GRAND RAPIDS — A medical marijuana caregiver has filed a federal lawsuit after police raided his St. Joseph County home last year.
Police arrested Sean Muntian and his wife, April Armstrong, after raids at their Three Rivers home and business, Triple Ripple Hydroponics. Police seized marijuana and grow equipment, and prompted an investigation by Child Protective Services workers.
Not long after the Jan. 2, 2010 arrests, prosecutors dropped charges, said Southfield attorney Michael Komorn, who specializes in medical-marijuana cases and represented Muntian in the criminal case. He said Monday that police had no interest in Muntian’s status as a medical marijuana caregiver.
In the lawsuit, recently filed in U.S. District Court in Grand Rapids, an attorney for Muntian and Armstrong wrote: “Despite unequivocal rights granted to Mr. Muntian as a licensed caregiver under Michigan law, (police) refused to allow Mr. Muntian to show them proof of his license and the defendants proceeded to seized medicine and equipment in direct violation of the statute.”
Troy attorney Travis Mihelick also alleged the search of their rental home was illegal. The couple’s landlord had reported to police that she detected the odor of burned marijuana in the residence. Using that information, police obtained a search warrant and arrested the couple, the lawsuit said.
Mihelick alleged that police used “extreme force and the threat of deadly force on suspects who were not resisting.”
Both were taken to jail, the attorney said.
“As a result of the illegal search and seizure, Mr. Muntian was forced to close his medical marijuana store and several of his patients were denied access to their prescription medicine.”
The police agencies have not been served with the lawsuit. Three Rivers Police would not comment, while a message left with the St. Joseph County undersheriff was not returned.
The lawsuit alleges unlawful arrest and imprisonment, malicious prosecution, excessive force and illegal search and seizure.
Komorn, the criminal attorney and a board member of the Michigan Medical Marijuana Association, said similar cases have occurred across the state.
He said police should have left Muntian alone after determining he was properly licensed. Instead, he was charged with manufacturing marijuana, possession with intent to deliver and maintaining a drug house.
When arrested, Muntian had state approval as a caregiver but had not received his identification card. Applicants may possess and provide marijuana 20 days after approval, whether or not they have received the card.
Police found about 6 ounces of marijuana in his home, and four large plants and 18 small plants, along with growing supplies, at his shop.
Caregivers are limited to 2.5 ounces of marijuana and 12 plants per patient. Once charges were dropped, Komorn said, Muntian was allowed to retrieve his equipment from the police station. He said the raid, with children in the home, was traumatic.
“Those kinds of images are very hard to shake,” Komorn said.
The investigation by protective services workers only made it worse. Investigators found “no issues there,” he said.
“Medical marijuana patients and caregivers are not bad parents,” he said.
One of the state’s most active medical marijuana specialist attorneys has been honored by the Criminal Defense Attorneys of Michigan (CDAM) with their “Justice For All” Award.
Of the thousands of criminal defense attorneys in Michigan, Komorn’s record of going after the big guy- and winning- propelled him into the top spot.
The award is described by CDAM below:
“The Justice for All award is given to recognize a particular extraordinary contribution of a group of individuals. This contribution can be in the form of legal representation or other extraordinary service.”
Komorn won a dismissal of charges in the Max Lorincz case, which involved a prosecution and removal of a child based on a tiny smear of alleged marijuana concentrate found by law enforcement.
This case, and Komorn Law’s digging into the back story, revealed the scientifically invalid and politically motivated changes in reporting marijuana concentrates as ‘origin unknown’ by the Michigan State Police Crime Lab.
The Lorincz case underscores what Komorn has been fighting for all along: an unyielding pursuit of the truth and exoneration for patients caught in a system designed to capture them.
Although the Lorincz case is the most recent and notable victory for Komorn Law, his other accomplishments stand out as well. Praise for Komorn’s career has been easy to obtain.
Some of Komorn Law’s highlights from 2015 include:
Having the entire Lapeer County Prosecutor’s office tossed off a medical marijuana case for being biased.
Challenging the Michigan State Police Crime Lab as they pervert scientific method to satisfy the political needs of prosecutors
Becoming involved as a Commission Member on the new Marijuana Law Section of the State Bar Association of Michigan
As well as many successful defenses of patients and caregivers registered with the Michigan Medical Marihuana Act (MMMA) in courts across Michigan.
Komorn is joined in his legal efforts by his longtime friend and aide, Chad Carr, who shares in the successes recognized by the Award Committee.
Komorn is also the Executive Director of the Michigan Medical Marijuana Association and the host of a weekly radio talk show dedicated to MMMA patients and the attorneys that represent them. The Planet Green Trees Radio Show has received notoriety nationally; interviews with legislators, scientists and attorneys for the past five years have offered revelations and brought clarity to what can be a very confusing medical marijuana program.
In the case of Max Lorincz, Michael was so moved by the unjust treatment of a man and his family, that he took the case pro-bono.
The Criminal Defense Attorneys have already posted the award notice and the dinner details. CDAM offers this description of their organization on the group’s website :
“Michael Komorn’s zealous advocacy and activism in the field of marijuana law has been impressive and has inspired many lawyers, including myself, to do the same through his accomplished example,” said Barton Morris, also a CDAM member.
“Michael is a pioneer and champion in marijuana law in Michigan.”
A new study adds to the evidence that letting patients use cannabis saves lives by reducing consumption of pharmaceuticals.
Insys Therapeutics, the Arizona-based pharmaceutical company that recently became the biggest financial supporter of the campaign against marijuana legalization in that state, makes an oral spray that delivers the opioid painkiller fentanyl and plans to market another one that contains dronabinol, a synthetic version of THC. Insys says it gave $500,000 to the main group opposing Arizona’s legalization initiative because the measure “fails to protect the safety of Arizona’s citizens, and particularly its children.” But one needn’t be terribly cynical to surmise that Insys also worries about the impact that legalization might have on its bottom line, since marijuana could compete with its products.
A new study suggests Insys has good reason to worry. In an article published last week by the American Journal of Public Health, Columbia University epidemiologist June Kim and her colleagues report that fatally injured drivers are less likely to test positive for opioids in states that allow medical use of marijuana. That finding, together with the results of earlier studies, indicates that making marijuana legally available to patients saves lives by reducing their consumption of more dangerous medications.
Kim et al. collected data from the Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS) for 1999 through 2013, focusing on 18 states that drug-tested at least 80% of drivers who died in crashes. They found that drivers between the ages of 21 and 40 were half as likely to test positive for opioids in states that had implemented medical marijuana laws (MMLs) as in states that had not.
“Among 21-to-40-year-old deceased drivers, crashing in states with an operational MML was associated with lower odds of testing positive for opioids than crashing in MML states before these laws were operational,” the researchers write. “Although we found a significant association only among drivers aged 21 to 40 years, the age specificity of this finding coheres with what we know about MMLs: a minimum age requirement restricts access to medical marijuana for most patients younger than 21 years, and most surveyed medical marijuana patients are younger than 45 years.”
The fact that a driver tested positive for opioids does not necessarily mean the painkillers he took contributed to the crash, so it is not safe to draw any conclusions about medical marijuana’s impact on traffic safety from this study. But the FARS data are an indirect way of measuring the extent of opioid consumption in a given state. Kim et al. note that “severe or chronic pain is among the most common indications cited by medical marijuana patients.” It therefore makes sense that opioid use would decline (or rise less) in states that recognize cannabis as a medicine.
The FARS numbers reinforce the results of another recent study, published last July in the journal Health Affairs, that looked at prescriptions covered by Medicare from 2010 through 2013. Ashley Bradford, a graduate student in public policy at the University of Georgia, and her father, W. David Bradford, an economist at the same school, found that “the use of prescription drugs for which marijuana could serve as a clinical alternative fell significantly once a medical marijuana law was implemented.”
The most dramatic decline was in painkiller prescriptions, which fell by 3,645 daily doses per physician after medical marijuana laws were implemented. There were also statistically significant drops in prescriptions for drugs used to treat seizures (down 1,370 daily doses per doctor), depression (1,280), psychosis (1,123), anxiety (1,106), nausea (1,028), and sleep disorders (615). Meanwhile, Bradford and Bradford “found no changes after implementation of a medical marijuana law in the number of daily doses filled in condition categories with no medical marijuana indication,” which “provides strong evidence that the observed shifts in prescribing patterns were in fact due to the passage of the medical marijuana laws.”
Medicare prescription drug coverage is mainly available to people who are 65 or older, although people receiving federal disability payments also can qualify. Bradford and Bradford note that “previous studies have suggested that Medicare patients may make up a relatively small percentage of people who use medical marijuana and that only 13–27 percent of people who used medical marijuana were ages fifty and older.” But Kim et al.’s analysis of FARS data suggests a similar shift to cannabis from other medications is occurring among 21-to-40-year-olds, who account for the bulk of medical marijuana users.
Other studies indicate that replacing prescription drugs with marijuana reduces opioid-related deaths. A 2014 study reported in JAMA Internal Medicine, based on death certificate data from 1999 through 2010, found that “states with medical cannabis laws had a 24.8% lower mean annual opioid overdose mortality rate…compared with states without medical cannabis laws.” Furthermore, internist Marcus Bachhuber and his co-authors reported, “such laws were associated with a lower rate of overdose mortality that generally strengthened over time,” which makes sense if more patients are switching to marijuana from opioids (or choosing marijuana rather than opioids) each year.
JAMA Internal Medicine
The reduced rate of opioid-related fatalities translated into about 1,700 fewer deaths in 2010 alone. The researchers suggest several possible explanations for this effect. “Patients with chronic noncancer pain who would have otherwise initiated opioid analgesics may choose medical cannabis instead,” Bachhuber et al. write. “In addition, patients already receiving opioid analgesics who start medical cannabis treatment may experience improved analgesia and decrease their opioid dose, thus potentially decreasing their dose-dependent risk of overdose. Finally, if medical cannabis laws lead to decreases in polypharmacy—particularly with benzodiazepines—in people taking opioid analgesics, overdose risk would be decreased.”
That last possibility could be more significant than you might think, since opioid-related deaths typically involve mixtures with other drugs, with benzodiazepines playing a substantial and increasing role. Bradford and Bradford found that medical marijuana laws were associated with decreases in prescriptions for drugs used to treat anxiety and sleep disorders. Benzodiazepines are commonly used for both purposes.
A working paper published last year by the National Bureau of Economic Research confirmed that the legal availability of medical marijuana is associated with a relative decline in opioid-related deaths. RAND Corporation researcher David Powell and two colleagues extended Bachhuber et al.’s analysis by including three more years of data. They also looked at drug treatment admissions related to opioids and found that they became less common in states that implemented medical marijuana laws.
“We find fairly strong evidence…that states providing legal access to marijuana through dispensaries experience lower treatment admissions for addiction to pain medications,” Powell et al. write. “We provide complementary evidence that dispensary provisions also reduced deaths due to opioid overdoses….Our findings suggest that providing broader access to medical marijuana may have the potential benefit of reducing abuse of highly addictive painkillers.” Like Bachhuber et al., they found that the longer medical marijuana was legally available, the bigger the apparent benefit.
Even while sounding the alarm about an “opioid epidemic” that included a record number of painkiller-related deaths in 2014, the federal government insists marijuana has “no currently accepted medical use.” Judging from these studies, its dogmatism may be deadly.
Last night’s episode of VICELAND’s Weediquette focused on how police forces in Michigan are using civil asset forfeiture to target legally run medicinal marijuana businesses in the state.
Weediquette host Krishna Andavolu – about his reflections after filming the episode; an edited and condensed version of his comments are below.
In Michigan, medical marijuana is legal—but last year, arrest rates were on the rise. Why? It seems like marijuana legalization is meant to at least take the drug out of the realm of the criminal justice system, but while doing research for this season of Weediquette, we found out that there’s still a strong incentive for police officers to go after legal marijuana growers in Michigan. The doctrine that the incentive is based off of is called civil asset forfeiture—which means that if a cop busts you, he or she can take your stuff in addition to throwing you in jail and charging you.
Even though medical marijuana growers have cards that say that they’re legally allowed to grow, civil asset forfeiture incentivizes police departments in Michigan to pursue really small technical violations
—For instance, if there’s a lock on a door that isn’t secure enough, or a key to a room in your grow house or dispensary is left on a counter when it should’ve been in a safe space. So law enforcement targets medical marijuana growers, finds enough evidence to justify a raid, takes all the growers’ stuff, and then makes an excuse for it after the fact.
It’s tough for Michigan cops. The state’s economy is pretty bad, and a lot of their police departments aren’t funded particularly well—so the police are using the doctrine of civil asset forfeiture to target mom-and-pop businesses. One of those businesses was run by the Shattucks, a family we visited who decided to go into the medical marijuana business because they saw people using it and thought it would be a good business to try for a couple of years to raise some capital to go into real estate. They were after the American dream, small business ownership.
However, the St. Clair County drug task force got wind of what they were doing, raided their grow facility, dispensary, and home, and took more than $80,000 worth of their goods. Losing the money and goods was bad enough—but their kids were also at home when the SWAT team came through the door, so their nine-year-old daughter is the one who saw the door broken down and men with guns rushing in.
You could look at the Shattucks and say, “I’m sure they were doing something wrong.” But a SWAT team seems like a disproportionate reaction. It’s an issue of how you implement medical marijuana legalization, but also of what we ask for in our community policing. What’s the relationship between those who are being policed and the police themselves? How do you balance making sure that the marketplace is legitimate while also respecting the people who are already operating legitimately in the marketplace? The Shattucks did everything they could to show the cops that they were doing the right thing—they met with the police department and showed the cops all their paperwork—but that didn’t stop the police from going after them two months later.
Another family we talked to, the Fishers, were in a hearing about a similar criminal case against them, and under cross-examination, the police officer who conducted the raid was asked if he questioned the family about whether they had medical marijuana cards—and he said no. There aren’t lawmakers who are trying to crack down on this stuff, so in a lot of cases drug task forces have no legislative oversight, meaning it’s up to individual cases in court to set any sort of precedent.
On Weediquette, we cover a lot of different stories—stories about medicine and recreational drug use—and this story is about how pot has always made it easy for law enforcement to go after vulnerable communities. We’re on a trajectory where medical marijuana and marijuana in general is going to become legal—it feels inevitable and that the war on drugs will also inevitable fade away—but stories like this bring to light that there’s a lot to still fight for.
The nation’s longest-running marijuana legalization rally runs from noon to 2 p.m. on the University of Michigan Diag, followed by the Monroe Street Fair.
Watch the video
Below is the full lineup for the rally:
Matthew Abel, Detroit attorney and executive director of Michigan NORML
Laith Al-Saadi, Ann Arbor musician
Virg Bernero, Lansing mayor
Statement by U.S. Rep. Earl Blumenauer read by Mark Passerini
Sabra Briere, Ann Arbor City Council member
Adam Brook, former Hash Bash organizer
State Rep. Mike Callton, R-Nashville
Tommy Chong, comedian and activist
Scott Cecil, Students for Sensible Drug Policy outreach coordinator
Stacia Cosner, Students for Sensible Drug Policy deputy director
Alyssa Erwin, brain cancer survivor and medical marijuana patient
Dori Edwards, Women Grow
William Federspiel, Saginaw County sheriff
Charmie Gholson, Michigan Moms United
Jeffrey Hank, Michigan Comprehensive Cannabis Law Reform Initiative Committee
State Rep. Jeff Irwin, D-Ann Arbor
Brian Kardell, Students for Sensible Drug Policy at U-M
Michael Komorn, Southfield attorney
Jamie Lowell, co-founder of the 3rd Coast Compassion Center in Ypsilanti
Reid Murdoch, Law Students for Sensible Drug Policy at U-M
Mark Passerini, Ann Arbor Medical Cannabis Guild
Dave Peters, Wayne State School of Medicine doctor
Jim and Erin Powers, parents of pediatric medical cannabis patient Ryan Powers
Chuck Ream, Safer Michigan director
Robin Schneider, National Patients Rights Association legislative liaison
Steve Sharpe, MI HEMP
Dakota Serna, advocate for veterans equality
DJ Short, known as the Willy Wonka of cannabis
John Sinclair, poet and activist
Marvin Surowitz- former professor and founder of the Partie Party
“We want all of our public health efforts aimed at the full community of Flint and that we will do all our work to educate and to provide as many resources as possible to protect the health of children and adults in Flint.” Dr. Eden Wells, chief medical executive MDHHS.”
Eden V. Wells, MD, MPH, FACPM, was appointed as the Chief Medical Executive for the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services in May 2015, and serves Michigan citizens by providing professional medical leadership, expertise and coordination in addressing public health issues, workforce issues, and health policy development to the MDHHS.
Michigan’s medical examiner believes that the 18 percent increase in in children’s blood levels in specific Flint zip codes is not a causal link to the Cities recent switch from Detroit water to Flint River water.
According to Dr. Eden Wells, chief medical executive MDHHS- She cited other possible causes of elevated blood lead levels in children, like lead paint and soil. She does admit however “No matter what the source of lead, all of it should be prevented. There is no safe level of lead.”
Dr. Wells and everyone involved in making the decision to stick with the “safe” Flint River, should have to drink from the same river while the rest of Flint is doing the same.
Dr. Eden Wells, chief medical executive MDHHS, as the chair of the new conditions for the Medical Marihuana Program panel, was one of two no votes, against four in favor of approving autism as a condition by which cannabis can be recommended.
