A COLUMN BY JOHN SINCLAIR
Hi everybody, welcome back to FREE THE WEED and the MMReport after a month off so that our editor, Matt Gervais, could recover from a serious medical problem that took him out of the office for a few weeks. He’s doing better now and we’re back in the saddle again.
The big news in Michigan this month is that the right-wing anti-marijuana conspiracy is making its long-awaited move to negate the people’s law instituted by popular vote in 2008 specifying that medical marijuana patients could legally obtain their medicine from properly licensed caregivers, each of whom could provide up to five patients at the rate of 12 plants per person and additionally grow another 12 plants for their own medicinal use
Under current legislation, caregivers are allowed to provide marijuana products to their patients without being subject to the same licensing fees or regulations as larger marijuana companies. This means that right now caregivers are allowed to grow up to 72 marijuana plants under the law, a program that has worked very well since the Michigan’s Medical Marijuana Act passed in 2008.
But the legislation introduced in September would, among other things, limit medical marijuana caregivers to one patient each and require caregivers seeking to care for more than just one to become licensed as a specialty medical grower.
The proposed legislation has exposed long-simmering tensions between one of the last remaining unregulated segments of Michigan’s medical marijuana movement and the newer, more regulated and better-financed recreational pot industry.
Protesters gathered at the state Capitol in mid-September to oppose bipartisan legislation that would require medical marijuana caregivers to become licensed or give up 80% of their patients, Beth LeBlanc writes in The Detroit News.
The bipartisan team of lawmakers who introduced the legislation, which would take effect in March 2022, said it would help promote “tested, tracked and labeled cannabis products” for Michigan residents.
But, Ms.LeBlanc reports, protesters argued in Lansing that the bills set out unrealistic hurdles for caregivers to become licensed and ultimately would push patients out of the system they were familiar with and into the state’s regulated recreational market. They blamed big, out-of-state cultivators—specifically the Michigan Cannabis Manufacturers Association (MCMA)—for lobbying lawmakers.
“There are 30,000 caregivers in Michigan, and they service about 72,000 patients,” said Rick Thompson, the new executive director for Michigan NORML. (Congratulations, Rick!) “If you take a lot of people away from those caregivers, that’s going to push a lot of people into the regulated market.”
Thompson argued caregivers wouldn’t be able to comply with testing, tracking or labeling requirements currently required of businesses with much more capital than a small care-giving service. The application alone would cost $500 and a license would only last a year, LeBlanc reports.
Ryan Bringold of Waterford Township, who helped to organize Wednesday’s protest, said caregivers “feel like they’re under attack” by big businesses like those that are part of the MCMA. “They’re taking away our ability to be good caregivers. A system that we created at the grassroots is now being taken away from us by people with money that are not from Michigan.”
“The relationships that are built between caregivers and patients are a special bond of trust,” he added. “We cater to what our patients need—the strains, the potency, the flavors—and we do that because we want to help them. We care about them.”
Michigan caregivers said that marijuana often takes the place of highly addictive opioids or other heavy-duty medications. But the Michigan Cannabis Manufacturers Association (MCMA) has adopted the phony issue of product purity to support their reactionary stance.
“Two-thirds of the marketplace is this illicit gray market where the product is not being tested, it’s not being labeled. It’s not being tracked or potentially taxed to some level and we want to make sure that the products that are consumed are ones that have been tested,” said Shelly Edgerton, board chair for MCMA, which includes some of the largest commercial growers in the state.
The legislation would also prohibit the use of flammable solvents in creating cannabis concentrates, a practice that is largely commonplace, Thompson said. And it allows the Marijuana Regulatory Agency to disclose the addresses of primary caregivers or licensed specialty medical growers to law enforcement.
Lawmakers said Tuesday the legislation’s requirements were necessary to secure safe cannabis for Michigan residents.
Lobbyists for MCMA are arguing that the state should reduce the number of cannabis plants a caregiver can grow. Caregivers and their advocates and patients hold that there should be no changes to the current laws.
“I’ve been providing patients medicines, safe medicine here, legal medicine in the state of Michigan for eight years,” says my friend and colleague Debra Young, a caregiver with five patients. “Where are the rest of my patients supposed to go? Dispensary prices are unbelievably high, and patients can’t afford this. What’s going to happen is caregivers are going to be forced underground and it’s going to turn us into criminals again,” Young said.
“In Michigan, it’s legal for medical marijuana and for recreational marijuana,” she concludes, “We want no changes to the law.”
But Edgerton says the argument comes down to safety. “I think Michigan Caregivers United would agree that we’re all about the safety for our patients,” she said.
Horseshit! What MCMA cares about is strictly the amount of profits their members can scrounge from selling marijuana to Michigan patients and recreational smokers.
Wanna know how much is at stake? Chris Casacchia reports that a recent “one billion dollar bust” on the outskirts of Los Angeles County in August unearthed the vast scope of California’s underground marijuana market.
The big bust led to 131 arrests and the seizure of 33,480 pounds of harvested marijuana, 65 vehicles, 33 firearms and $28,000 in cash, as a result in part of the deployment of more than 400 personnel from local and federal agencies.
California marijuana industry experts doubt the illicit market will dissipate anytime soon. That prospect continues to haunt the state’s legal market, where businesses struggle to compete with underground operators who don’t face local and state taxes as well as regulatory red tape. That, in turn, allows the illicit growers and retailers to peddle their merchandise at lower price.
Legalization didn’t bring with it widespread business opportunities only for those willing to follow the law. Rather, it created arguably a newer and stronger illicit market. To wit: Casacchia asserts that annual sales in California’s illicit market have ballooned to $8 billion in the past five years.
Happily, the L.A. District Attorney’s Office, as of August 24, had filed only misdemeanor cultivation charges related to the Antelope Valley raid. “Our office has not been presented with any felony cases arising from these arrests,” spokesman Greg Risling told Casacchia.
As one of the originators of Mchigan’s marijuana legalization movement and a participant in the struggles of the present century which have resulted in the legalization of both medical and recreational marijuana use in our state, I can assure you that what the proponents of legalization have always had in mind is that marijuana should be available on a legal basis to anyone who wants to smoke it, wherever they wish, in whatever quantities they can afford to possess.
We legalized marijuana in Michigan through the citizens’ initiative process wherein the proponents of our position wrote the new laws that had to be adopted by the State Legislature. The caregiver system outlined above was the whole of the medical marijuana law, with no provision for dispensaries or other public outlets where people could cop legally.
The recreational legalization statute passed by ballot initiative in 2018 is somewhat more complicated, but nowhere do the voters say that one should pay the State a $60,000 application fee or any other excessive and even scandalous fees and taxes in order to grow and transfer marijuana through retail sales to the recreational consumer.
Leave the medical patient and the recreational smoker alone! ¬FREE THE WEED!
