Proposed Restrictions on Medical Marijuana Worry Washington Patients

It looks increasingly likely that
Washington’s legislature will approve
new restrictions on medical marijuana by the end of its current
session a week from Thursday. The two leading bills both involve
mandatory registration of patients, sharp reductions in the limits
on possession and home cultivation, and elimination of “collective
gardens,” including hundreds of dispensaries operating under that
label. The general thrust of the bills is to ban the untaxed,
unregulated outlets that otherwise would compete with
state-licensed pot shops, which are supposed to become the main
source of medical marijuana. Patients have
several concerns about that plan:

Will the stores be ready in time? The
Washington State Liquor Control Board (LCB), which is expected to
issue its first marijuana cultivation licenses this week, says
marijuana retailers should be open by June. But the Washington
State Economic and Revenue Forecast Council, an independent agency
charged with projecting tax revenue, notes that local bans and
moratoriums, which Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson

says are not pre-empted by state law, make hitting the
LCB’s target pretty iffy. “Although LCB has indicated that it
expects retail sales to start in June 2014,” says a February 19
report
from the council, “local moratoria on cannabis businesses and
other production uncertainties have the potential to
impact the timing and amount of cannabis produced and sold. As
a result, we have assumed retail sales will start in June
2015.”

That’s a month after dispensaries would be
abolished by
H.B. 2149, the bill
approved by the state House of Representatives in February.
S.B.
5887, introduced by state Sen. Ann Rivers (R-La Center), would
repeal the provision allowing collective gardens as of July 15. But
assuming that Washington’s pot stores experience
shortages like those seen in Colorado, it is not clear that an
adequate supply will be available to patients even by the middle of
next year, or that they will be able to find a retailer within a
reasonable distance. If a patient happens to live in, say, Yakima,
which has
banned marijuana retailers, where will he go to buy his
medicine? Kari Boiter, a lobbyist who works with Americans for Safe
Access, warns that “the proposed repeal dates are likely to leave
patients without access.”

Will the stores cater to patients? The cannabis
strains that best meet patients’ needs may not appeal to
recreational consumers. They may be low in psychoactive THC, for
example, but high in cannabidiol (CBD), which shows promise as
a treatment for a wide range of disorders, including epilepsy and
multiple sclerosis. “It’s not the same marijuana,” says Douglas
Hiatt, a Seattle criminal defense attorney and longtime marijuana
activist who opposed I-502, Washington’s legalization initiative,
largely because he worried that it would hurt patients.

H.B. 2149 and S.B. 5887 both would offer “medical marijuana
endorsements” to pot stores that choose to serve patients, either
exclusively or in addition to recreational users. The endorsements
would allow registered patients to benefit from a higher purchase
limit (three ounces rather than one) and an exemption from the
standard sales tax. But patients worry that they will still be
treated as an afterthought and may have trouble obtaining the
specific varieties that are tailored to their symptoms. Boiter

says legislators should put “health before happy hour.”

Are the ceilings on home cultivation high
enough? Currently patients are allowed to grow up to 15
plants. H.B. 2149 and S.B. 5887 both would reduce the limit to six
plants, although the latter bill would allow as many as 15 plants
if a health professional certified the larger number was medically
appropriate. The possession limit would be cut from 24 ounces to
three under H.B. 2149 and to eight (with a health professional’s
recommendation to that effect) under S.B. 5887. Even the lower
limits may sound generous for a single person, but patients tend to
consume a lot more cannabis than recreational users do, especially
if they make concentrates to be taken orally. Depending on where
the nearest state-licensed store is located, the prices it charges,
and the selection it offers, some patients may end up growing most
or all of their own medicine, in which case the six-plant limit may
prove too low.

What about collective gardens? Legislators
want to repeal the provision allowing collective gardens mainly
because dispensaries have seized on it as a legal rationale,
counting each customer as a temporary “member.” But the provision
originally was intended as an alternative for patients who were not
up to growing cannabis on their own and could not find “designated
providers” to do it for them. Given the uncertainties surrounding
the newly legal pot stores, some patients think they should still
have the option of pooling their resources to produce medical
marijuana for their own use. “For [cultivation rights] to be
meaningful,” Hiatt says, “you’ve got to allow people to grow
together.”

What will registration mean? H.B. 2149 and
S.B. 5887 both require that patients register with the state if
they want to grow their own marijuana, enjoy higher purchase and
possession limits, and escape part of the taxes imposed on cannabis
sales. Currently there is no registry, but patients with medical
recommendations have an affirmative defense against marijuana
charges, a right that both bills would eliminate. Some patients are
not keen to be officially identified in a central database as
marijuana consumers, a fact that can have social, professional, and
legal implications. Even if the Justice Department refrains from
prosecuting patients for possession or home cultivation, for
example, the Gun Control Act of
1968 strips all marijuana consumers of their Second Amendment
rights. Under H.B. 2149, information from the patient registry can
be disclosed to various people, including “law enforcement and
prosecutorial officials engaged in a specific investigation
involving a designated person.”

Supporters of the new restrictions argue that it makes little
sense to have a parallel distribution system for patients once
state-licensed marijuana stores are up and running. They also note
that Jenny Durkan, the U.S. attorney for Western Washington, has

called the current system “not tenable” given the Justice
Department’s
demand for a strictly regulated market in which diversion to
minors and other states is minimized. But Hiatt complains that
legislators are so eager to maximize tax revenue and discourage
federal intervention that they are willing to compromise the
interests of patients. “They’re saying, ‘We’ll throw medical
marijuana under the bus if you’ll let us get away with 502,'” he
says. “People in the community here are furious. They feel like
they’ve been betrayed.”