March 18, 2010
Marijuana studies renew attention for acclaimed documentary
The widely anticipated results last month of an $8.7 million California study into the potential benefits of marijuana has given new life – and relevance – to a powerful documentary on the medical cannabis movement in California.

Jed Riffe’s award-winning 2006 documentary, Waiting to Exhale, includes extensive footage of the first clinical study of medical marijuana users since the 1970s. It features Dr. Donald Abrams, the chief of oncology at San Francisco General Hospital and professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco.

Abrams conducted state and federally funded research that showed marijuana to be beneficial for patients with HIV and for pain from nerve damage. His research was part of the state-funded studies by the Center for Medical Cannabis Research at UC San Diego that supported marijuana’s effectiveness for chronic pain.

Though the documentary was produced before the explosion of medical marijuana dispensaries and cannabis physicians’ clinics in California, Waiting to Inhale stands as an essential primer to understanding the social, political, legal and medical forces behind California’s current marijuana debate. It will soon be getting an encore, with upcoming showings due on Dish Network and Free Speech TV.

Read more: http://www.sacbee.com/static/weblogs/weed-wars/2010/03/marijuana-studies-renew-attention-for-acclaimed-documentary.html#ixzz0iYLrOjmO

A move to impose a moratorium on medical marijuana failed Thursday night when Livingston City Council members Rodrigo Espinoza and Margarita Aguilar were no-shows.

An emergency ordinance for the moratorium required four of five council votes to pass. With the absences of Espinoza and Aguilar, only three were present – Mayor Daniel Varela, Mayor Pro Tem Frank Vierra and Councilmember Martha Nateras.

Due to the absences, the item was dropped from the agenda, Katherine Schell reported in live Twitter coverage of the meeting. Schell is editor of Thegardeningsnail blog.

Mike Sperry Jr., owner of Mike’s Cozy Corner tavern in rural Livingston, had approached city staff asking what the procedure is for obtaining a permit for selling medical marijuana at his business establishment.

This set in motion a city staff report to the city council outlining City Hall’s opposition to sales of medical marijuana and encouraging the council to take emergency action to stop it.

“Cities that have permitted the establishment of medical marijuana dispensaries have witnessed an increase in crime, such as burglaries, robberies and sales of illegal drugs in the areas
immediately surrounding such dispensaries,” Assistant City Attorney Jeffrey L. Massey wrote in a memorandum to the council.

“Under federal law,” Massey wrote, the United States Controlled Substances Act classifies marijuana as a Schedule 1 drug, meaning it has no accepted medical use. Indeed, the Controlled Substances Act was enforced by the Justice Department against medical marijuana users, growers, etc. until the beginning of 2009.

“In February 2009, however, the United States Attorney General announced that the Justice Department would no longer raid medical marijuana growers and dispensaries. This led to rapid increase in the number of medical marijuana dispensaries operated throughout California.”

The three council members present did not indicate when the issue may be considered again.

(Rancho Cordova, CA) — California-based Statewide Insurance Services has instituted what it calls the first insurance coverage designed for the medical marijuana industry.

According to the “Sacramento Bee,” the coverage includes medical marijuana dispensaries, operations of marijuana growing, general liability, workers’ compensation and even pot spoilage.

Mike Aberle, the company’s national director of its Medical Marijuana Specialty Division, said premiums start around 650 dollars annually and go up to 25-thousand a year.

Typical policies are in the one-thousand-to-four-thousand-dollar range.

Statewide Insurance Services provides medical marijuana industry insurance to customers in California, New Mexico, Colorado and Rhode Island.

Americans for Safe Access says City Atty. Carmen Trutanich is misreading California law and court decisions, but he has not budged on his legal assault over sales at dispensaries.The nation’s main advocacy group for medical marijuana threatened Tuesday to challenge Los Angeles City Atty. Carmen Trutanich’s legal assault on dispensaries, saying it is “unlawful, unconstitutional, and contravenes the spirit and letter of the governing laws.”

The city prosecutor’s office filed three lawsuits last week seeking court injunctions to force Organica in the Venice area and two Holistic Caregivers stores in South Los Angeles to stop all sales. Trutanich maintains that state law authorizes collectives only to grow marijuana and recover their actual costs, not to sell it.

Americans for Safe Access, which advocates for the use of medical marijuana and has defended dispensaries in court, has tried repeatedly to persuade the city prosecutor that he is misreading the law and recent court decisions, but he has not budged.

The organization’s chief counsel, Joseph D. Elford, sent letters to Trutanich and Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley, who shares Trutanich’s view, saying the advocacy group would join the lawsuits unless they are withdrawn.

“We want to let Trutanich and Cooley know we’re not just going to sit this one out,” he said.

The organization’s decision increases the likelihood that Los Angeles, the ground zero of the state’s dizzying dispensary boom, also will become the center of litigation that clarifies murky issues.

Voters passed the state’s medical marijuana initiative in 1996 and the Legislature adopted a law to expand access in 2003, but the courts still have not ruled directly on whether collectives can sell marijuana to their members.

William W. Carter, the chief deputy city attorney, said he had not seen the letter.

“I’ve read their press release, and I am not impressed,” he said. “We obviously don’t agree with their position. We are enforcing the existing local and state laws just as we’ve been doing for a long time.”

Carter said the city attorney’s office had no intention of withdrawing the lawsuits, noting that it has already won an injunction barring one dispensary from selling marijuana in a similar case and is confident in its legal position.

Trutanich and Cooley have pressed cases that could force the courts to weigh in. Trutanich sued Hemp Factory V, an Eagle Rock dispensary, and his lawyers persuaded a Superior Court judge to take their side. Elford said he learned about the case too late to intervene before the decision.

Cooley’s office has filed felony charges against dispensary operators, saying their sales violate state laws.

On Monday, prosecutors charged Jeff Joseph, the operator of Organica, with 24 felonies.

Elford also accused the two prosecutors of taking preemptive action before the city’s medical marijuana ordinance takes effect. “They fought us tooth and nail with the City Council,” he said. “They’re not happy with the result.”

Trutanich and Cooley had pressed the council to explicitly ban sales, but lawmakers rebuffed them.

Pointing out that the city attorney’s office filed its lawsuit against Hemp Factory V months before the council approved the ordinance, Carter dismissed Elford’s contention, saying, “We were fully engaged.”

john.hoeffel@latimes.com
Copyright © 2010, The Los Angeles Times

LOS ANGELES, Feb. 23 (UPI) — A California medical marijuana dispensary owner faces drug charges and a bond amount of $520,000, the owner’s lawyer said.

Jeff Joseph, the owner of Organica, a Los Angeles dispensary, was charged Monday with 24 felonies that included possessing, selling and transporting marijuana, and is being held in custody, the Los Angeles Times reported Monday.

Joseph’s attorney, Eric Shevin, said the bail, which was five times the amount requested, was outrageous and politically driven, as there has been community pressure to close the hundreds of dispensaries that have sprung up throughout the city. Shevin said Joseph’s is being used as a high-profile test case.

“There have been dozens of cases that the office has filed. We’re going to evaluate every case differently,” said Joseph Esposito, head of the Los Angeles district attorney’s major narcotics division.

State law permits collectives to grow marijuana and be reimbursed for costs, but not to sell it. The Times said marijuana sales from dispensaries are commonplace.

In court Monday, prosecutor John Harlan said Organica is “an illegal drug-dealing operation” that occasionally made a monthly profit of more than $100,000, prosecutor John Harlan told the court.

“He is an ongoing threat to the community,” Harlan said.

Marijuana helps ease muscle spasms caused by multiple sclerosis and pain caused by certain neurological illnesses or spinal cord injuries, says a report released Wednesday by the Center for Medicinal Cannabis Research at the University of California, San Diego.

The document includes the findings of five studies that included participants who were randomly selected to receive either marijuana or placebos, the Associated Press reported.

“There is good evidence now that cannabinoids may be either an adjunct or a first-line treatment,” psychiatrist Igor Grant, the director of the research center, said at a press conference where he presented the study results.

The California Legislature created the center in 2000 to investigate claims about the effectiveness of medical marijuana. California is the only state to sponsor such research, the AP reported.

As an $8.7-million state research effort comes to an end, investigators report that cannabis can significantly relieve neuropathic pain and reduce muscle spasms in MS patients. More research is urged.

With an innovative but little-known state program to study medical marijuana about to run out of money, researchers and political supporters said Wednesday the results show promise.

“It should take all the mystery out of whether it works. We’ve got the results,” said former state Sen. John Vasconcellos, who led the effort to create the 10-year-old Center for Medicinal Cannabis Research.

The center has nearly spent its $8.7-million allocation, sponsoring 14 studies at UC campuses, including the first clinical trials of smoked marijuana in the United States in more than two decades.

Much of the research is still underway or under review, but five studies have been published in scientific journals. Four showed that cannabis can significantly relieve neuropathic pain and one found that vaporizers are an effective way to use marijuana. Another study, submitted for publication, found that marijuana can reduce muscle spasms in multiple sclerosis patients.

Dr. Igor Grant, a neuropsychiatrist at UC San Diego who is the center’s director, called the pain studies “pretty convincing” and urged the federal government to pay for additional clinical studies.

With the state stuck in a daunting budget crisis, even the center’s advocates do not expect more support. “There is no state money at this time, unfortunately,” said state Sen. Mark Leno (D-San Francisco).

Since the center opened in 2000, medical marijuana use has spread rapidly in California, driven largely by doctors’ willingness to recommend it for a wide range of ailments. But little research has been done on its effectiveness, in part because researchers must win approval from federal agencies, including the Drug Enforcement Administration.

Grant said federal officials did not try to thwart the research, but noted that approval typically took 18 months. “We basically did a lot of the work for investigators in terms of jumping through the hoops,” he said.

The unusual scientific program, approved by the Legislature in 1999, was the result of negotiations between Vasconcellos and former Atty. Gen. Dan Lungren. The two were vigorous adversaries in the contentious debate over the 1996 initiative that approved the use of medical marijuana.

Lungren, now a Republican congressman from Gold River, argued that Californians were moving ahead without the research needed to show whether marijuana was useful as a medicine. “I said at that time, if we had scientific evidence, we ought to be guided by scientific evidence,” he said.

“I was shrewd enough to pick up on Lungren’s ‘Let’s do research,’ ” Vasconcellos said. Lungren said he was shrewd enough to accept.

Lungren said the results are helpful, but underscore that medical marijuana should be more tightly controlled and used only where it has been proven effective.

The center funded a range of research, including six studies of whether marijuana reduces neuropathic pain, which is caused by a damaged or abnormally functioning nervous system. A UC San Francisco study of patients with HIV-related pain found that 52% of those who smoked marijuana experienced significant relief.

“I think that clearly cannabis has benefits,” said Dr. Donald I. Abrams, a San Francisco oncologist who led that study. “This substance has been a medicine for 2,700 years; it only hasn’t been a medicine for 70.”

Abrams doubts that the research will alter the debate over marijuana. “Science has not been driving this train for a long time now. I think it’s all politics,” he said.

Grant was more optimistic: “We have a different administration, and they are looking at the science basis of many things.”

He said the research shows marijuana should no longer be classified as a Schedule I drug. “It is not a drug without value,” he said.

john.hoeffel@latimes.com

FRISCO — A lively public discussion on medical marijuana recently reflected the belief that, regardless of personal opinion, society is becoming more accepting of the drug — and statewide legalization is no pipe dream.

“We kind of follow the trends of the state of California,” Summit County Sheriff John Minor said.

California has a ballot initiative to legalize recreational marijuana set for this fall. Minor said that if it passes, Colorado could follow.

About 35 local residents including doctors, marijuana dispensary owners, law enforcement and more attended Thursday’s Our Future Summit roundtable conversation on medical marijuana at the Summit County Community and Senior Center in Frisco.

Topics ranged from regulation of medical marijuana to the drug’s history and societal norms.

Susan Westhof with Summit Prevention Alliance — a community organization that promotes health and preventing drug abuse — said the community should consider the effect marijuana’s public acceptance has on children.

She said she asked some kids how they would describe the community and they replied, “Potheads.”

“Of course they want to make pot legal because it gets you high. It’s fun. Kids were saying ‘Go Breckenridge…’” she said of the town of Breckenridge’s marijuana decriminalization.

Others said marijuana is hurting the tourism-based community’s reputation.

Jerry Olson, owner of Medical Marijuana of the Rockies in Frisco, said the new law could attract “families friendly in the cannabis concept.”

Another dispensary owner said it’s the responsibility of parents as well as the community to teach kids about drugs.

Regulating a psychoactive plant as medicine

Though the Colorado General Assembly is drafting legislation to regulate medical marijuana, Minor said the highly restrictive, dispensary-closing regulations law enforcement recommended won’t likely be approved.

He said that as an example of changes in “societal norms,” there was once a policy that if a person had ever used illegal drugs, he or she couldn’t be a cop.

“Now we’re asking people if they haven’t done it in the past two years to not do it,” Minor said.

The Sheriff’s Office has dealt with a mess of complications since medical marijuana began to proliferate — such as wasting taxpayer dollars investigating grow operations that turned out to be legal. There’s also the issue of dispensaries buying product from the black market.

“I’m a big believer in the will of the people just like most of the people in this room,” Minor said. “But we’ve got to have some rules.”

Some doctors find the lack of regulation troubling as well.

Dr. David Gray, a local physician, said the it’s difficult to identify the definition of “severe pain” as a medical-marijuana-worthy condition.

“It’s hard to say (to a patient), ‘Your pain is not severe,’” he said.

Gray said that while a young person may feel severe pain from a cut on the head, there are war veterans who could keep stoic with a broken leg.

He also said it’s unusual for a physician to “recommend” rather than “prescribe” a drug, as medical marijuana patients need only a doctor’s recommendation.

Olson said that language is used to protect doctors from federal prosecution.

“It’s federally illegal to prescribe a schedule I drug,” he said.

Effects on the ill and black-market villains

Thursday’s discussion included a few testimonies to the drug’s potential benefits as an alternative to pills.

One woman said that when she first moved to the county, she saw it as a “very druggie society,” but with alcohol even more widely promoted.

She said that when her husband became ill last fall, he was given a recommendation for medical marijuana.

“It was such a comfort for him,” she said, becoming tearful as she added that he died in November.

Howard Hallman, the discussion’s mediator, took two polls of the people in the room.

When he asked whether anybody would prefer no dispensaries in the county, nobody raised a hand. One woman said she didn’t want people dispensing marijuana on her residential block.

When Hallman asked whether people agree regulations are needed, nearly everyone raised hands.

Regarding marijuana prohibition, Frisco resident and former mayor Bernie Zurbriggen said the black market is dangerous.

“If there’s a villain, it’s the drug dealer,” he said. “He doesn’t care if you’re sick or well. He’s got other stuff in his back pocket that’s more expensive and more addictive … If we legalize, this state would get well economically. It would be almost overnight.”

Officials squeamish over medical marijuana
BY COLIN RIGLEY

New medical marijuana operations proposed in the Nipomo area have SLO county officials scrambling to their legal books in a move that could kill the prospect of a local dispensary once and for all.

Every incorporated city within the county boasts either a temporary or permanent ban on dispensaries, leaving only the unincorporated areas open to applicants. An existing county ordinance allows dispensaries in commercial areas, provided they’re not near schools, youth centers, and the like.

Following an application for a new dispensary proposed by Los Angeles resident Robert D. Brody, Supervisor Katcho Achadjian and other county officials asked legal representatives to tweak the current ordinance to bring it in line with the ever-evolving guidelines on medical marijuana. Specifically, county officials want to make sure they’re OK under the guidelines provided in August 2008 by California Attorney General Jerry Brown, Deputy County Counsel Tim McNulty said. According to McNulty, the county needs to analyze its definition of what a dispensary is against Brown’s definition.

Though there’s been a lot of movement on medical marijuana since Brown weighed in nearly two years ago (U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder told federal drug officials to cease raids on legally operating dispensaries, new California legislation could make marijuana completely legal, and the state Supreme Court removed limits on how much marijuana a patient can possess), Brown’s guidelines say medical marijuana is illegal when sold from a dispensary for profit. By that same definition, medical marijuana is legal only when distributed through a collective or cooperative.

McNulty said SLO County’s ordinance basically defines a dispensary as a storefront, but noted there may be some revisions to close up any loopholes that would allow illegal medical marijuana operations as defined by Brown.

For now the bit of legalese is merely an administrative memo. But based on what county staffers find, county supervisors could ask for an official ordinance amendment. Because the Nipomo medical marijuana operations fall under conditional use permit procedures, if the county changes its ordinance, it could retroactively affect pending applications, McNulty said.

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