Was That Colorado Pot Grower Complying With State Law? Does It Matter?
Was That Colorado Pot Grower Complying With State Law? Does It Matter?
Posted by Raymond on February 19, 2010
From Reason.com:
Yesterday Radley Balko noted that on Friday the Drug Enforcement Administration busted Chris Bartkowicz, a medical marijuana grower in Highlands Ranch, Colorado, despite the Justice Department’s announcement that it would stop prosecuting such individuals if they are complying with state law. Did Bartkowicz’s operation comply with state law? The short answer is “probably,” at least as the law is currently understood. But that is not good enough to qualify him for the Justice Department’s newfound tolerance, which applies only to “individuals whose actions are in clear and unambiguous compliance with existing state laws providing for the medical use of marijuana.”
Colorado’s law, like California’s, allows patients or their “primary caregivers” to grow and possess marijuana for medical use. The general limit is two ounces of pot and six plants per patient at any given time. The law defines a “primary caregiver” as “a person, other than the patient and the patient’s physician, who is eighteen years of age or older and has significant responsibility for managing the well-being of a patient who has a debilitating medical condition.” Prior to his arrest, the Denver Post reports, Bartkowicz told a local TV station “a number of medical-marijuana patients” had designated him as their primary caregiver, a status that would allow him to grow six plants per patient. In 2008 the California Supreme Court rejected this sort of argument, once favored by marijuana dispensaries in that state; it ruled that a primary caregiver’s involvement in a patient’s life has to go beyond supplying him with pot. But it appears the Colorado courts have not followed suit. Westword reports that the Colorado Board of Health is considering new regulations that, among other things, would “require caregivers to offer additional services to their patients besides providing them with pot” and impose “a five-patient-per-caregiver limit.” In other words, those restrictions do not currently apply, so Bartkowicz’s defense could very well be successful in state court.
[Read more at Reason.com]
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