Smoke Signals
Changes might be coming for Oregon’s Medical Marijuana Act
by Rick Levin

Narcotics have been systematically scapegoated and demonized. The idea that anyone can use drugs and escape a horrible fate is anathema to these idiots. I predict in the near future right wingers will use drug hysteria as a pretext to set up an international police apparatus. But I’m an old man and I may not live to see a final solution.  — Tom the Preacher in Drugstore Cowboy, 1989 

Saturday, high noon

It's an odd but fitting sign that this time, the smoke preceded the fire. When folks around Eugene sparked up on April 20 — that would be 4:20, the apocryphal National Marijuana Holiday allegedly named for the after-school meeting time designated by a clutch of teenage stoners in San Rafael in the '70s — they were, consciously or not, sending up a smoke signal of things to come for advocates of medical marijuana.

First of all is the Global Medical Marijuana March at “high noon” Saturday, May 2, in front of the old federal building at 7th and Pearl. Other events are happening in Salem and Portland. The Eugene event will feature a number of notable speakers, including Elvy Musikka, who has been receiving 300 federally sanctioned and supplied joints a month since 1988, Dr. Arthur Livermore, a member of the American Alliance for Medical Cannabis. Also addressing the rally will be Dan Koozer, head of the Willamette Valley chapter of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Law (NORML).

This year's march anticipates a veritable firestorm of initiatives and bills knocking on the door of the Legislature for the next two years at least. According to a WV-NORML press release, “there are 35 bills relating to marijuana in the Oregon State Legislature this session, and there are more coming.”

The Oregon Medical Marijuana Act has been on the books for a decade, and much of the proposed legislation seeks to clarify or clean up or strengthen or gut or eradicate altogether whatever benefits OMMA offers its beneficiaries.

If the state and country have inched closer to ending what some advocates call “Prohibition Part II,” still, all is not mellow in the land of legalized medical marijuana. When it comes to pot, it's politics as usual.

A divided movement

“The story you're about to write is completely bullshit.” This is as good a place to start as any, with one of the first sentences spoken to me over the phone by Jerry Wade, who serves as secretary for the Stormy Ray Cardholder's Foundation (SRCF). Wade was responding — in a kind of preemptive strike, since no specific questions had yet been asked — to a request that his organization respond to the scads of criticism leveled at SRCF by other organizations in the movement.

Stormy Ray was one of the chief petitioners for Measure 67, which in its voter-driven success became OMMA. Ray, who in 1985 was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, is one of countless patients whose symptoms have been relieved by ingesting cannabis, and her foundation is currently behind the push to enact Senate Bill 388, which was voted down last week but is expected to return in some form.

According to Wade, SB 388, which received a hearing in Salem April 20, focused exclusively on the needs and rights of patients who use medical marijuana. The bill, he said, sought to prevent abuses on the supply side of the issue by ensuring clear and legal access to well-regulated and well-defined marijuana producers who are growing pot solely for patients.

Now, as for the “bullshit”: Numerous individuals and organizations have claimed, in so many words, that SRCF is a puppet and a front for The Man; and that the organization, by working so closely with law enforcement and politicians, is a slave to power; and that it does not represent the collective interest of the medical marijuana movement.

Anthony Johnson of Voter Power said: “It is a shame that the Stormy Ray Cardholder's Foundation, an organization with just a handful of members, has been propped up and used by the law enforcement lobby to pass laws that actually harm sick and disabled patients.”

The actual harm being done, Johnson claimed, is “by conning legislators that compromises are being  made while patients are only going to be harmed by proposals that reduce the amount of medicine available and will lead to more resources being wasted on the arrest and jailing of patients and their providers.”

Koozer from WV-NORML said that the legalization movement in general is “appalled” that Ray has “worked her way into being the only group that law enforcement will deal with and speak with.” In general, Koozer added, it's confusing that legislators are paying so much attention to law enforcement, which he called “addicted” to the money it makes waging the so-called War on Drugs. He warns further that it's a dangerous thing when law enforcement is involved in the making of laws, a process typically, if not constitutionally, delegated to the legislative branch of government.

Wade objects to such assessments. What Ray's harshest critics refer to as compromise or plain old selling out, Wade might instead call being pragmatic. He says that too many organizations are hitching their wagons to the issue of medical marijuana to trick voters with “backdoor legislation” that seeks to legalize marijuana across the board. What's more, he says, the current system is too prone to abuse, with patients being overcharged or having their card-holding status used as a “fence” for growers and dealers whose supply goes to non-card-holding recreational stoners.

“We are truly fighting to keep this program in the hands of the patients,” Wade said of SB 388, which he added “will have no effect on patients.” What it would have done, Wade adds, is stop “stockpiling and hoarding” by those growers who abuse the current law. The bill explicitly defined garden size and growth amounts and created “an easy-to-understand manual about patient's rights” where “all medicine produced is the property of the patient.”

Essentially, Wade says, his organization has worked hard to close some of these “loopholes” that make the law as it stands — and as many legalization advocates would like to see it remain — an easy way for illegitimate growers to skirt the law. “I'm not saying all growers and caregivers are bad,” he says, adding that he guesses about “90 percent are legal.” It's only those few who are “giving the entire program a black eye.” 

Initiative 28

Voter Power director John Sajo, who is leading the petition drive to put Initiative 28 in front of the voters in 2010, says that what OMMA has done “is create a cesspool of corruption of a different form,” where patients are just as guilty as abusing growers as vice versa. Many patients he's seen, he says, have passed their card-certified marijuana to other, non-card-carrying individuals — sometimes right in front of Sajo, who is himself a certified medical marijuana grower.

The main difference between SB 388 and I-28 is that — while both deal primarily with the supply side of the issue — the former purports to protect patients by tweaking OMMA with better-defined controls on marijuana growers and distribution, while the latter argues for the creation of a non-profit dispensary system that acts as a regulated middleman between patients and growers. Both claim to clean up corruption: the one, SB 388, by tightening the one-to-one correspondence between patient and supplier; the other, I-28, by modeling the system on controlled but consumer-driven economics.

Sajo says that the real issue driving new legislation, however, is the “inability of the Oregon Legislature to get a handle on the medical marijuana issue.” He says that, unlike every other form of commerce in a capitalist society, “medical marijuana is all supposed to be done without the exchange of money,” which he says is absurd.

Even more absurd, Sajo says, is creating a one-to-one correspondence where individual patients are dependent on a single grower and his or her schedule, harvest and reliability. Here he offers a poignant analogy: “It's insane ... if we tried to do food like that in this country, half the people would starve.”

What I-28 would create, Sajo says, is a “supply system where patients can go get their medicine” in the form of a nonprofit dispensary operating on the model of a regulated free market economy. A sort of sliding-scale system would be implemented for more needy or destitute patients, with some even receiving free medicine, while other patients would pay what the market demands. This system, Sajo adds, would be subject to controls such as inspections and health standards, and a 10 percent tax on sales would fund the overall program.

“A farmer who's good at growing marijuana shouldn't be limited to growing for four patients,” Sajo says. “They should be encouraged to grow for as many as they can.” Under I-28, which so far has collected some 35,000 signatures, a grower would pay $1,000 for a license and would be equally subjected to zoning and inspections.

Jim Greig, a long-standing medical marijuana advocate who suffers from a debilitating from of arthritis that keeps him all but bedridden, calls I-28 “as close to perfect as we're going to get”— at least until the federal government gets past the “bold-faced lie” of giving marijuana the same controlled substance scheduling as heroin. “What other prescription drug do you need to get a hundred dollar permit to carry it?” Greig asks rhetorically.

For Greig, every existing problem with medical marijuana legislation starts at the federal level, and the only solution, he adds, is education, which would challenge the ridiculously outdated “Reefer Madness” mentality and politicized fear tactics of the War on Drugs while also alerting the public to the substantial and ever-increasing amount of scientific data that proves the medicinal properties of cannabis. “Decisions are supposed to be made on scientific fact, not ideologies,” Greig says.