Washington dispensary owner busted buying marijuana in Oregon

(Spokesman-Review) More than a thousand medical marijuana patients have purchased the drug at a small dispensary on Northwest Boulevard in Spokane in the nearly five months it’s been open.

Business is booming, and Scott Q. Shupe, co-owner of the dispensary, intended to keep it that way when he set out for Oregon with thousands of dollars and a lead on several pounds of marijuana.

Shupe, 54, was driving back from Bend, Ore., on Friday afternoon when an Oregon State Police trooper pulled him over for crossing the centerline.

That trooper found 4 pounds of marijuana and more than $18,000 in Shupe’s 1993 Chevrolet Cavalier station wagon – supplies destined for his dispensary, he said.

Shupe’s status as a medical marijuana patient in Washington didn’t matter. Oregon doesn’t recognize medical marijuana permits from other states.

Even if it did, patients and caregivers are limited to 1.5 pounds at time.

And even if the limits weren’t breached, Oregon’s law does not allow the selling of marijuana, even between registered patients and their registered growers within the state, much less to an out-of-state dispensary owner.

I want patients to get access to their medicine, which is why I support full legalization of marijuana for all adults.  Scott Shupe should be able to buy cannabis from a Washington farmer or an Oregon farmer or any American farmer.  Scott Shupe should be able to sell it to any adult American (and foreign tourists, too!)

But the way we’ve been corralled in the medical marijuana box canyon, stories like this are bound to hit the news.  Our opponents claim the medical marijuana programs are widely abused, a front for greedy drug dealers.  So some states craft language that forbid cannabis commerce and deny interstate recognition of medical marijuana permits.  Then you’ve got thousands of patients with demand and few with supply and inevitably some guy gets pulled over with cash and pounds of weed crossing state lines trying to fulfill that demand.  Then our opponents say, “See, we told you so!”

I am so worried about a pendulum swing back away from medical marijuana.  I can see the next few states writing even more restrictive language.  I can see activists losing the battles to keep business and law enforcement from hacking away at existing state medical marijuana laws.  I can see pharmaceutical science creating dose-regulated, non-psychoactive cannabinoid drugs and our opponents demand that “crude plant material” be made illegal once again in medical marijuana states because of the “abuse” and because now the sick and dying have a “safer” alternative.

While the pendulum still swings toward freedom, we must follow through and see that it reaches full legalization for all adults.