Marijuana

OLYMPIA -- The agency in charge of setting up the state's recreational marijuana system this morning approved the rules businesses will have to follow to get the industry off the ground.

As medical marijuana supporters gird for a fight against further state controls, they are rallying around the case of Billy Fisher, a Spokane patient who has so far been denied custody of his infant daughter in part because he refused to attend an inpatient chemical dependency program for his use of the drug. The Department of Social and Health Services, which took the child from Fisher’s estranged wife, ordered an assessment of Fisher before placing the baby with him.

The dried marijuana buds packed in jars, the marijuana-infused vitamin water, the Chewy Choo chocolate cannabis candies, the Canna Bull drinkable energy shots – they’re all sold at the Pacific Northwest Medical marijuana cooperative to people with prescriptions for marijuana to treat what ails them. Soon – likely by next June – marijuana grown at the North Side business will be available for sale to those without prescriptions, too, under the voter-approved initiative legalizing the production and sale of recreational pot.

It’s fascinating and amusing to watch as Washington tries to heave marijuana over the line from technically illegal to legal, and from disreputable to technically reputable. It is a marriage of two worlds that have not, heretofore, collided. The world of the bong and the world of the bureaucrat. The shaggy black market and the uptight realm of subsections and permit variances. A lot of us have felt for a long time that there is no sense whatever – no legal, economic or ethical sense – in pot prohibition. And yet the emergence of the first batch of state rules for a marijuana market struck me, initially, as simply hard to believe.

SEATTLE – If serial Hempfest-goer Rob Thomas, of Everett, had his way, marijuana would “be sold at farmers markets, just like tomatoes.” That’s what Thomas, 25, hoped for when Washington voters last fall legalized the recreational use of marijuana.

Though the nation’s top prosecutor said this week that regional offices should determine when federal charges should be filed in drug cases, U.S. District Attorney for Eastern Washington Mike Ormsby demurred Friday when asked how he will respond to the state’s new recreational marijuana laws. “That decision’s really being made at a level that’s higher than my pay grade,” Ormsby told the Greater Spokane Valley Chamber of Commerce. “As soon as we have a decision made, it will be rolled out.”