Statistical Report with Program Information and Financial Data For Fiscal Year 2016
(Pursuant to MCL 333.26426 (i) (1), (2), (3), (4) and (5) and Section 507 of Public Act 268 of 2016)
December 22, 2016
(l) The amount collected from the medical marihuana program application and renewal fees authorized in section 5 of the Michigan medical marihuana act, 2008 IL 1, MCL 333.26425.
$9,841,058.49
(m) The costs of administering the medical marihuana program under the Michigan medical marihuana act, 2008 IL 1, MCL 333.26421 to 333.26430.
His lawyers say he’s the innocent victim of illegal search and seizure aimed at medical-marijuana users. Police and prosecutors beg to differ
Donny Barnes said he just wants to be a regular guy.
He just wants to run his small businesses scattered around Oakland County. Just wants to hang out with his family at their split-level home on a woodsy street. And just wants to keep using medical marijuana for calming the neck and shoulder pain that Barnes said has plagued him ever since he was in a snowboarding accident at age 19.
But a drug bust in 2014 “turned my life upside down,” said Barnes, 41, of Orion Township. Police seized his property, shutting down his antique resale and spyware businesses, and charged him with possessing more than 100 pounds of marijuana, which Barnes and his lawyers argued didn’t belong to him.
This month, after two years of legal battles, Barnes’ lawyers claimed what they called a rare victory against the Oakland County Prosecutor’s Office, widely known for its aggressive prosecutions of medical-marijuana cases; and against the confiscatory tactics of OAKNET, the county’s much-feared Narcotics Enforcement Team.
Oakland Circuit Judge Denise Langford Morris dismissed a criminal charge against Barnes — marijuana possession with intent to distribute — and she ruled that police had failed to establish probable cause for raiding Barnes’ house, his office and warehouse.
Ecstatic at the ruling early this month, Barnes’ lawyers said it was a sign that times are changing — that a Michigan judge, even in such a conservative bastion as Oakland County, refused to continue waging the discredited war on drugs against one of Michigan’s medical marijuana users.
Yet, Oakland County law-enforcement officials said Barnes merely got lucky with a lenient judge and that, on appeal, the tables would be turned.
A county sheriff’s spokesman said that detectives had indisputable evidence of Barnes having been a big-time marijuana dealer, one who’d tried to hide his illegal activity under the cloak of medical marijuana while overseeing the sale of plastic baggies of marijuana to total strangers — a violation of the state law that allows “transfers” of the medicinal drug but only from a state-registered “caregiver” to that person’s five registered “patients.”
The spokesman said that nothing about the ruling would change the tactics of Oakland County’s drug investigators. And the prosecutor’s office said it decided last week to appeal.
The outcome of the appeal could decide not only Barnes’ fate but also whether his case becomes a landmark ruling that aids others in similar circumstances.
It will be argued in a year when Michigan could pivot toward more tolerance of the drug, or the state could adopt even tighter restraints under a Trump administration whose top law enforcer is the notoriously anti-marijuana Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
And the appeal will occur in a year that began with Gov. Rick Snyder signing a bill that gives limited protections to citizens facing civil forfeiture; they no longer must pay a bond of 10% of the value of their seized property to challenge the forfeiture in court. When Snyder signed the bill in early January, both sides of the political spectrum in Michigan — both the conservative/Libertarian Mackinac Center for Public Policy and the liberal American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan — called for more protections.
Outside Michigan, in 12 other states, law enforcement must get a criminal conviction before a suspect forfeits property, and in two states — New Mexico and Nebraska — civil forfeiture is altogether banned, Jarrett Skorup, spokesman for the Mackinac Center, said in the news release.
It was late November 2014 when police shook up what Barnes said was his tranquil lifestyle.
“They even took the Christmas presents I had wrapped for my kids,” Barnes said.
Heavily armed police in masks seized his family’s cars as well as the business computers, tools and considerable inventory of his several trades, and took the contents of several bank accounts including one belonging to his mother. That scenario is a familiar one around Michigan, and especially in Oakland County, where authorities are notorious among marijuana users for being merciless to those accused of skirting Michigan’s medical marijuana act.
Countless defendants in such cases, lacking the money to mount aggressive legal defenses, have been forced to plea bargain, to give up their possessions and accept jail or prison sentences as well as pay fines said David Moffitt a Bingham Farms lawyer.
One of two attorneys defending Barnes. Because his family “has significant resources,” Barnes was able to fight back and win the dismissal, Moffitt said.
This ruling “sends a strong message that in appropriate procedures on the part of police and prosecutors will result in dismissal. To have an Oakland County judge dismiss search warrants for faulty procedures is a game-changer in the state because everyone looks at Oakland County for their legal leadership on key issues.
“What this judge said was that you can’t just kick down doors and seize people’s property without having good reason to do so,” he said.
The same judge, after reviewing a lengthy brief submitted by Barnes’ attorneys, allowed him in a ruling last fall to use medical marijuana while out on bond “for a very demonstrable medical need,” instead of the opioid painkilling pills that caused him dangerous side effects, Moffitt said.
Getting a judge’s approval to use the drug as a bond condition is rare enough, but Moffitt said he was thrilled that Langford Morris wrote a detailed opinion justifying her circuit court ruling, making it precedent-setting for the state, he said.
One strikingly unfair tactic of Oakland County authorities is to arrest a medical-marijuana user, seize property “and then not even file charges if the defendant doesn’t contest the forfeiture — that’s become a standard approach there,” Moffitt added. Barnes wasn’t arrested until 14 months after the raids, seemingly not until he “aggressively challenged and contested the forfeiture case” in a civil case completely separate from his criminal case, his lawyer said.
“Both Mr. Barnes and I believe that the Oakland County sheriff’s department is protecting us every day, but I think they must agree that not everything they do is done perfectly in every case, and this is one of those cases,” said Moffitt, who is a former Oakland County commissioner from Farmington Hills.
Medical-marijuana cases can be complex, said Oakland County Undersheriff Mike McCabe. And so, there was nothing odd or unfair about how long detectives took to investigate before Barnes was arrested, he said. “With the sensitivity of these cases, the prosecutor goes over them with a fine-tooth comb” before approving arrest warrants, he said.
The sheriff’s and prosecutor’s offices have taken strong and specific issue with the dismissal of charges against Barnes. Among his small-business activities was a monthly free magazine called The Burn, whose masthead listed as publisher “Donald Barnes III.” Each edition was loaded with full-color ads, the most prominent ones being those for Metro Detroit Compassion Club, a facility open six days a week at the same address in Waterford Township as Barnes’ magazine
.
Among the come-ones for the Metro Detroit Compassion Club? “All meds locally grown … Providing our members only the best … We now accept valid out-of-state medical cards.”
That line refers to cards issued by numerous states, including Michigan, showing that someone is approved to use medical marijuana although not approved to buy medical cannabis from just anyone in Michigan except under the state’s tightly controlled system that ties caregivers to five so-called and only five “patients.”
So, when undercover informants of the Oakland County Sheriff’s Office were able to buy medical marijuana last year four times at the Metro Detroit Compassion Club, detectives linked that wrongdoing to Barnes, who was listed as the “resident agent” on the incorporation papers of the nonprofit club.
That’s when they decided to burst into the magazine’s offices, as well as into the compassion club at the same address where they found about two pounds of marijuana, and into a warehouse Barnes owned that was full of marijuana plants and more than 100 pounds of marijuana stored in refrigerators, as well as into Barnes’ rambling modern house that held about four pounds, McCabe said.
Did all of the marijuana belong to Barnes? If the case goes to trial, prosecutors will show that much of it did and the motive was to sell the drug for profit, McCabe said. At the warehouse, “the marijuana was in small baggies in refrigerators,” he said.
As for the nonprofit compassion club, it constituted a dispensary — a retail outlet for selling marijuana, McCabe said. Even though Detroit is said to have more than 100 dispensaries, operating mostly without interference by the Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office, Oakland County authorities abide by the view of Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette, who has declared dispensaries illegal in Michigan.That will soon change, but it hasn’t yet, McCabe said.
Dispensaries are going to be legal in Michigan, through a new law enacted last year, “but not until at least early 2018 — that’s what we’ve been told by people in Lansing; that’s the soonest anybody can get a license to operate one,” McCabe said.
A top attorney at the Oakland County Prosecutor’s Office was adamant about not dropping Barnes’ case.
“We felt that the evidence rose to the level showing that Mr. Barnes was violating state law,” said Paul Walton, Oakland County’s chief assistant prosecutor.
The judge “made the statement that Mr. Barnes was simply an officer of the corporation, but there’s every reason to believe that he had significant involvement, if not outright ownership,” in the dispensary masquerading as a nonprofit club, Walton said.
So,was the ruling was a victory for medical-marijuana users across Michigan, as Barnes’ attorneys insist? Or just a temporary setback to the law-enforcement establishment in Oakland County, standard bearers for a rigid approach to users and distributors of medical marijuana?
Only time, and Michigan’s higher courts, will tell.
Higher education takes on new meaning in Pueblo County, Colorado.
In February, local officials announced that a first-of-its-kind scholarship program will create $475,000 in funding to help send the county’s graduating high school seniors to local colleges.
A majority of the fund – about $425,000 – came from taxing legal marijuana.
“A couple years ago, these are dollars that would have been going to the black market, drug cartels,” Pueblo County commissioner Sal Pace told KKTV in an interview. “Now money that’s used to fund drug cartels is now being used to fund college scholarships.”
Marijuana has been legal for recreational use in Colorado since 2012. Pueblo County, located about an hour’s drive south of resort town Colorado Springs, began collecting a 2% excise tax on all weed grown there in 2016. The tax will increase 1% annually until 2021.
Students who live in Pueblo County and graduate from high school this spring automatically qualify for a chunk of the fund. County officials expect a $1,000 payout for every applicant, which they can put toward tuition at Pueblo Community College or Colorado State University-Pueblo (which gets about 300 and 400 incoming freshmen from the county every year).
While $1,000 would not stretch far at a private university, in-state tuition costs about $3,000 a year at PCC and up to $6,000 annually at CSU-Pueblo, depending on the number of credit hours taken. The Pueblo County Scholarship could put a substantial dent in student debt.
The scholarship fund is expected to grow as the rate of taxation increases. Pace told The Huffington Post that only half of the marijuana cultivators licensed to grow were operational last year, and the county expects to generate extra revenue as more farms come online in 2017.
Colorado isn’t the only state to put legal marijuana revenues to good use.
In California, which legalized recreational marijuana in 2016 but won’t sell it in stores until 2018, residents will pay a 15% tax on sales of the drug, generating up to $1 billion in new tax revenue annually. Ten million dollars (increasing annually for five years until it reaches $50 million) will help support communities disproportionately harmed by the war on drugs.
During today’s White House briefing, Press Secretary Sean Spicer was asked about the Trump administration’s position on marijuana enforcement. This issue has left marijuana advocates, business owners, investors, patients, and consumers wondering what the president’s true intentions are. As 28 states and DC have legalized medical marijuana and eight states and DC have legalized recreational marijuana, the administration’s position is one that will affect many Americans.
Spicer’s response drew a distinction between medical and recreational marijuana. He answered the initial question by stating,
“there are two distinct issues here: medical marijuana and recreational marijuana. I think medical marijuana, I’ve said before, the president understands the pain and suffering that many people go through who are facing, especially terminal diseases, and the comfort that some of these drugs, including medical marijuana can bring to them. And that’s one that Congress, through a rider in 2011…I think put in appropriations bill saying the Department of Justice wouldn’t be funded to go after those folks. There’s a big difference between that and recreational marijuana. And when you see something like the opioid addiction crisis blossoming in so many states around this country, the last thing we want to be doing is encouraging people—there is still a federal law that we need to abide by when it comes to medical—in terms of recreational marijuana and other drugs of that nature. There’s a big difference between medical marijuana which states—in the states where that’s allowed in accordance with the appropriations rider have set forth a process to administer and regulate that usage versus recreational marijuana and that’s a very, very different subject.”
There is a lot to break apart here, and while the issue of marijuana policy is clearly new to the press secretary and to the Trump administration, it is important to break a bit of this down to a few points for the White House to consider.
Medical marijuana and recreational marijuana are equally illegal under federal law.
Although Mr. Spicer is correct that an appropriations rider (formally, the Rohrabacher-Farr Amendment) prevents the Justice Department from spending money to crack down on medical marijuana in states that have approved reforms, that does nothing to address the illegality of the substance. In short, all the amendment says is that DOJ is prevented from enforcing federal law against medical marijuana growers, distributors, and buyers—who are still breaking the law. The Controlled Substances Act makes marijuana illegal in all cases—regardless of the purpose of its use. The Rohrabacher-Farr Amendment does not change that.
The suggestion that medical marijuana states have “set forth a process to administer and regulate” but recreational states have not is fundamentally false.
Recreational states that are currently up and running—Colorado, Washington, Oregon and Alaska—have been implementing significant and stringent administrative and regulatory systems around those policies. The only jurisdiction that has not done so—the District of Columbia—was prevented from doing it by one of President Trump’s supporters in the House, Rep. Andy Harris of Maryland. The District government intended to construct a recreational system that looked much like their medical system in terms of regulatory rigor. In fact, arguments can be made that recreational marijuana regulatory systems in the states that have come online (and in the states that are soon to come online) are more robust than a few of the states that have approved medical marijuana reforms. This distinction is important when disseminating information to the public—one of the roles Mr. Spicer prominently plays—because it reinforces the myth that every medical marijuana system in the U.S. is a tightly run ship and that recreational marijuana systems are free-wheeling, fly-by-night operations. I would encourage Mr. Spicer and other members of the Trump administration to meet with regulators from the Marijuana Enforcement Division in Colorado, the State Liquor and Cannabis Board in Washington, the Liquor Control Commission in Oregon and the Marijuana Control Board in Alaska to understand more clearly what these states are doing.
If President Trump believes in the medical value of cannabis, he can enact meaningful change.
There are many areas where presidential action and/or presidential leadership can go a long way in reforming the nation’s medical marijuana policy. Mr. Spicer was clear that the White House was supportive of medical marijuana and sees it as distinct from recreational marijuana. If so, the White House has a bit of a to-do list. President Trump can:
Support reform proposals in Congress centered on medical marijuana such as the CARERS Act and others.
Codify the Rohrabacher-Farr Amendment (now the Rohrabacher-Blumenauer legislation) that Mr. Spicer referenced to make it permanent law and not contingent on the continuing resolutions that fund our government or the standard appropriations process—if Congress can ever find a way to return to that.
Reschedule cannabis or deschedule it with specific restrictions with regard to medical use.
Deschedule non-intoxicating cannabidiol or CBD.
Call for increased federal funding at NIH and other agencies to study the medical efficacy of marijuana.
Appoint a drug czar and heads of the DEA and FDA who have similar beliefs to the president on this issue.
Lift banking and tax restrictions for medical marijuana firms in ways that lower overhead costs for producers that are ultimately passed on to sick patients.
There is no shortage of ways in which a medical marijuana reform-oriented president can advance those ideas. If the White House is serious about it, President Trump can show the nation that he is more willing to address such issues and public needs than any of his predecessors.
Opioid use and marijuana use are not the same thing.
Mr. Spicer seemed to equate recreational marijuana use with the use of opioids and other drugs. People are dying every day across the United States because of opioids. Heroin is being cut with other, more deadly drugs like Fentanyl and causing a serious overdose crisis in the U.S. Those results are not happening with legal marijuana. Yes, legal marijuana has led to some public health issues and state regulatory systems have tried to respond to those challenges. Those public health issues are minor compared to what is happening with opioids in the states. Mr. Spicer should ask himself if he really believes heroin is as big a threat to Americans as a state-legal and regulated marijuana system. If he believes that answer is “yes,” then his equating the two is logical. If he believes the answer is “no,” he should abandon dangerous rhetoric that simultaneously hyperbolizes marijuana and delegitimizes the opioid crisis. Moreover, Mr. Spicer should read some of the research that suggests marijuana could be used as a substitute for opioids, helping opioid users distance themselves from that drug. That research isn’t a rumor in the marijuana industry; it is medical research coming from the University of Colorado, the University of Michigan, and elsewhere.
Recognize that marijuana legalization does not introduce marijuana to communities.
Recreational marijuana use happens in every state in the U.S. every day by hundreds of thousands of individuals. That includes states with and without recreational legalization. In states that have legalized, the regulatory systems ensure that the product is safer than black market product and that consumers know what they are getting in terms of potency and with regard to the presence of adulterants like mold or pesticides. Moreover, in state-legal systems, officials can use tax revenue to fund information, prevention, public health, and public safety campaigns that help deal with problems that can arise from marijuana use. In states without legal systems, those problems still arise, but states collect zero tax revenue from sales.
The White House can host a summit to address marijuana policy.
Mr. Spicer’s comments from the podium today showed some hesitation and some misunderstandings within the White House on marijuana policy. That same confusion exists among some in the public, as well. That is not a criticism of the White House; it is a reflection of the complex and ever-changing reality of marijuana policy in this country. The White House can show leadership and encourage a better-informed public and policy making community by convening the top experts on cannabis, public health, public safety, drug policy, and medicine to discuss the issue. The president has effectively brought together CEOs, labor leaders, minority communities, and other groups to discuss relevant issues— he can do the same on this issue.
Think about public opinion on marijuana.
The president has often spoken about returning the power to the people. Returning power to the people can take many forms. One is the decentralization of power to the states (closer governmental representatives of the public). Another is for the White House to be responsive to public opinion. For the former, the president can let states do what they like on marijuana policy and have the federal government get out of the way—a policy that should resonate well if the president is truly a small government conservative. For the latter, the answer is not only clear but was reflected by polling results released on the same day Mr. Spicer discussed marijuana from the podium. Quinnipiac University released a poll showing that 59 percent of Americans support recreational marijuana legalization and 71 percent of Americans want the federal government to get out of the way of states when it comes to marijuana policy. And you can bet a lot of that support comes from states President Trump won in 2016. The president may not believe that you can ‘Make America Great Again’ by legalizing marijuana, but if he wants states and citizens to be more in control of public policy, he should consider himself the last person who should try to get in the way.
To sum up, Mr. Spicer was bold in addressing a marijuana reform question head on and refusing to punt on it. His predecessors have not been so brave. He should continue to discuss this issue that matters to many Americans, and in the meantime, take today as an opportunity to push the White House to become better informed on the issue and think hard about what the best policy path forward could be.
In a Hill op-ed, NORML refutes claims that cannabis contributes to increased opioid consumption, uses facts and data to highlight the inverse correlation between opioid abuse and medical marijuana.
Washington, DC: On Thursday, White House Press Secretary lied to the American public when he claimed “I think that when you see something like the opioid addiction crisis blossoming in so many states around this country, the last thing we should be doing is encouraging people (by regulating the adult use of marijuana)” during his daily press conference.
Paul Armentano, Deputy Director for NORML, published a response in The Hill newspaper systematically refuting this claim.
“Yet even a cursory look at the available evidence finds Spicer’s concerns to be misplaced and his allegations to be dead wrong.
In reality, permitting legal access to cannabis is consistently associated with reduced rates of opioid use, abuse, and mortality.”
Armentano cites several relevant peer-reviewed studies from the US, Canada, and Israel to bolster his arguments.
He concludes: “Proponents of marijuana prohibition have long alleged that experimentation with pot acts as a ‘gateway’ to the use and eventual abuse of other illicit substances. But the evidence does not support this claim. In reality, permitting marijuana sales to be regulated by licensed, state-authorized distributors rather than by criminal entrepreneurs and pushers of various other illicit drugs results in fewer, not more, Americans abusing other, potentially more dangerous substances.”
NORML’s mission is to move public opinion sufficiently to legalize the responsible use of marijuana by adults, and to serve as an advocate for consumers to assure they have access to high quality marijuana that is safe, convenient and affordable.
