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New Dispensary Restrictions Not Surprising Many

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Jan 12, 2010 3:32 pm US/Mountain

New Dispensary Restrictions Not Surprising Many

Good Question: How does it all work?

Written by Alan Gionet

Reporting
Alan Gionet
DENVER (CBS4) ― The Denver City Council's move Monday night to put new restrictions on medical marijuana operations begins to push back on a door flung wide open in recent months.

For people watching the dispensaries come to outnumber Starbucks in Colorado, it's not surprising.

"There aren't any rules," observed one woman. "It's getting out of hand," said one man, while a friend said, "What's the difference between opening a Walgreens and a medical marijuana shop? They both have medicine for the people."

That's where the difficulties start for lawmakers. If you want the history of medical marijuana in Colorado, you can go back to 2000 when voters approved Amendment 20, allowing its use. But the state Board of Health set a standard that no medical marijuana caregiver -- a term for people who provide pot, could care for more than five people.

"For eight years we had a total of 1,500 people on the registry," said Colorado Attorney General John Suthers. "Fifty-five percent of people said they grew their own, 35 percent had a caretaker."

That limit of five was thrown out by a judge in Denver when it was challenged in court. In July of 2009, the board held a packed meeting at the Auraria campus in which supporters and detractors advocated new limits on the number of patients or called for none. None won. The board did not approve any new limits on the number of people a caregiver could oversee. That opened the floodgates. Entrepreneurs stepped in seeing the potential to be caregivers for hundreds, maybe thousands. There was profit to be made.

Now CBS4 viewers wonder why medical marijuana is not treated like a prescription.

"Why is it not dispensed in a pharmacy with other controlled medications?" wondered Mary in Fort Collins. And, "Where do these places get their pot from? Is that part of the business legal too?" wondered Rob in Thornton.

The jury's certainly out on the legality surrounding much of the medical marijuana issue.

"Now these dispensaries are calling themselves caregivers and presumably they're claiming a relationship with the grow operation that 'we're all in this together and we're a caregiver for these patients,'" said Suthers.

Marijuana shop operators say they buy from vendors who have caregiver licenses. As for the involvement of pharmacies, that is prohibited.

"You can't go to a pharmacy because, a pharmacy, it would be illegal for them to provide marijuana," said Suthers. "It's a Schedule 1 controlled substance in violation of federal law."

Suthers doesn't miss the irony.

"What I find incredibly ironic is that some people want to create a state bureaucracy to regulate dispensaries and have a state bureaucracy within the Department of Revenue regulating, and in some sense promoting an activity in violation of federal law."

(© MMX CBS Television Stations, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.)

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