Subscribe to Breaking News
Loading ...Mich. medical pot law goes into effect, amid questions
12.05.2008 4:23pm EST
(Detroit) Medical marijuana became legal in Michigan on Thursday, but smoking a joint could still get patients arrested because the regulations needed to protect them won’t be ready for months.
The law approved by voters in November allows patients with cancer, HIV, AIDS, glaucoma and other diseases to use marijuana to relieve their symptoms on a doctor’s recommendation.Qualifying patients can register with the state and receive ID cards allowing them to legally acquire, possess, grow, transport and use a limited amount – no more than 2.5 ounces and 12 plants – of marijuana. They also can designate a primary caregiver to receive similar protection.
But those cards won’t be issued until the Department of Community Health introduces guidelines addressing how applications will be handled, what fees will be charged and other issues. The rules must be finalized by April 4.
Until then, anyone possessing marijuana – even patients who could later qualify for the program – can be arrested and prosecuted, though the law allows patients to use a medical-justification defense at trial.
“We have this void where this takes effect now, but there are no rules, regulations or guidance for the people who want to use it or the people who enforce the laws,” said Jim Valentine, chief of police in Lowell and first vice president of the Michigan Association of Chiefs of Police.
Officers in Lowell will arrest marijuana users even if they claim to be patients awaiting cards, Valentine said. He said he’ll let the prosecutor decide whether to pursue charges.
A medical-marijuana program nearly identical to Michigan’s was implemented without major incident in Rhode Island in 2006, said Charles Alexandre, who oversees the program as chief of health professions regulation in Rhode Island’s Department of Health. That state also had a period where the law went into effect before the regulations were in place, and patients simply had to wait until the rules were in order.
“It’s been very quiet,” Alexandre said.
Michigan is the 13th state to allow medicinal use of marijuana, though the state’s law doesn’t address how patients can obtain it. It’s illegal to sell marijuana, even to registered patients. That’s also the case in several other states.
Police in Michigan say they want guidance on the issue, and some experts said the Legislature may have to intervene if that or any other aspect of the program becomes a problem.
Here at least is finally some compassion and common sense.
If you have a fatal or excrutiatingly painful illness, you deserve some kind of relief, release, the return of some kind of appetite for a while. If it helps you live your life better, why not?
Such strict treatment of a form of medication! Yet we can smoke cigarettes, which are a deadly noxious killer, pumped with poisons that are illegal to put in our food, like arsenic etc. How do the cigarette companies get away with that anyways?
Jenifer my dear, the reason they can pump poisons into cigarettes without prosecution? MONEY, my dear!!! MONEY!!! I am a former smoker and right after I quit in ‘01 I read a book about cigarettes and the additives put in them. Most of the stuff they put in cigarettes you couldn’t dump on the side of the road without being prosecuted. Yet they can legally put those same toxins and carcinogens in products for human consumption. I wish I could recall the name of the book I read. I tried looking it up, just can’t remember. But money is the answer. The tobacco industry makes too much money for them to be held accountable for their actions. Sad, but very true.
The tobacco industry makes too much money off cigarettes? Hell, the government brings in far more from taxing cigarettes than the industry itself.
Come on folk, where do you think the tax money would come if there were not smokers out there?
I don’t understand these medical marijuana laws. “Yes, we have medical marijuana but you can’t have any because it’s illegal” That’s really f#cked up. No government has the right to outlaw anything that is provided by nature.
“No government has the right to outlaw anything that is provided by nature.”
And yet there are laws set up against homosexual rights.
Double Standard. Double edged.
Why, indeed, is marijuana illegal?
It’s all about the continued growth of the prison industry – and “industry” is the right word for it, given the increase in prison-labor contracts with private employers and the ongoing privatization of corrections operations themselves.
As Jenifer rightly points out, there are any number of things far more destructive than marijuana that are nevertheless completely legal. Well, there’s a reason our nation’s anti-drug fanatics chose such a comparatively placid target – they knew it would generate enough raw fodder for the jaws of the prison system.
More destructive drugs, like heroin and meth, wouldn’t provide enough convicts on their own, because their extremely destructive properties are enough to scare off all but the people whose lives are already so hosed that they’d see these toxic chemicals as a comparative improvement. Pot, on the other hand, isn’t all that scary in and of itself – leaving a much larger base of potential users for the government to step in and incarcerate as profit generators for the likes of Wackenhut – and, in possibly the REAL endgame, a large base of people who can be miscast as an army of dangerous criminals in an attempt to sell the public on ever-more-invasive law enforcement tactics and ever-more-thorough rollbacks of our Constitutional rights.
The Federal Government gives states big bucks to fight the war on drugs. Really! They choose to spend it on busting pot smokers as opposed to going after the harder drugs because it is easier and there is more money in it for them.Most pot smokers are gainfully employed.I predict that pot will be legal on the federal level in the not too distant future as will same sex marraige. Then local law enforcement can spend their drug fighting dollars fighting real drug issues. Thats one small toke for man, and a giant toke for mankind..:)