You can scour the text of this state’s medical-marijuana amendment for as long as you like, but you will see no clue that we would have pot “dispensaries” popping up like the latest strip-mall sensation.
The amendment, which voters approved nine years ago, takes care to define “patient,” “physician,” “primary caregiver,” and just about every other relevant term. Yet it never so much as hints at the emergence of commercial enterprises catering to dozens or perhaps hundreds of individuals, complete with advertising and the not-so-subtle promise of a hassle-free route to the drug.
To the contrary. One of the original arguments against the amendment was that it provided no mechanism for patients to get marijuana other than to take their chances on the black market. A patient could keep up to two ounces of marijuana and grow up to six marijuana plants, or a caregiver could possess the same amount on the patient’s behalf, but the amendment suggested nothing about a role for pot entrepreneurs.
In fact, the amendment seemed to limit the likelihood of commercial dispensaries because it defined a caregiver as someone “other than the patient and the patient’s physician, who . . . has significant responsibility for managing the well-being of a patient . . . .” That suggests the caregiver would be someone with a personal commitment toward the patient as opposed to a business applying assembly-line principles to qualify people for the marijuana registry — and then selling the drug to them for a tidy sum.
“We’re verging on a 7-Eleven model for marijuana dispensaries,” state Sen. Chris Romer told me this week as he contemplated the details of a bill to regulate them.
So what’s wrong with a 7-Eleven model? Nothing, if your goal is the backdoor legalization of the drug. But Coloradans didn’t vote to legalize pot. They voted to allow the use of marijuana to alleviate severe, chronic pain and nausea (a goal that I support, too.)
The state could effectively shut down dispensaries without violating the spirit of the ballot language by limiting each caregiver to no more than a handful of patients. Romer, however, is reluctant to go too far down that path. “I’ve spoken to too many patients who . . . don’t want to go back to some dark street where they don’t know who they’re buying from. You have to have some way to get the medical marijuana,” he says.
Fair enough. But if the dispensary is no more a “caregiver” than the fellow who fills your prescription at a drive-up window, then Coloradans were sold a bill of goods. After all, as Attorney General John Suthers told me, “The business model of the dispensaries seems to be to create patients.” Their message to prospective clients basically is, “We’ll get you a doctor and we’ll qualify you.”
You’d think the vast majority of people with a genuinely severe condition would already have a doctor. Yet as of August, according to the state health department, a single physician had authorized 28 percent of the more than 10,000 Coloradans on the marijuana registry. Can anyone doubt the system is being gamed?
Besides regulating dispensaries, Romer says the state also has a right “to prescribe regulations on how doctors see and treat [medical marijuana] patients.” I’m not sure that he’s right, however, since the amendment clearly says, “No physician shall be denied any rights or privileges for the acts authorized by this subsection.”
It’s equally hard to see how the state could legally enforce another idea Romer is toying with: requiring a second medical opinion for adults in their 20s before adding them to the registry (the amendment itself requires patients 18 and under to get two opinions). The amendment refers to a patient’s “physician,” after all, not physicians. Like it or not, the amendment’s open-ended green light to patients who complain of “severe pain” all but guarantees that some potheads will exploit the system.
Yet lawmakers aren’t helpless. They can regulate the growing number of dispensaries so they hew more closely to the caregiver role that voters imagined. But in most other respects, these legislators will probably discover, their hands are pretty much tied.
E-mail Vincent Carroll at vcarroll@denverpost.com.
