They jumped him early, and they jumped him often. They called him everything but his mother’s son.
“I got so many nasty letters,” state Sen. Al White, R-Hayden, said Tuesday amid the smoke and rubble of his proposed medical-marijuana bill he had only hours before decided to kill. “You know, I thought these pot guys were supposed to be all mellow and laid-back. Not these guys.”
His bill would have put Colorado in the marijuana business by allowing the state to grow it and sell it solely through licensed pharmacies — medical marijuana that now is grown and sold legally to those holding physician-issued cards through myriad dispensaries popping up across the state every day.
Cities are wrestling with what to do about medical-marijuana dispensaries. White saw his bill as cleaning up the confusing mess wrought by Amendment 20, passed by voters in 2000.
The state attorney general’s office called White last week when I wrote of his intentions.
Marijuana, they told him, is still a Schedule 1 controlled substance in Colorado, and the state’s growing it and selling it would be in contravention of federal law. And, they said, federal rules bar pharmacies from dispensing Schedule 1 controlled drugs.
“I guess that is what happens to good ideas,” White lamented. “I was just trying to carry out the will of Colorado voters.”
So pulling the plug on the bill was not at all connected with the heat that came down on him and his proposal?
“I will tell you I heard from a lot of dope smokers who were upset about it, convinced I was trying to screw up their deal, trying to put all dispensaries out of business,” he said. “I think they misunderstood my intent.”
His goal, he said, was to create a reliable supply of medical marijuana while “trying to clean up a perceived underground drug culture that seems to have attached itself to the quite legal medical-marijuana industry in this state.”
He tells of an experiment he ran with a newspaper advertiser, who exhorted readers to come in and get a medical-marijuana card “before they change the law.”
He had his grown son call. The “office visit,” White said, would have cost $275, “and there was made known an expectation of same-day approval, that they would determine some ache or pain, that he would leave that day with a card.”
White said he is fairly certain that was not the intent of Amendment 20.
I asked him if he was done with it all now. He measured his words.
He spoke of being in contact with other state legislators, who he said have their own ideas, many of them centered on state licensing of dispensaries and the people who run them.
But no, he said, he will not participate in any future legislation.
“I had an idea. It didn’t work out. It’s how legislation goes,” White said. “As you start developing ideas farther, you find obstacles you hadn’t anticipated. It happens in this business.”
I have no idea of the ultimate rightness or wrongness of White’s idea. All I do know is that the next person facing charges related to the growing or selling of medical marijuana likely will have wished the senator had succeeded.
Bill Johnson writes Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at 303-954-2763 or wjohnson@denverpost.com.
