Michigan Medical Marijuana Act: The First 24-Months

criminalize it’s legitimate purposes.

This past fall, the recent election was a set-back for progressive marijuana laws.  California’s Proposition 19 lost by a vote of 56% to 44%.  If successful, the proposed law would have been the first in the country to legalize the recreational use of marijuana.

In Arizona, the medical marijuana proposition lost.

In California, the pot initiative lost because too few voters under age 26 turned out and moderate voters rejected the initiative.  Recent violence with Mexican drug gangs in both California and Arizona did not help either initiative.

Mixed messages float around the issue here in Michigan.  Recently, a huge pot-expo scheduled for the Pontiac Silverdome, billed as the largest pot-party in the world, was canceled at the last minute.

All this raises the questions: do we really need to legalize pot?  Is ours a pot-smoking nation?  Does marijuana have genuine palliative properties?

One of the major problems of perception with medical marijuana laws is that folks are simply going through the administrative steps to get “medically” certified to use pot, but are smoking on a recreational basis.

No good comes of a law that sets requirements that are perceived as a farce.  It would perhaps be better to legalize marijuana outright, then regulate its production, sale, and distribution.

California was really looking forward to billions in pot-derived state revenue.  Here in Michigan, there is confusion about who can legally grow pot and how it should be grown and distributed to “patients”.  In Arizona, the question is too close to call 3-days after the mid-term elections.

So then, what are they smoking?  That’s what Detroit-based Cannabis Counsel lawyer Matthew Abel is asking of the Michigan Senate Judiciary Committee, who met earlier this year, in January, in order to discuss a package of bills which would amend the public health code so that medical marijuana must be dispensed by pharmacists, and to classify medical marijuana as a schedule 2 controlled substance.

“It seems that if the legislature ever passed these bills, they would be in conflict with the medical marijuana statute,” Abel said. “So they’d need a 3/4 vote to supersede the law, and you know that they can’t even get 3/4 of the legislature to agree on lunch, let alone this.”

Southfield-based lawyer Michael Komorn, who also serves as the treasurer for the Michigan Medical Marijuana Association, said the bills are similar to bills introduced last year; last year, the bills which also would have allowed for 10 marijuana growing facilities to be affiliated with a pharmacy, got no traction.

This year’s incarnation of the bills would essentially make all production of medical marijuana illegal, though use would still be protected by law, Komorn said.

“It’s like the stamp act, arcane and without any understanding of what really is going on with patient needs,” Komorn said. “Bottom line, this is an attempt to repeal the Michigan medical marijuana act.”

It’s impossible, Abel said, to require dispensing of medical marijuana through pharmacies.

“They don’t have a supply, and no way to get it. There’s just no way for them to do it,” Abel said.

Still, he’s resting easy with the idea that the bills are going nowhere, and are really more about grandstanding for political popularity than they are about the Michigan medical marijuana law.

Now that the MMA has been around long enough to generate some interesting cases and controversies, we must wait until one of them percolates through the Michigan Supreme Court in order to get a true sense of this legislation.  Our blog takes the position that the MMA is flawed and thus, exposed to failure, so long as it can be used to mask recreational pot use.  Perhaps the most common sense thing to do at this point is what Peter Tosh called for world-wide: just legalize it.

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