This article was originally published on the Marijuana Patients Organization site on April 16, 2013.
Imagine that you owned a retail store. For the purpose of example, let’s say a grocery store. Let’s assume a new regulation has been passed, let’s say some sort of environmental regulation regarding recycling of waste. Now let’s further assume the language in the statute is not precise and that the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality is having trouble figuring out how to enact the law. What reaction would you expect if it could not be determined whether or not the grocery was in compliance?
Most likely, the grocery store would continue to operate unaffected throughout the rule making process. At the very worst, the store might be subjected to fines for not properly recycling waste, something it would most likely appeal once formal procedures were in place. The last thing one would expect would be for police to raid the grocery store, arrest its patrons, and pocket any cash in the register. After all, even when liquor stores are consistently caught selling to underage patrons, the worst that happens is the store looses its license, but this only occurs after a series of hearings to ensure due process.
Yet, heavy-handed, ramboesque tactics are what the State of Michigan feels is the appropriate response to deal with lack of clarity which currently exists in the state’s medicinal marijuana laws. Rather than allowing the state agencies in charge of medicinal marijuana to do what they have been legislatively empowered to do, create rules governing marijuana’s use, police have determined a better approach is to bring in SWAT teams, take menacing cancer patients and dispensary employees into custody, and bring them before judges, so the criminal justice system can determine their legal status. Rather than letting the system create rules, the police are turning criminal judges into defacto legislators. For a group that normally condemns judicial activism, this is one heck of a reversal.
Certainly, this is not what Michigan voters had in mind when they overwhelmingly passed the medicinal marijuana act over four years ago. While most certainly expected there would be some growing pains, no one thought the state would use police action as a substitute for democratic process. This is something one would expect from a place like North Korea , not a state that bills itself as a center of innovation. If the State of Michigan can’t get something this simple right, recall 18 states and the District of Columbia that have enacted similar statutes without issue, why would any firm working with new technology trust the state to regulate it in a manner that allows it to be successful?
Michigan ’s citizens are not asking for much. They simply want their legislators to create a way for sick people to legally gain access to a potentially helpful medication. After four and a half years of waiting, such a system is still not in place. The solution to this problem lies in the legislative, not the law enforcement arena. Its time for lawmakers to step up to the plate, do their job, and make this happen or instruct law enforcement to stand down.
[box ]Ryan Richmond is a commercial real estate professional and director of the Medical Marijuana Dispensary Association (dispensaryassociation.org), a network of Michigan dispensary and caregiving operations.[/box]