A resolution under consideration by the Charlottesville City Council would recommend that local police and prosecutors make a low priority of enforcement of laws prohibiting possession of small amounts of marijuana. The resolution has now been endorsed by the Rutherford Institute, a nationally-known public interest law firm based in Albemarle County.

In an interview on May 1 with WINA-AM radio host Coy Barefoot, the institute’s CEO and president, John Whitehead, explained that the City Council will take up the resolution at its regular meeting on May 7 and that he has “written a letter to the City Council saying I think that’s a good idea.”
Whitehead added that “the war on drugs has been a total failure.”

The problem, he said on the radio, is that the “focus, it seems, in law enforcement across the country, and the studies show, is mostly on African-Americans. African-Americans are ten times more likely to be incarcerated or arrested for marijuana possession.”

On the other hand, he pointed out, “studies show that white people use drugs more than black people. It may not be racist-intended, the laws how they’re enforced, but the impact is racist.”

The significance of the City Council resolution, Whitehead explained, is that it instructs the police to “go after things like heroin [and] cocaine,” which he has heard are big problems in the Charlottesville area.

“As everyone knows, the war on drugs is relentless,” Whitehead continued. “SWAT team raids for possession of marijuana have resulted in people getting killed. I think that’s just crazy.”

Changing public opinion

At the same time, he added, polls show that “Americans are moving toward, in terms of their views, legalizing marijuana, especially medical marijuana.”

Whitehead said that “$246 million a year is spent on arrest, prosecution, and incarceration of marijuana users” in Virginia, money that could be spent better on eradicating hard drugs or on social-welfare programs.

For his part, talk-show host Barefoot asked if “the folks in Washington and Richmond are ready to wrap their minds around this idea?”

He described the war on drugs as “corporate socialism, it’s welfare for prison companies, it’s a way to militarize law enforcement and give them a bunch of toys to play with.”

Letter to Council

In his six-page letter to City Council, Whitehead wrote that “for those who fear that de-emphasizing marijuana prosecutions might lead to an increase in drug use, studies show the contrary to be the case – that decriminalization actually results in reduced drug usage.”

Whitehead added in his letter that, in “adopting the resolution to de-emphasize primary arrests for marijuana, the City Council has an opportunity to set an example for the Commonwealth [of Virginia] and the country of what it means to be a community that prioritizes people over policy. Doing so would show that Charlottesville is progressive enough to act on Americans’ changing attitudes towards marijuana possession, recognizing that the nation’s drug war is a failure and that a new direction is sorely needed.”

He ended his letter by urging all five members of City Council to vote yes on the resolution.

Wiz Khalifa makes no secret of his penchant for marijuana, but after a recent bust by the police, the Kush & Orange Juice rapper might be a little more careful about his smoking habits. Wiz got busted at hotel in Nashville over the weekend when cops responded to a complaint about the strong smell of marijuana emanating from his room, TMZ reports. When the police showed up, the Taylor Gang leader threw his joint out the window, but the cops were able to recover it. Wiz eventually admitted the marijuana was his.

The officers let him off with a citation for possession of 3.7 grams of marijuana.

Wiz has also been in the news recently because of Kanye West’s unexpected reference to him on his recent song “Way Too Cold.” Although the Pittsburgh rapper had been asked about Mr. West in numerous interviews even before the song was released, the track only stirred up more interest in the supposed triangle given that Wiz is now engaged to Kanye’s ex-girlfriend Amber Rose. Wiz recently told Sway of MTV’s RapFix that he doesn’t let those questions get under his skin.

“It doesn’t really bother me because it’s something that people are gonna always be interested in,” he said. “It’s something that if I try to fight it then somebody is gonna do it to try to annoy me and then what am I gonna do then? So I just accept it for what it is and keep it pushing man. I got a whole positive campaign and it’s all love.”

Legislation to allow marijuana to be grown and used in Connecticut for medical purposes cleared its third hurdle on Tuesday, when the General Assembly’s Public Health Committee approved it 19-6. The next stop for the bill is the House of Representatives, as the May 9 adjournment date draws closer. The bill had previously been reviewed and approved in the Judiciary Committee, then last week in the Finance, Revenue & Bonding Committee.

Rep. Elizabeth B. Ritter, D-Waterford, co-chairwoman of the health committee, said the bill has been rewritten from legislation that failed in recent years.
“There is extensive analysis following this concerning the conditions and parameters placed around the obtaining, the ordering, the possessing, the administering and the monitoring of patients,” Ritter said.
Rep. Dan Carter, R-Bethel, who voted for the bill, said, “We’ve all heard stories about folks who, in some way, have been able to benefit from it. It seems to me from looking at the medical evidence of the last couple of years that there are definitely groups of people out who will benefit from it and it’s usually because of tolerability of drugs available.”
But other legislators expressed concerns. “Connecticut had absolutely no obligation at all to deal with marijuana,” said Rep. John W. Hetherington, R-New Canaan, ranking member of the Judiciary Committee, who voted against the bill.
“The federal government has, in various ways, made it clear that marijuana is illegal from a federal jurisdictional standpoint,” he said. “In that way we are defying federal law and that gives me great concern. Defying federal law by state law is really not something that has occurred very often, certainly not outside the Deep South.”
Rep. David A. Scribner, R-Brookfield, who also voted against the bill, said, “I think it’s of great concern that there remain doubts and concerns about the conflict of what this law would establish with federal law and I don’t think that’s something we should disregard or take lightly. It has less to do with evidence that’s been produced about the assistance it might provide in certain circumstances for health purposes.”

In this hard-luck town in Michigan’s western Upper Peninsula, rumors persist of a company growing pot deep in the bowels of a former copper mine nearby. In 2010, the rumors got so bad that the State Police contacted the owners and asked to inspect the White Pine Mine sometime in the next couple of days. “No, right now,” SubTerra official Mark Pierpont said he told them, not wanting lingering suspicions that he had spent a day hiding a stash of marijuana.

Trooper Timothy Rajala later reported how he “entered the mine in a vehicle which we drove approximately 1 mile underground” before reaching a sealed and brightly lit chamber he could only enter after washing down his feet and putting on clean clothes.

Inside, Rajala “noted several plants that were not narcotic,” he wrote. “There was no evidence of marijuana nor any signs of suspicious activity.”

Still, Rajala’s tip had a grain of truth.

The mine’s owners want to use its underground chambers to create the state’s largest pot farm, with a potential market of 131,000 Michiganders (about 1 in every 75 residents) who hold medical marijuana certificates. The company, Prairie Plant Systems, already has a contract to supply medical marijuana in Canada.

Michigan voters legalized medical marijuana in 2008, but few people think the regulatory system is working. “Chaos” is a word frequently used by editorial writers and other critics.

Officials with PPS and its Michigan subsidiary, SubTerra, which now uses the White Pine Mine for other plant-based pharmaceutical research, granted exclusive access to the mine and the company’s plans to a Free Press reporter and photographer. They say their methods would stress security, safety and science, treating pot as a pharmaceutical rather than a street drug.

“There’s a need to bring this under the proper reins of appropriate manufacturing for patient safety and for public safety,” said Brent Zettl, president and CEO of PPS, a plant-based biopharmaceutical company based in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.

But Zettl acknowledges he has major state and federal hurdles to clear before he can convert the former copper mine, which closed in 1996.

The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, the Food and Drug Administration, the Michigan Legislature and Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder would all have to sign off and, in the case of the first two agencies, reverse direction on policy. Federal agencies consider marijuana illegal. DEA agents have not cracked down on small operations to supply licensed patients but almost certainly would view SubTerra as a major bust opportunity.

The FDA supports research to capture marijuana’s benefits in tablet form, but opposes “the use of smoked marijuana for medical purposes,” spokeswoman Shelly Burgess said.

Growing marijuana hundreds of feet underground — the same way the company started its Canadian operations in 2001 — provides security, constant temperature, controlled light and humidity, and protects the plants from bugs and diseases, eliminating the need for harmful pesticides and herbicides, Zettl said. He said any medical marijuana sold in Michigan should be subject to the same regular and rigorous testing as is found in Canada.

To help get around a federal ban on the sale of controlled substances, state law relies on the legal fiction that licensed caregivers provide patients with marijuana for free and get paid for helping patients register.

Canada, with a population of 34 million, has 17,000 patients approved for medical marijuana. Michigan, with less than a third as many people, has nearly eight times more cannabis patients, and a few physicians have been accused of indiscriminately approving patients to use the drug.

An explosion in medical marijuana dispensaries caused control headaches for cities. The shutdown of most dispensaries as a result of a Michigan Court of Appeals ruling in August broke the supply chain.

But Zettl says there is a more fundamental problem in Michigan.

With no testing or standards, nobody knows what Michigan patients are smoking. In Canada, Zettl’s cannabis is tested not just for active ingredients such as THC, but for mold, fungus, pathogens — including bacteria — and metals, such as lead, cadmium, mercury and arsenic.

“We’ve breached the first cardinal rule of pharmaceutical manufacturing,” Zettl said. “It doesn’t have any safety bells or whistles.”

PPS began in 1988 developing disease-free berry trees and other products aimed at farmers. It later moved into medical cannabis and plant-based pharmaceutical research. The company had to leave the leased facility where it grew its medical cannabis in Manitoba in 2008 because the owner wanted to resume mining. It now grows the plants above ground at a location kept secret at the request of the Canadian government.

Zettl, who has a farming background and a bachelor’s degree in agriculture from the University of Saskatchewan, said the company had 2011 sales of $7.6 million, about 75 percent of which came from medical cannabis contracts with the Canadian government. Its SubTerra subsidiary acquired the White Pine Mine in 2003.

A bill is expected to be introduced in the Legislature before summer to establish testing standards similar to Canada’s that would go into effect if and when medical marijuana is approved for sale in Michigan. SubTerra hired former House Speaker Chuck Perricone, a Republican, as its lobbyist.

PPS is the only authorized mass supplier of medical marijuana in Canada, but serves only about 2,000 of the 17,000 approved patients. Others can grow their own or get their cannabis from small growers.

Adrienne Baker-Hicks, 53, of Warkworth, Ontario, said the PPS product has been “wonderful” for her because the company irradiates it to ensure it is germ-free.

“I have autoimmune deficiencies, quite a few,” said Baker-Hicks, who uses medical cannabis to help with a spinal condition, a blood disorder and tremors. “If I smoke something that isn’t clean, it can make me really sick.”

A bill to legalize marijuana for medicinal use in New Hampshire passed a House committee yesterday, but its prospects for overcoming a potential veto by Gov. John Lynch remain shaky. Under Senate Bill 409, people diagnosed with a debilitating medical condition or their caretakers would be allowed to legally possess or cultivate up to six ounces of marijuana. The bill passed the Republican-controlled House Health, Human Services and Elderly Affairs Committee on a 12-4 vote yesterday, similar to a 14-3 vote taken by the committee on a like-minded bill last year.

“If you can get pain relief without using opiates, it changes the quality of life” for cancer patients, said committee Chairman John Reagan, a Deerfield Republican who says his mother would have benefited from marijuana to deal with breast cancer. “It’s just so sad the police of the world use this as a focus of the ridiculous War on Drugs.”

But after last year’s bill passed the full House on a veto-proof 221-96 vote, it died in the Senate where it did not have enough support to overcome a promised veto from Lynch. Lynch successfully vetoed a medical marijuana bill back in 2009, saying he has sympathy for those who could be helped by the drug but “law enforcement officials have raised legitimate public safety concerns regarding the cultivation and distribution of marijuana.”

The bill approved by the House committee yesterday contained an amendment that changes it from the version that narrowly passed the Senate 13-11 last month. Rep. Evalyn Merrick, a Lancaster Democrat on the committee who suffers from an incurable cancer for which she would benefit from marijuana, said she hopes more senators and the Democratic governor – who has decided not to run for a fifth term – are swayed in favor of the bill by the amendment.

“The governor has had concerns right from the get-go. We have done everything in our power to address all of his concerns over the years,” Merrick said. “He has expressed some concerns again . . . but I’m hoping, quite honestly, that after he reads the latest amendment he might see the bill more clearly and at this juncture in his career allow the bill to pass.”

Reagan said he’s surprised Lynch hasn’t supported medicinal marijuana because the governor’s wife is a physician.

“I think most physicians are in favored of pain control and this as a no-side-effect pain control,” he said. “It’s very easy for the governor to say come down on the side of law and order.”

Rep. Frank Kotowski, a Republican from Hooksett, was one of the four committee members who voted against the bill. Kotowski said he believes marijuana is a “gateway drug.”

“I have true compassion, believe me, for folks who believe there is some benefit to using it,” Kotowski said. “However, I have grave concerns about self growing and the lack of control, from my perspective, that says a doctor may recommend you try this but it’s not dispensed at a pharmacy.”

Moultonboro resident Ted Wright, whose wife has stage-four metastasized breast cancer, has been an active supporter of the medicinal marijuana effort. His wife lost 32 pounds last year, threatening her participation in a clinical trial, but began eating within five minutes after trying marijuana.

“We’ve got nurses and everything telling us marijuana works, so it became absurd to me that this wasn’t legal,” Wright said.

Wright acknowledged medicinal marijuana is a “third rail” issue for some, but he wants Lynch to “come to the table and talk about it.”

“Law enforcement is a tough nut to crack,” Wright said. “They see this is as a backdoor bill to legalization, but it’s not.”

Yuba County has adopted an ordinance to guide when growing medical marijuana is a nuisance, but the ordinance, and legal reaction to it, are far from burned out as an issue. With an overflow crowd at Tuesday’s meeting, supervisors adopted the ordinance on a 4-1 vote with the understanding an ad hoc committee of two supervisors will continue studying the issue for possible changes before final adoption next month.

“We’re trying to deal with this issue in a civil way,” said Supervisor John Nicoletti, one of the committee members, after county Sheriff Steve Durfor said his department had more than 200 nuisance calls about pot grows last year. “We need to be pretty honest about the impacts going all the way around, or the problem won’t go away.”

But civility was a tough requirement for many who attended, who loudly booed after the vote and on more than one occasional drowned out supervisors from the floor, both during the ordinance’s presentation and during subsequent public comment and supervisor discussion.
The ordinance, created by the committee in consultation with county staff, local growers and law enforcement representatives, would create limits on how big a space people with valid medical marijuana cards could use to grow plants, depending on the size of the parcel.

As well, the parcel would have to have a inhabited, permitted home on it; growing indoors or inside a structure such as a shed would be encouraged to keep plants from public view; and the grow area would have a defined setback from fence lines.

For many speakers, the key sticking point was the 10-foot-by-10-foot growing space allowed on parcels less than an acre, which county staff said would accommodate about six plants.

Many said that was too small relative to the amount needed to medicate various illnesses. One speaker demonstrated by standing arms spread inside a demonstration area the county set up in board chambers, complete with lobby plants in the place of mature pot grows. “

Since doctors don’t have a limit on what they can recommend, the county shouldn’t have a limit,” said Daniel Aspin.

Many speakers took it a step further, saying the county’s ordinance was an attempt to strip rights from people who were sick and bearing signs with the same message. As one woman said, “Who are you to tell me, ‘you can only grow on 10-by-10’? It’s my property!”

The repeated catcalls from the audience, often followed by others encouraging quiet, seemed to vex the supervisors, with chairman Hal Stocker saying at one point, “Can’t you see something’s being done up here?”

Representatives from the Yuba County Growers Association, a registered not-for-profit group, told supervisors they believed the ordinance was better than one originally discussed last month, but still far from what was needed.

Supervisor Mary Jane Griego, the other committee member working on the issue, agreed for more consideration, and motioned for continuing the item. No one seconded it, and the ordinance then passed on a 4-1 vote with Griego opposed.

Sam McConnell, the YCGA’s president, said he was hopeful he could meet with the county before the ordinance comes up again for final adoption on May 1. Among the unresolved issues were how the ordinance would apply to collectives, where marijuana for several patients is grown in one location.

Without changes, though, he said his group was prepared to file an injunction, and subsequent lawsuits.

“A lot of people have already spent time and money,” he said of his group, which has about 2,000 members. He said he believed the county had to work with his group. “We are voters too,” he said.

A task force charged with forming regulations for the two dozen or so marijuana dispensaries in Tacoma is fine-tuning a report that tackles issues such as zoning, permitting and security. The final draft, due by the end of the month, will go to the city Planning Commission and the Public Safety Committee before landing before the City Council. After public feedback, the council will decide which regulations to implement. It’s unknown when the new rules governing medical marijuana dispensaries will take effect.

“We want (dispensaries) to operate within the law in a way that isn’t overly intrusive but satisfies the city’s need that everything is as advertised,” said committee chairman Stan Rumbaugh, an attorney. “It’s a huge task.”

The 11-member Medical Cannabis Task Force plans to meet once more to finalize its recommendations before its term ends May 1.

Among the controversial topics the group tackled is where dispensaries and collective gardens (where marijuana is grown for medical patients) can be.

Neither will be allowed in residential neighborhoods. Collective gardens can operate only in industrial zones; dispensaries could exist downtown or in commercial and industrial areas, according to the draft plan.

All medical marijuana facilities must be at least 1,000 feet from schools, day care centers and churches. The task force also would like the distance to apply to parks, youth group centers and detoxification facilities.

Existing dispensaries are suggested to be grandfathered in, as long as they are 500 feet from schools and day cares. Dispensaries out of compliance once the City Council adopts its rules would have 120 days to move.

Members also tried to provide boundaries for the size of dispensaries.

A business devoted only to dispensing marijuana to patients would have to be between 500 and 2,000 square feet. Facilities that distribute pot but offer other services such as educational classes could be 1,500 to 3,000 square feet.

The group will recommend that hours of operation for dispensaries in the city be 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., which is similar to many private pharmacies.

Although most of the group’s recommendations have been vetted repeatedly, members still went back and forth Monday on issues including enforcement.

Patricia Lecy-Davis, a business owner, said dispensaries that offer edibles such as brownies should use commercial kitchens, although she noted it would be difficult to regulate them.

Laurie Jinkins, deputy director of the Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department, pointed out that once marijuana is used in baked goods it must be regulated as medicine rather than a food.

“What this teaches me is how complicated the issues around medical marijuana and regular marijuana use are,” Jinkins said. “In every discussion, there were multiple deep layers.”

Some issues were pretty straight-forward. Among them:

n Nobody younger than 18 could operate a dispensary or be on the premises unless accompanied by an adult.

n All dispensary owners would have to submit a security plan to the city and install security cameras.

n Marijuana products could not be visible from outside the building.

n Insurance would be required for businesses that distribute pot.

Task force members said forming regulations was a daunting task but that they believed they’d done a thorough job and included input from a diverse group.

Mayor Marilyn Strickland selected the panel’s members in August, about three weeks after the City Council approved an emergency moratorium on new and existing medical cannabis dispensaries and community gardens.

The moratorium will expire Aug. 1. It was prompted after dispensaries began popping up in the city last year.

Conflicting federal and state laws have posed a major challenge in how to regulate medical marijuana facilities.

State lawmakers last year passed a measure calling for state-licensed dispensaries, but Gov. Chris Gregoire vetoed much of the bill. The new law, which took effect in July, left dispensary regulation up to local jurisdictions.

The District’s health department announced Thursday that four applicants to run marijuana dispensaries have been advanced to the next stage of the approval process. They are ready to locate in various commercial corridors across the city. One, Herbal Alternatives, is proposing to locate downtown, in the 1100 block of 20th Street NW. Metropolitan Wellness Center is looking at the Barracks Row strip on Capitol Hill. Takoma Wellness Center is prepared to set up in its namesake neighborhood on the 6900 block of Blair Road NW. And Center City Care is proposing to occupy a North Capitol Street storefront just north of New York Avenue.

Seventeen applications were accepted by last year’s filing deadline. The four named today scored enough points in the course of a panel review to seek approval from their respective advisory neighborhood commissions.

Najma Roberts, a health department spokeswoman, said the other applicants will not have an opportunity during this round of licensing to improve their applications. “This list is pretty final,” she said.

The move to advance the dispensary licensing comes two weeks after officials gave the green light to six medical marijuana cultivation centers. Those businesses now are pursuing business licenses and other permits in order to get final approval to open and operate.

Only Center City Care appears to have won the right to both register as a cultivation center and also move ahead in the dispensary process.

ANCs have about a month to weigh in, and health department officials expect to then complete the dispensary application process in late June. Depending on how quickly winning applicants will then be able to get permits, marijuana could be available to qualified patients within weeks after that.

A year and a half after Garfield County voters OK’d commercial medical marijuana growing in unincorporated parts of the county, officials are preparing a final set of rules to be considered later this spring. The Garfield Board of County Commissioners (BOCC) held a work session earlier this week to refine a draft set of land-use regulations for medical marijuana cultivation. The rules would apply to “optional premises” cultivation, the growing operations serving medical marijuana products manufacturing and retail dispensaries in other locations.

Commissioners indicated that they would prefer that any commercial growing in the county be connected to retail and manufacturing businesses located in the county.

“The board was very interested in only producing and selling the product locally, and not allowing it to be exported outside the county,” Garfield County Building and Planning Director Fred Jarman said.

The county is not inclined to try to regulate smaller growing operations by medical marijuana patients and caregivers, he said. That is already handled under state regulations.

In November 2010, county voters were presented with three separate ballot questions related to county government control of medical marijuana facilities.

The questions were aimed at determining what types of commercial medical marijuana activity should be allowed in areas of the county outside of the six municipalities from Carbondale to Parachute.

Voters rejected retail medical marijuana dispensaries serving authorized patients, as well the manufacture of marijuana-infused products. However, voters narrowly approved growing operations.

Most of the county’s municipalities have adopted their own regulations for the various types of facilities. Others are still in the process of doing so.

In the meantime, both the state of Colorado and Garfield County have a moratorium on new medical marijuana facilities of any type through June of this year.

Garfield County’s draft medical marijuana cultivation regulations will go before the county Planning Commission for a public hearing at 6:30 p.m. Wednesday, May 9.

The BOCC is tentatively scheduled to have a public hearing on the regulations at 1 p.m. on June 4. Both meetings will take place at the Garfield County Administration Building, 108 Eighth Street, Glenwood Springs.

The county regulations would limit commercial cultivation to the county’s existing commercial and industrial zone districts, Jarman said.

A limited impact review before the BOCC would be required, including notification of neighboring property owners. Applicants would be required to address a range of issues related to the growing operation, including water and sewer, electrical, odor control, visual impacts, access and signage.

In keeping with state law, growing operations would have to be at least 1,000 feet away from educational and child care facilities, group homes, churches, public parks and public buildings.

Garfield County had originally planned to consider its medical marijuana regulations in May of 2011, Jarman said.

However, because marijuana remains illegal under federal law, the U.S. Attorney’s Office had indicated that medical marijuana operations, and even local government regulators, could be liable to prosecution.

Federal officials have since indicated that operations adhering to state and local regulations would not be targeted for prosecution.