Spokane7
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September 17, 2010 in City
Vestal: Medical marijuana dispensaries don’t seem like big threat
It’s time to de-stupidify medical marijuana.
Earlier this month, the local gendarmes once again expended a bunch of time and effort bringing down a medical marijuana dispensary. If someone breaks into your garage, don’t hold your breath waiting for an officer. But if you’re growing medical marijuana in that garage, they’ll find a way to send a car.
Last September, city police busted Change, a North Side marijuana dispensary. Two men face felony charges from that bust, with trial set to begin Sept. 27. Then, earlier this month, county sheriff’s deputies busted the Med Mar Dis, a Spokane Valley dispensary. The owner faces felony charges.
Everybody feel safer now?
With our muddle of a law on medical marijuana, prosecutors can choose their path: tough or lenient. Here, we’ve obviously chosen the former. In King County, prosecutor Dan Satterberg has taken a saner tack, saying he has “more important things to do.”
The law, in an enormous nutshell, says: It’s legal, if a doctor writes on tamper-resistant paper, which is not a prescription but a recommendation, that you have a medical condition, including HIV and cancer but not Alzheimer’s disease or neuropathic pain, that would benefit from the pain-relieving or appetite-boosting properties of marijuana, for you to possess a 60-day supply, which is defined as 24 ounces or 15 plants, or more if a patient can prove a medical need.
Naturally, it’s illegal to buy or sell it. It’s legal for one “provider” to “provide” medical marijuana to one person “at any one time.”
Which is to say nothing of federal law, which prohibits possession of marijuana, medical or otherwise. But the U.S. attorney general last year urged prosecutors to take it easy on users.
Did a monkey write these laws? Simple folk might just do something simple, like legalize it. Medical or not: Who cares?
Of course, if you come out and say this, you run two risks: the enthusiastic embrace of patchoulied Rastafarians and Phish fans, and asinine arguments from those who see pot as sinister and fail to recognize the difference between recreational and medical use of the drug.
We saw a great example of this a month ago, when Dino Rossi dumbly mocked medical marijuana research at Washington State University in Vancouver. Rossi put out a statement criticizing a federal grant of $148,000 for a study.
The release’s headline was: “It’s 5:00 Somewhere, But It’s 4:20 At Washington State University.” It said taxpayers are tired of their money “going up in smoke.” It said the money wouldn’t stimulate anything “other than sales of Cheetos.”
As hilarious as these jokes are, they miss the point by a mile.
The WSU researcher, Michael Morgan, has spent 25 years studying the effects of pain-relieving drugs on the brain. People who take opiates build a tolerance that makes them less effective over time. In studies on lab rats, Morgan found that using opiates in conjunction with synthetic cannabis makes the drugs more effective – suggesting possible ways of improving pain treatment for people.
But still. Hilarious.
“One of the things I found ironic about it is that marijuana is a controlled substance, but so are opioids,” the class of drugs including heroin, morphine and oxycodone, which he researches primarily, he said.
“No one’s criticizing those studies,” he said. “Those drugs can kill you. I don’t know of anyone who’s died from an overdose of marijuana.”
But there is a big underdose of clarity in the law. The county prosecutor’s office says dispensaries are flatly prohibited, and the state agrees, saying the law limits providers to supplying one person, period. Advocates of medical marijuana argue that the law limiting providers to one patient “at any one time” means simply: one at a time.
Both interpretations are inane. What we have is a law that allows people to have pot, but not to get it. Even growing your own – I’m no gardener, but wouldn’t you have to commit a crime to get the seeds? So there’s daylight for the cops to be super-zealous. But it’s hard to understand why they would be, given the strained resources and crisis-level budgets we keep hearing about.
Neither John Grasso, the county’s chief drug prosecutor, nor the sheriff’s investigator involved in the most recent case were available for comment this week. Local officials have said the dispensaries are magnets for seedy behavior and crime, and a cover for illegal sales; they’ve also suggested that courts need to clarify the law.
That’s one approach. But I prefer Satterberg’s. He has declined to charge dozens of medical-marijuana cases, and has argued that if patients have a legal right to the drug, they ought to be allowed to “band together” and share costs and resources, according to the Seattle Times.
I visited a Spokane dispensary this week – you can still smell it on me. Understandably, given that news media coverage helped prompt last year’s bust, no one there was interested in an interview.
But it didn’t seem like a big community threat to me. Didn’t seem like Eliot Ness needed to come breaking down the door.
I know we’re not Seattle. But maybe we’ve got more important things to do, too.
Shawn Vestal can be reached at (509) 459-5431 or shawnv@spokesman.com.
The draw of the unknowable 
ChefGus/ John Olsen on September 17 at 5:34 a.m.
From my vantage point, seeing the destruction of lives from the use of alcohol, which the state is regulating and taxing.. I’d have no trouble “criminalizing” alcohol and substituting marijuana as the “drug of choice”… alcohol potentiates all kinds of agressive and nasty behaviours …. those smoking dope for recreation do not pose nearly the same threat. I don’t have a large number of “dopers” ( marijuana users) coming down to eat at Shalom daily… but the calls to detox to come and get someone who has overdosed are not infrequent, and repeated by the same cotery of alcoholic men and women. Otherwise productive lives slip down the tubes all too easily, even in good homes with alcohol as the drug of choice. Lets legalize marijuana and tax it too. john
misjustice on September 17 at 7:16 a.m.
One of the reasons that cops won’t respond if your garage is broken into is that it doesn’t generate any revenue.
Busting pot users, growers, and dispensaries, does. The “law” will seize personal property, bank accounts, homes, cars, and other assets in pot busts - and these forfeitures generate revenue. Yes, it’s really that simple.
It’s all about the benjamins!
lewis8457 on September 17 at 7:30 a.m.
I will just keep buying it on the street, I have for 35 years.
They miss the entire point with dispensaries we can cut the street traffic down. But in stead they bust the dispensaries and the street traffic grows leaps and bounds.
misjustice on September 17 at 7:42 a.m.
High school kids have the best stuff.
brooklyn41 on September 17 at 9:56 a.m.
Legalize pot and the booze businesses wil lose mucho dinero.
mikewsu on September 17 at 10:25 a.m.
Dino showing his true colors. What a moron.. anyways:
Good article, Shawn. Hopefully change is coming to this side of the state as well.
Raiding sick people’s source of doctor prescribed medicine, is just vile. I would be ashamed, as a public official, if I didn’t take a second to stop and look at what I was actually doing.
Storm_Crow on September 17 at 10:34 a.m.
Shawn, thank you for your effort to “de-stupidify” medical cannabis use! Can I assist you by recommending that folks begin their education by reading these 10 articles from WebMD?
“Marijuana Ingredients Slow Invasion by Cervical and Lung Cancer Cells”
“Marijuana’s Active Ingredient Targets Deadly Brain Cancer”
“Marijuana Ingredient May Cut Fibromyalgia Pain”
“Marijuana Chemical Fights Hardened Arteries”
“Chemicals in Marijuana May Fight MRSA”
“Pot-Based Drug Promising for Arthritis”
“Cannabis May Help Multiple Sclerosis”
“Marijuana May Fight Lung Tumors”
“Marijuana May Slow Alzheimer’s”
“Marijuana Smoking Doesn’t Kill”
Links to the actual studies that the articles are based on, can be found in “Granny Storm Crow’s MMJ Reference List”, which is available, free, online. (The July 2010 version is the most recent.)
Even if only half of those potential uses “pan out”, cannabis is an amazing healing herb ! If you compare the side effects of cannabis (“feeling good”, hunger and thirst, red eyes, and sometimes drowsiness or the “giggles”) to those of the many expensive pharmaceutical drugs it can replace, restricting the medical use of cannabis seems foolish!
Before you can have an informed opinion about anything, you need factual information. Most of the studies and articles in my list come from sources like PubMed, medical journals, WebMD and the news media - I don’t like “fluff articles”. Please learn the facts about cannabis from reputable sources. De-stupidify yourself! Thank you.
brentandrews on September 17 at 12:20 p.m.
Excellent commentary. Well put, Shawn. However, we cannot simply appeal to the better senses of law enforcement and the judiciary. We need good solid laws protecting the rights of medical marijuana patients to access their medicine; the medipot law did not cause the sky to fall, and so these laws solidifying the legal marijuana market should soon be introduced.
In some not-to-distant future, my hope is that my government will stop making war on its sickest, weakest citizens. The ‘war on drugs’, as waged here at home, is not war on drugs at all, but war on our friends, neighbors, and family members who are sick with addiction. Right now the prosecutors and the police need the money - imagine how the probation system alone would suffer, without its addict-customers. That’s all this war is about now: money. But word is getting out, as this commentary, and these comments, show very well. I see the light at the end of this tunnel.
“This war is over, if you want it.” - Eric Schlosser, ‘Reefer Madness’
chouligirl on September 17 at 5:30 p.m.
Please keep more articles coming and keep this topic in the media as much as possible. As usual law enforcement is self-serving and not looking out for anyone but their kicks and creating more money in their coffers…at OUR expense. It is deplorable to persecute anyone for the use of marijuana, medical or recreational.
LEGALIZE IT AND TAX IT AND GET OFF OUR BACKS. and thank us for the tax revenue…
spokanecougar on September 17 at 6:46 p.m.
Great article, Spokane law enforcement seems to be stuck back in the 1930’s and 1940’s of the reefer madness era. All this garbage of raiding dispensaries and hurting people who legitimately need help for crippling pain is sickening of the cops. I had to watch my father die slowly and painfully back in the late 1980’s of AIDS so I have seen up close and personal how much marijuana could have and does help people with their unbearable pain. Our local sheriff and police departments are full of truly disgusting people who think dying people trying to be comfortable in the last days is more of a threat to this city and county than people our breaking into houses and cars, vandalizing property and any other crime they think is a lower priority than busting medical marijuana dispensaries.
misjustice on September 17 at 11:06 p.m.
I’d forgotten about this story of the SPD “slush” fund and how cops were driving the cars that they seized from drug suspects…I think it’s relevant to the “war on drugs” and explains why they are waging war on us; they want to take our stuff…It really is about the benjamins!
http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2009/sep/13/the-golden-goose-fund/
And the author won an award for the article.
Bee509 on September 18 at 1:14 a.m.
Well said Shawn… I haven’t read any articles or heard stories of chronic marijuana users holding up banks or robbing people for their fix, as with the big pharma epidemic we have on our hands.
Retep_Semaj79 on September 18 at 11:21 a.m.
There seems to be a stigmatism associated to marijuana use. The “gateway drug” theory only works in so far as the other “legal” drugs are not entered into the equation. The true “gateway drug” is tobacco. Everyone that has lived in the United States has met or lives with someone that uses tobacco. If everyone understood how marijuana truly affects a person, this debate would have been dead long ago. The problem is self-serving propagandists perpetuating lies about marijuana in order to continue reaping the benefits of “Drug War” funding from the government, as well as the civil forfieture of property.
http://reason.tv/picks/show/policing-for-profit
This is the major reason that the federal government will not allow citizens to legally possess a plant. Don’t worry about medical, outright legalize and all patients will be able to have safe access.
alltheplants on September 19 at 1:33 a.m.
My home was raided last year in supposed connection with Change.The spd’s affidavit for a search warrant was pure fiction and was subsequently thrown out by a superior court judge in Stevens county. Cops will tell you in a second “we are allowed to use deception”. Are they allowed to use deception on judges also? Are they allowed to use deception on the public? I believe they have extended this (practice) policy of lying a little too far! Rocky Treppiedi is scumbag and a liar, and when we start cleaning house around here the trash needs to go out first!
eagleproducer on September 22 at 9:36 a.m.
Those involved in this bust are true heroes to rid the public of such a dangerous man and his demon weed.
It was probably brought here by all those Mexicans you see around these days.
I can’t think of anything more disgusting, or that threatens our republic more, than the sickly using a law brought about by a populist initiative to ease their pain and suffering.
The letter of the law is what matters most. What do we really have without that?
HERE’S OUR VOICE!
my ode to the soccermom….
ps: Seeds are not illegal to possess. They are illegal to buy, sell, or import from several places in Canada that you can order from on the internet. Hint, hint.