Pubdate: Tue, 29 Jun 2010
Source: Helena Independent Record (MT)
Copyright: 2010 Helena Independent Record
Contact:  http://helenair.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1187
Author: Jennifer McKee

LEGISLATIVE PANEL GETS TO WORK ON POT LAW FIX

A panel of lawmakers is starting to "get into the  weeds," as one
state senator put it, and are hoping to  write first-drafts of
possible new laws by the end of  the summer to address Montana's
wide-open  medical-marijuana scene.

"We have to have a firm dividing line between what's  legal and what's
illegal," Powell County Attorney Lewis  Smith told the interim
Children, Families, Health and  Human Services Committee at a meeting
Monday.

The bipartisan group has been studying the state's  medical-marijuana
regulatory scheme. Rep. Diane Sands,  D-Missoula, the chairwoman of
the committee, said she  expected the group to have bills for
discussion by its  next meeting, which will be in August.

Sands appointed a smaller subcommittee of the group to  start working
on the language of the bills, which will  be recommended to the 2011
Legislature in January.  Their first meeting is scheduled for Tuesday
morning.

Many of the potential solutions deal with licensing  medical-marijuana
caregivers and stepping up regulation  in the industry, which was
created after 62 percent of  Montanans voted in 2004 to legalize
marijuana for  medical uses.

Smith wasn't alone in his call for stiffer regulations.  A long line
of people addressed the committee Monday,  most of them involved in
the medical-marijuana  community and most of them urging the members
for laws  that would professionalize the industry. Still, many  also
called upon lawmakers not to forget the sick and  suffering who say
medical marijuana helps them.

"I have patients who I don't know how I am going to get  out of the
city limits," said Pam Birchard, a Great  Falls medical-marijuana
caregiver with a small  practice. Great Falls has a local ban on
medical-marijuana caregivers. Birchard said after the  meeting that
she has been transporting her patients out  of the city limits to give
them their marijuana. Two of  her patients are very ill and housebound.

"She is at home to die," Birchard said of one patient  in an interview
with Lee Newspapers. The patient  experiences pain relief with medical
marijuana, and  Birchard said she worried how the woman would handle
what might be her final days.

Others, like R.A. Rosio, president of Montana Pain  Management in
Missoula, another medical-marijuana  clinic, encouraged lawmakers to
"please take the time  to understand who it is you're
regulating."

Rosio told lawmakers that some medical-marijuana  growers and
caregivers are moving ahead with their own  internal certification
standards.

"Eventually, this will be very, very tightly regulated  and we welcome
it," he said.

Also on display at the meeting was a kind of cultural  divide within
the medical-marijuana community,  specifically between two of its most
prominent members:  Tom Daubert, of Helena, the man behind the 2004
citizen's initiative that legalized medical marijuana;  and Jason
Christ, the founder of Montana Caregivers  Network, which runs
traveling medical-marijuana clinics  where hundreds of people can get
medical-marijuana  cards in a single day, often with little time with
a  doctor.

Daubert told lawmakers that Christ, who was standing  right next to
him, was "exploiting (the law's) problems  and loopholes, registering
thousands in one day."

Daubert has long supported tighter regulations of the  industry to
eliminate those kinds of clinics and return  it to what he said was
the original intent of the law.

Christ, who is also a medical-marijuana patient,  encouraged lawmakers
to tread lightly into stiffer  regulations, even as he said more
government  involvement is needed in the industry.

"It's going to take an army of people to regulate  this," he
said.

Christ, who said he has two intestinal disorders that  make sitting
down uncomfortable, particularly praised  Montana's law that allows
medical-marijuana users to  smoke in public.

"After this speech, I am going to go outside and smoke  a bowl," he
told the panel.

Shortly after, he produced a large, glass pipe and left  to do just
that.
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MAP posted-by: Matt