Distributing marijuana

Having approved the medicinal use of marijuana last November, Mainers will have to wait until at least this coming November, and possibly longer, before sick people can receive the drug. That may be for the best.

LD 2580, a bill that would have put a registration and distribution system in place to get seized marijuana to the sick, was amended into a study commission led by the Attorney General’s Office. That task force, which meets for the first time May 9, is expected to come up with ways to honor the voters’ will by Oct. 1.

The bill was relegated to study for two reasons, said Sen. Judy Paradis, D-Frenchville, cochairman of the committee that oversaw the bill: Legislators didn’t want to act without a better understanding of the ramifications; and one of the potential ramifications tossed up by law enforcement was the loss of millions of dollars of Department of Justice grants.

Justice grants money for a variety of purposes to Maine each year: DARE, domestic violence programs, anti-crime, the COPS program for funding additional police officers. Last year alone, Maine received at least $2.5 million in DOJ grants, and at least $1 million of that for domestic violence prevention.

Put aside, for the moment, the shaky idea of handing out as medicine a pot crop grown under uncertain conditions in someone’s backyard. The fear among many in law enforcement — a fear voiced to legislators by Maine Drug Enforcement Agency Director Roy McKinney — is that forcing MDEA to turn over seized marijuana to the sick would be a violation of federal law, one that might lead Justice to shut off the flow of money to Maine.

That’s hard to swallow, because apparently no one at Justice has specifically told anyone in Maine’s law enforcement community that distributing pot would end or impede federal grants here. And it doesn’t consider the one real-world experience the nation has with a state distributing marijuana to the sick.

California began opening marijuana clubs in 1998, two years after that state’s voters approved medicinal marijuana. Justice, in turn, started shutting those clubs down. The city of Oakland, Calif., in an effort to get around the Drug Enforcement Agency, went so far as to make its marijuana club a city agency, to protect the program from federal agents. Even today, some counties in California distribute pot in violation of Justice’s wishes; San Francisco is soon to launch a distribution program, too.

But California still gets Justice dollars. Last year, at the height of the dope war between Justice and California, DOJ gave the Golden State some $13.2 million in domestic violence funding — almost twice what New York, the next largest recipient, received. Even in 1998, as Oakland was circumventing DOJ’s will, that city received federal money for a program to prevent juvenile handgun violence.

Director McKinney is correct that noting the federal government has to decide to play ball at some point on this issue, since they ultimately decide not only what is an illegal drug, but also ultimately hold the power over which drugs doctors may prescribe. But the task force should be less concerned about the potential loss of federal dollars and more concerned about the quality of the drug that Mainers are to receive.

That’s one reason the delay that the task force creates makes sense. Its members, for instance, might look to the UK Medicinal Cannabis Project, which under the regulatory standards of the Medicines Control Agency in the United Kingdom and the Food and Drug Administration here, is conducting research on non-smoked cannabis based medicines. It received approval last month to begin patient trials and plans to examine the effects of cannabis on everything from AIDS wasting illnesses and asthma to schizophrenia and Tourette’s syndrome.

The results of this research will take time and there certainly should be ways to safely distribute medicinal marijuana in the meantime, but the ad lib method of under consideration in Maine promises to create problems of quality control. Given the recent concerns the federal and some state governments have expressed over the lack of control in the growing herbal-remedy industry, a state could hardly enter that industry with marijuana without seeming hypocritical.

Two-thirds of the states have approved some form of medicinal marijuana – Hawaii being the latest. Maine legislators have been remarkably willing to make up for Congress’ weaknesses by taking the lead on issues such as prescription drug price controls; they should show similar strength toward medicinal marijuana, helping to put pressure on Congress to identify and approve well-researched methods of delivery for cannabis when it is appropriate.