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August 28, 2011 in City
Spin Control: Cities dazed, confused over marijuana control
OLYMPIA – Whether she realized it or not last spring when wielding her “partial veto” pen, Gov. Chris Gregoire has prompted a hodgepodge of pot laws around the state and a fair amount of confusion among the cities.
In Seattle, where possession of a small amount of marijuana is less likely to bring public condemnation than drinking mediocre coffee, medical marijuana dispensaries are being told to register as businesses, pay their taxes, meet building codes and comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act. But be advised: No-smoking laws apply to smoking medical marijuana, too.
In Spokane, dispensaries are being raided by federal agents. There is a city ballot initiative supporting medical marijuana on file with the city clerk, although sponsors managed to miss all deadlines for making this year’s ballot.
In Ellensburg, people who want medical marijuana are told to get a permit, grow it in an indoor collective garden that can’t be observed from public places and aren’t built within 300 feet of schools and other “youth oriented facilities.”
Castle Rock and Shoreline have some temporary rules for collective gardens, while Issaquah, Kent, Kirkland, Maple Valley, Snohomish and Tukwila have temporary moratoria on such operations. Pullman might go the moratorium route this week.
Tacoma has a moratorium on marijuana dispensaries, but city officials reportedly have no plans to shut down the marijuana dispensaries they already have, let alone stop any new ones that might decide to open.
Gregoire is not solely responsible for this, of course. She got a bill from the Legislature that had already been trashed by a pair of U.S. attorneys and had state employees unions worried about the prospect of their members inspecting Cheech and Chong’s back 40.
Part of the problem is a disconnect between the federal government, which officially has a Reefer Madness stance, while voters in states like Washington put marijuana somewhere between a reliable home remedy and a wonder drug.
Advocates of the curative powers of the plant would prefer that everyone call it cannabis, by the way. But of the 100 or so words I heard used for marijuana while growing up, cannabis wasn’t one of them.
The request brings to mind an old Harry Truman joke about him telling his daughter the vegetables looked so good because he spread manure on them. When she suggested he say fertilizer, because it was more refined, Mrs. Truman said: “Hush Margaret. Don’t you know how long it took to get him to say manure?”
If voters say sick people should have medical marijuana, and the federal government says the standard place where sick people get medicine, a pharmacy, can’t dispense it, then someone else will. In Western Washington, dispensaries don’t just advertise in the alternative weekly papers but in the daily press.
The new law – what’s left of it, anyway, after Gregoire’s veto pen did a John Belushi Samurai Warrior number on it – doesn’t countenance dispensaries. It continues to allow for collective gardens, where as many as 10 people can have as many as 45 marijuana plants. But it gives cities the authority to restrict where these gardens can be. Or even if they can be.
By requiring gardens to be inside, the city of Ellensburg may have hit on a way to keep them out of sight as well as stop the casual midnight theft of one or two handfuls of smokeable stuff. But they will raise the electric bills for heat and grow lights.
Does Ellensburg have any such gardens? “Not that I’m aware of. We don’t think so,” City Attorney Jim Pidduck said. Different cities are doing different things, he said. “Everybody’s just struggling to come up with the appropriate response.”
Unclear, however, is whether a garden actually has to have growing marijuana plants. Could a collective garden merely have the harvested product, which it could dispense – strike that, dispensaries are illegal – provide to members of the collective?
“We don’t know the answer to that,” said Candace Bock of the Municipal Research and Services Center of Washington, which gets regular questions about the state of marijuana laws in the state.
Where they obtain that pre-grown product might have to be left to the imagination or the entrepreneurial spirits of the collective.
The Legislature is bound to take this all up in next year’s session, although whether they will make the situation better or worse is anyone’s guess. Steve Sarich of Canna Care, which operates dispensaries and clinics in the Seattle area, is suing the state over vagueness in the new law rather than waiting for a do-over in the Legislature.
Even if the law gets changed for the better, it’s not likely to take effect until sometime next summer, Sarich said. “What are medical marijuana patients supposed to do until then?”
Spin Control, a weekly column by Olympia Bureau Chief Jim Camden, also appears online with daily items and reader comments at www.spokesman.com/ blogs/spincontrol.
Supermajority for taxes unconstitutional, judge rules 
jimvw2 on August 28 at 7:43 a.m.
Legalize the sale of seeds and home cultivation. Don’t legalize sales of marijuana. People who want it would have to invest the time and effort to grow it. People who want to make a profit from it would go to jail. Exceptions could be made for medical applications. Not that complicated. Allowing cultivation for personal use will effectively kill the black market for this product. Maybe we could then declare this lamentable chapter of the War on Drugs closed. We could save millions of dollars on pointless prosecutions and enforcement, a huge peace divdend for war-weary communities.
Thoreau on August 28 at 10:57 a.m.
Like many issues, politicians have made this one muddled.
What confounds the cannabis issue is the fact that it is the only effective “drug” that can be obtained on one’s own with seed, water, and light. That scares the hell out of the pharmaceutical companies, who make billions off drugs that are manufactured inside government regulated factories.
The pharmaceutical industries control America’s health. They control America’s suffering, and they control America’s pocketbook, when all one has is a social security check to survive. These companies are extorting sick people by charging exorbitant prices for their drugs - drugs that can kill or make addicts.
You can’t grow your own Vicodin, Prozac…………
alltheplants on August 29 at 5:45 p.m.
I moved here from the south a few years ago. I’ve been dealing with a lower back injury for 20 years. I learned about medical cannabis after moving here and re-injuring my back for the umteenth time. It wasn’t long before I realized that I wasn’t experiencing my usual injury. It was bad, and I started deteriorating rapidly. I was living on the west side at the time and a friend told me that I could get my medical cannabis card. I told them that was for cancer patients and I didn’t think it would work anyway. 2 weeks later they came back to visit and I was even worse. I couldn’t even straighten up enough to sleep in my bed. I was in horrible shape. They returned with their mother who was one of the first authorizations in Wa for MS back in ‘98. She was a little rude to me for letting myself get into this kind of condition and told me that it was a very powerful anti-inflammatory and to eat the extract. I’d been an anti-inflammatory test dummie for 20 years, she was speaking language I could understand. I ate the extract. The next day I awoke, meaning I’d been asleep, then I moved around some and noticed I wasn’t in screaming pain like I usually was after managing to pass out. I stood and immediately noticed a noticeable reduction of pain, and then I noticed an improvement in range of motion. I then went and got authorized. My medical history was solid and it was easy. It doesn’t sound like much, but from deterioration to improvement felt very good. I continued to eat the extract and little by little over the next month I was standing upright and most importantly sleeping in my bed if you know what I mean. I moved over here and found out the hard way that what I was part of on the west side wasn’t acceptable over here. How can a state law be legal in one part of a state, but not in another?