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FREE THE WEED 24
A Column by John Sinclair
Highest greetings from New Orleans, where I’ll be residing for the next four months as director of cultural affairs for the New Orleans Institute for the Imagination. There’s no medical marijuana here, but I lived in the city for 12 years from 1991-2003 and I know where to get my medicine.
A tiny glimmer of hope for change in Louisiana appeared today when veteran Times-Picayune columnist James Gill surmised: “It might take Louisiana 100 years to follow the lead of Colorado and Washington…but even here a liberal whiff is in the air.”
Even here, where “Louisiana locks up a higher percentage of its citizens for drug offenses, for longer terms, than anywhere else. The average sentence for possession here, on first and second offenses, is four years.”
Gov. Bobby Jindal, the Louisiana counterpart of Michigan’s Slick Rick Snyder, has deigned to consider perhaps lowering sentences (two year minimum though) and establishing more drug courts and drug rehabilitation centers, planning to focus on “Rehabilitating those who can be rehabilitated—nonviolent, nonhabitual offenders.”
As Gill comments, “He might as well have said ‘those who don’t need to be rehabilitated,’ because such folks would not be caught up in a rational criminal justice system.
“Let them enjoy an occasional toke in peace,” Gill says, “while we concentrate on criminals who pose a threat.”
We’ve come a long way from when Michigan’s marijuana laws were similarly draconian and misdirected, but the recent Michigan Supreme Court ruling that the medical marijuana dispensaries in the state are illegal represents a serious—although not entirely unexpected—setback for Michigan marijuana patients.
I hate to say it, but it seemed inevitable to me that the Michigan Supreme Court—politics aside—would rule against the state’s medical marijuana dispensaries.
The statute that was drafted by marijuana activists, endorsed by thousands of petitioners, and voted into law by 62% of Michigan voters in 2008 permits the transfer of marijuana only by a care-giver to his or her one to five registered patients. Patients may grow their own or designate a care-giver to grow their 12 plants for them.
Licensed care-givers serving five medical marijuana patients in Michigan may legally grow up to 60 plants, plus their own 12 plants, for an absolute maximum of 72 plants. That’s a lot of weed—certainly enough to keep all five patients and the care-giver each supplied with their legal limit of two and a half ounces of marijuana at all times.
Not having been privy to the experience of drafting the Michigan legislation, I can only speculate that the intent of the authors of the Michigan Medical Marijuana Act was to mandate a sort of organic process for the cultivation and transfer of weed outside of the commercial model that would keep the commerce of cannabis on a small, intensely personal level.
At best, the approach enshrined in our current law actualizes such intent but stops well short of providing for the needs of all the medical marijuana patients in the state, probably a vast majority of whom don’t even know any growers who could serve as their care-givers.
Growing marijuana successfully is not no easy thing. It takes a green thumb, a lot of work, long hours with the crop and not a little luck to turn some seeds into smokable medicine several weeks later. Just as we rarely grow our own food and clothing, growing our own medicine is an extraordinary solution to the need for its healing powers.
I should probably say that my own belief system calls for marijuana and all recreational drugs to be available to their users at all times in a safe, economical and legally sanctioned way. With respect to medical marijuana, the dispensary system that’s grown up around the needs of Michigan patients seems to have been working very well until the Supreme Court blew the whistle. But like the care-giver system, the dispensaries need to have a legitimate basis in state law in order to function properly again.
Given the present state of the legislature I don’t expect much, but at least it’s a start: the Detroit News reports that Michael Callton (R-Nashville) and a bipartisan coalition of lawmakers have introduced House Bill 4271, the Medical Marihuana Provision Center Regulation Act, to allow for the establishment of facilities to dispense medical marijuana to authorized patients in Michigan.
Presently the states of Arizona, Colorado, New Jersey, Maine, and New Mexico have state-licensed medical cannabis dispensaries up and running, with similar dispensary outlets slated for Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington, DC.
Representative Callton told the paper that the law should provide for a regulated distribution scheme for patients. "The problem is there're 126,000 patients and only one-third have a caregiver," he said. "So what that's going to do is leave them without access, or they will go underground."
Well, we’ve been copping our weed on an underground basis for a great many years, and the Supreme Court decision has insured that the underground weed economy will have to continue to thrive for some time to come.
Even with the establishment of a perfectly legal system of care-givers and their patients, there’s bound to be a a sizable quantity of weed left over from a 72-plant grow operation after all six patients (including the care-giver) have been taken care of, and there is already a vast number of patients without direct access to licensed care-givers, so it’s safe to assume that off-the-books transfers will continue to be made whether it’s legal or not.
When the Michigan Medical Marijuana Act was passed into law in 2008 and instituted the following spring, it seemed to me that the only legal solution would be to form linked collectives of care-givers and patients that would provide for the growing and distribution of sufficient supplies of cannabis to take care of the needs of all Michigan patients.
With considerable organizational effort these collectives could combine legal units of one-and-five through the agency of a non-profit cannabis clearing-house where
registered card-carrying members could be hooked up five at a time with licensed care-givers who would grow for them.
Regional clearing-houses could maintain premises where patients could sign up and meet with their care-givers, obtain their medication, and enjoy the company of fellow patients in a warm, safe and comfortable environment over a cup of coffee or tea or a glass of juice and informed by high-quality music playing on the house sound system.
This has been my own personal vision and I’ve even made a couple of efforts to realize it in real life, but the biggest stumbling block has seemed to be the quest for profit on the part of the growers I’ve dealt with in this quest. I spent two years working with a remarkable facility on the west side of Detroit where we discussed setting up a legal in-house grow operation, establishing a compassion club/coffeeshop open to licensed patients and an adjacent music club open to all.
After two years this attempt came to naught and I moved to a compassion club on the near east side to try to institute the same plan. Again my ideas came to naught after hours of discussion and the club embraced the profit model without the fellowship component I had signed up for, opting to operate as “a private club for card-carrying medical marijuana patients” instead of a nonprofit collective of care-givers and patients.
I’ve thrown in the towel on these efforts and just hope that someone will come up with the appropriate solution. We got to have our weed, we need to preserve and extend the cannabis culture for the people of today and the future, and we have to stop the legal authorities from continuing to interfere with the satisfaction of our medical and recreational needs. Free The Weed!
—New Orleans
February 19-20, 2013
© John Sinclair. All Rights Reserved.
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