The California Supreme Court ruled on Monday that medical cannabis dispensaries are legal under state law, but cities and counties can still ban them. The decision in City of Riverside v. Inland Empire Patients Health and Wellness Center is disappointing, but it is not the end of the fight for safe and dignified access to medicine in approximately two hundred communities where patients’ associations are banned. The Supreme Court pointed out that “nothing prevents future efforts by the Legislature, or by the People, to adopt a different approach.” That means the ball is in your court now.

Ask your California lawmakers to protect safe access for every legal patient by adopting statewide regulations based on our “Principles of Sensible Medical Cannabis Regulation.” Two measures before the state legislature seek to regulate medical cannabis activity – AB 473 by Assemblymember Tom Ammiano (D-San Francisco) and SB 439 by Senate President Pro-Tem Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento) and Senator Mark Leno (D-San Francisco). Act now to be sure these two measures, which are still being finalized by lawmakers, reflect what patients and other medical cannabis stakeholders want to see.

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Last week, Kal Penn, who plays Kumar in the “stoner” film franchise Harold & Kumar, spoke to Huffington Post Live about President Obama’s marijuana policies. During the April 26th interview, Penn defended recent Justice Department attacks on dispensaries in medical marijuana states like California, citing articles he read from a Google search.

Unfortunately, we cannot always rely on a pliant mainstream media — that too often quotes Justice Department officials without any counterpoint — to provide consistently factual information.

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I am so excited to be attending the ASA California Medical Cannabis Policy Summit and Lobby Day this weekend.  The event last year was absolutely brilliant.  Steph and the Sacramento ASA Chapter did an outstanding job organizing the event, and together, we accomplished the impossible. Imagine visiting EVERY representative in Sacramento in ONE day.  What an undertaking!  We might qualify for a Guinness Book of World Records.

Lobbyists have a lot of power in Sacramento, but legislators really take notice when an “ordinary” citizen takes the time to show up in their offices.  The value is priceless.

Seriously, I learned so much about being an EFFECTIVE advocate: how to make  appointments to talk to your representatives, how to address them, how to prepare my talking points, and how to follow up after the meeting.  This training has served me well during the past year and I have developed relationships with several legislators as a result.

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Sadly, but not unexpectedly, last week the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit denied a petition for rehearing filed be Americans for Safe Access in ASA v. DEA. After more than a decade of legal wrangling with the federal government over the medical efficacy of marijuana and its relative lack of abuse potential, the D.C. Circuit gave great deference to the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) position that marijuana has no proven medical value. In doing this, the D.C. Circuit not only ignored voluminous evidence of marijuana’s medical efficacy, but it held the petitioners to a standard above and beyond that advanced by the government itself. Out of thin air, the Court interpreted the phrase “adequate and well-controlled studies” to require FDA-approved Phase II or Phase III studies, rather than the common meaning of the term. A similar such standard as that interjected into the proceedings by the Court at the last possible moment had already been rejected by the same Court and others in the cases of Grinspoon v. DEA, 828 F.2d 881 (1st Cir. 1987) and Doe v. DEA, 484 F.3d 561 (D.C. Cir. 2007).  This, coupled with the failure of the Court even to consider marijuana’s lack of abuse potential, was the basis for ASA’s recent petition for rehearing.

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California Senator Lou Correa (D-Santa Ana) has proposed a bill that would turn most of the state’s legal medical cannabis patients into criminals. SB 289 will make it a crime to drive with any amount of a controlled substance in your blood, unless the drug was prescribed by a doctor. The bill makes no exception for medical cannabis patients, whose medicine is recommend by a doctor, as opposed to prescribed. That means trouble for responsible, law abiding medical cannabis patients statewide.

Regular medical cannabis users may have detectable levels of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), one of the active compounds in cannabis, for up to two days after using medicine (See G. Skopp and L. Potsch, “Cannabinoid concentrations in spot serum samples 24-48 hours after discontinuation of cannabis smoking,” Journal of Analytical Toxicology 32: 160-4, 2008). However, measurable impairment from medical cannabis use may only last a few hours. This means that a legal medical cannabis user will be in violation of SB 289, because he or she has a detectable amount of THC long after there is any potential for impairment.

ASA is asking medical cannabis supporters to speak up against SB 289 to protect legal patients from unnecessary arrest. The bill will be heard in the Senate Public Safety Committee on Tuesday, April 30, so your California Senator needs to hear from you now.

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Patient advocacy group Americans for Safe Access (ASA) filed recommended amendments today to draft regulations which were issued last month by the Massachusetts Department of Public Health (DPH) in order to implement Question 3, the state’s new medical marijuana law. The amendments were filed in advance of a scheduled hearing by the Public Health Council that took place today in Boston.

The draft regulations are the product of many weeks of deliberation, during which time DPH sought input from medical marijuana patients and other stakeholders, including ASA, the Massachusetts Patient Advocacy Alliance (MPAA) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Seeking a broad range of feedback, DPH held public hearings earlier this month in Boston, Plymouth, and Florence.

In November, sixty-three percent of voters approved Question 3, making Massachusetts the 18th medical marijuana state. Question 3 establishes a framework that allows qualifying patients with serious illnesses to get a recommendation from their licensed physician for the use of marijuana, and further enables patients to obtain their medicine from a registered Medical Marijuana Treatment Center (MMTC). Overseen by DPH, the MMTCs will be licensed to cultivate, process, and sell medical marijuana to qualifying patients who are allowed to obtain up to 10 ounces in a 60 day period. Patients who qualify under a hardship provision will be able to cultivate for themselves if unable to access a MMTC due to distance, disability, or low income.

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Nothing happens in the state legislature just because it should. Sometimes laws get passed because those with a financial interest in the outcome influence lawmakers. In some cases, political favors get traded to get something done. And all too often, lobbyists are the only voices lawmakers hear when they make choices that affect citizens. That is what is happening with medical cannabis in Sacramento right now, and I hope you will join me there next month to change that conversation for the better.

Medical cannabis patients and other stakeholders are meeting in Sacramento May 4-6 for the California Medical Cannabis Policy Summit and Lobby Day. The goals of the event are to develop strategies and skills necessary to adopt beneficial legislation for medical cannabis this year, and to take that message to lawmakers in person. Americans for Safe Access (ASA) and our partners at Californians to Regulate Medical Marijuana (CRMM); a coalition of patients, cultivators, organized labor, and others; is organizing this event to be sure that patients are at the table when important decisions about regulating medical cannabis are made this year.

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When the Maryland Senate voted earlier today to approve HB 1101 today, it failed to become the 19th medical cannabis (marijuana) state. In spite of the bill’s comendable intentions, it remains highly flawed. Some have touted the HB 1101 approach as a “yellow light” on medical cannabis, yet sadly, it can only be seen as a “yellow light” on a “bridge to nowhere.”

In spite of the bill’s laudable intent, the approach is completely untested, and causing even greater concern, the program is almost certainly  unimplementable for legal, financial and practical reasons. In fact, the Maryland Department of Legislative Services found that participation program is “expected to be low (or nonexistent)” and will “not likely to be able to comply with the bill’s requirement to set its fees at a level sufficient to offset program costs…unless it sets its fees at a level that would likely be prohibitively high.”

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Third time’s a charm? Not in the case of Navy veteran and former San Diego dispensary operator Jovan Jackson.

San Diego Assistant District Attorney (ADA) Chris Lindberg decided this week to try Jackson for a third time in as many years. Jackson, who operated the San Diego dispensary Answerdam Alternative Care Collective (AACC), was raided by a multi-agency law enforcement task force in 2008 and again in 2009. Jackson was tried the first time on possession and distribution charges, but was acquitted by a jury in 2009.

Unsatisfied with that result, ADA Lindberg, likely at the behest of San Diego District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis, tried Jackson a second time on charges levied after the 2009 raid on AACC. The second trial was not considered “double jeopardy” by the court because the prosecution was based on a different raid. During Jackson’s second trial in 2010, Lindberg prevented him from using a medical marijuana defense and, as a result, was convicted this time on the same charges of possession and distribution.

Outraged by this official persecution of a law-abiding dispensary operator and the waste of taxpayer dollars, Americans for Safe Access (ASA) appealed Jackson’s conviction in late 2011. In a unanimous landmark decision by California’s Fourth District Court of Appeal, Jackson’s conviction was overturned in October 2012. The court also held that Jackson should have been entitled to a medical marijuana defense, rejecting arguments made by both Lindberg and the Attorney General that patients must take part in the cultivation used to supply dispensaries.

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Following overwhelming approval of the medical marijuana ballot initiative in November, Massachusetts’ patients are waiting for safe access to their medicine as the state proceeds with implementation. We aren’t there yet, but so far progress is continuing in the right direction, thanks to the work of patient advocates from around the state. There have been a number of exciting advancements over the last several weeks.

The Attorney General issued a ruling that cities and towns cannot ban medical treatment centers from opening. Despite the overwhelming passage of the initiative that won in 350 out of 351 communities, a small minority of municipalities had attempted to forbid treatment centers from operating within their jurisdictions, largely based on unfounded fears about how treatment centers will work. Supporters within these towns have been frustrated with local officials’ attempting to overturn the will of the voters by passing bans. The AG has decided that these efforts are not legal, based on the reasoning that if one town can ban treatment centers, they all can. If that happened, implementation of the medical marijuana law would be impossible, and therefore these local bans are not permitted under state law. However, the AG also found that cities and towns can pass temporary moratoriums or zoning ordinance to address treatment center siting, as long as they do not ban the centers outright.

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