When Deborah Young of Ferndale sent her $60 fee to Lansing this year to register as a medical-marijuana user, she assumed the state would use her money to review her paperwork and print her ID card.
The fees are “for the operation and oversight of the Michigan medical marihuana program,” says state law — spelling marijuana with an “h,” the old-fashioned way as in federal law.
Last month, though, Young said she and other card holderswere shocked to learn that Michigan’s Department of Licensing and Regulatory Affairs — LARA — had built up so much in fees that it gave $1.2 million to 18 county sheriffs, including those in Wayne, Oakland and Macomb counties. The grants are intended via legislative approval to be used by sheriffs for training and enforcement of Michigan’s medical marijuana act.
“They’re raiding the same people who paid those fees,” said Young, 58, who has glaucoma, a serious eye disease approved for medical-marijuana treatment in Michigan.
“We couldn’t believe it,” said Young. Ferndale residents learned not only that the Oakland County Sheriff received fee revenue from the ID cards but that their own city’s police department was set to get a share of it for use in medical-marijuana investigations.
The Oakland County Sheriff’s Office received $323,725 this year from LARA, according to a county memo sent to cities getting the grant offers. According to the memo, the county sheriff plans to spend $98,000 on 28 raid-style bulletproof vests, $80,000 on a Chevrolet van, pickup and trailer to transport seized marijuana plants; $10,000 to train investigators, and $134,000 for overtime pay to medical-marijuana investigators. Much of the overtime pay is being offered to 15 communities in Oakland County that lend officers to OAKNET — the Oakland County Narcotics Enforcement Team.
The Ferndale City Council rubber-stamped the grant without discussion in mid-July. Rochester and Royal Oak city councils also voted last month to accept grant money. Ferndale’s share of $5,582 was to pay overtime for officers in countywide medical-marijuana raids, according to the county memo.
When Young and other residents began calling the city to complain, the council put the grant back on its agenda. And it prompted Young to stand before the council members to demand that they rescind their decision.
“Why would we need a medical-marijuana oversight grant in Ferndale? Why would we even be a part of something to harass sick people?” she told council members.
Her questions also prompted bigger ones: Whether medical-marijuana users are primarily law-abiding Michiganders who merely seek a respite from pain and other conditions approved for medical-marijuana treatment; or whether they’re mainly seeking a sensory high, with the aid of complicit doctors willing to sign forms, and of drug dealers bent on making big profits while dodging federal drug laws.
Oakland County Sheriff Michael Bouchard said he sees dispensary operators as a serious threat to society.
“These grants aren’t to prosecute someone who’s not breaking the law,” Bouchard said. Oakland County’s memo offering grants to local police departments, provided to 15 city councils and township boards, said that medical marijuana “is being smuggled, mailed and transported into Oakland County from other states on a regular basis.” Michigan’s medical marijuana act, a vague law passed by voters in 2008, is an invitation to drug dealing, profiteering and the involvement of organized crime, Bouchard said.
Bouchard is unabashed about his vigorous campaign to wipe outdispensaries in Oakland County, citing a state Supreme Court ruling in 2011, which Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette has said means that most dispensaries were illegal in Michigan. Law enforcement officials in some counties, including Wayne, have tolerated the spread of dispensaries, but Bouchard said he is adamantly opposed to such leniency.
Oakland County investigators recently learned that two workers at a chain of four dispensaries, operating in Wayne and Oakland counties, were shot by a rival group, he said.
“One individual was murdered. The other was shot several times, but survived,” Bouchard said, adding: “I don’t care what some other counties are doing. The law says these types of facilities are illegal (and) they put law-abiding citizens at risk.”
The practice of turning medical-marijuana users’ fees against them by police agencies is not new in Michigan, although this year’s escalation of grants was shocking, said Rick Thompson, editor of the online Compassion Chronicles, a blog for medical-marijuana patients.
“This started out as a small, hidden part of the state’s budget in fiscal year 2014,” Thompson said. As the medical-marijuana funds swelled from cranking out ID cards, the Legislature began earmarking grant money for county sheriffs, Thompson said.
“The language said it would be for education about and enforcement of Michigan’s medical marijuana act, but you can see what that turned into,” he said. In the first year, four counties spent $116,000, state records show.
This year, the grant money grew tenfold, said State Representative Jeff Irwin, D-Ann Arbor. The Macomb County Sheriff is allowed up to$254,125, and the Wayne County Sheriff got $473,256, Irwin said.
The grants could expand dramatically again next year because LARA now has a whopping $31 million in its medical-marijuana fund, mainly from fees paid for ID cards by nearly 200,000 Michiganders, who were either approved to use medical marijuana or approved to be caregivers and provide medical marijuana to others.
The fee revenue this year flows in at nearly $9 million a year, $3 million more than the cost to administer the program, Irwin said.
Funneling fresh windfalls to law enforcement could mean more raids of dispensaries, home growing operations and other medical-marijuana sites, Irwin said.
Michigan is one of only two states that allows medical marijuana but doesn’t allow dispensaries, said Karen O’Keefe, a lawyer who is director of state policies for the Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit Marijuana Policy Project.
“The big problem in Michigan is that the Legislature just has not updated the law” to allow dispensaries, O’Keefe said.
“It just does not make sense that you tell people, your only legal option is to plant a seed and wait four to five months” for it to grow the plant, said O’Keefe, in Grosse Pointe Woods last week to visit her parents.
Law-enforcement leaders have lobbied to block bills in Lansing that would’ve allowed and regulated dispensaries. This fall’s lame-duck session of the state Legislature could change that, said State Sen. Rick Jones, R-Grand Ledge.
“Right now, we have a package of bills that would do that, and in a way that would be acceptable to police, acceptable to the cities and townships, and acceptable I think to most of the patients,” said Jones, a former sheriff of Eaton County and chair of the powerful Senate Judiciary Committee.
“The only people who oppose this are the ones who are profiting greatly” by hiding criminal enterprises behind the cover of Michigan’s medical marijuana law, he said. In the meantime, police must keep the pressure on those who’ve turned dispensaries into dens of illegal drug dealing, he said.
At the Ferndale City Council meeting late last month, another speaker who opposed accepting the county’s grant was former Ferndale mayor Craig Covey, a strong supporter of fully legalized marijuana. Covey is running in November against Bouchard for Oakland County Sheriff.
“So the money that’s coming back to Ferndale (as a grant to police) is coming from people with glaucoma, people with pain conditions, people who are legal patients using medical marijuana, and it’s being used to shut down compassion clubs and dispensaries,” Covey told the city council.
Standing nearby, Ferndale police Chief Timothy Collins already was counting on having an extra $5,000 in his budget.
“This is simply a vehicle for the city to be reimbursed for some of our overtime. Royal Oak accepted it two weeks ago,” Collins told the city council.
After a short debate, the council voted 3-1 to rescind its previous vote. The grant had been rejected. “Thank you, Ferndale!” shouted Young, as she and others applauded. But moments earlier, the audience heard Councilman Dan Martin’s dire assessment of the vote: “I understand that this is a symbolic stance — the county’s going to do what it’s going to do.”
Bill Laitner , Detroit Free Press 10:39 p.m. EDT August 6, 2016
We know where marijuana law and access in Michigan is going in the short term. Two recent legal developments have laid it out.
The first development is that there will be no vote on legalizing recreational use of marijuana on this year’s ballot. It’s been lingering on life support as MI Legalize went through various legal challenges and appeals in the state courts to get the signatures on their petitions counted. But it died when the state Supreme Court refused the case. There is still a federal challenge to the state decision, but even if there were a win down the road on that front, it wouldn’t happen in time for a vote this year. A federal judge denied a motion to stop the printing of ballots for this year’s election.
Not that MI Legalize has given up the effort. The organization is pursuing a federal appeal. At the same time the group is reorganizing — with lessons learned — for an attempt to get on the ballot for 2018, a gubernatorial election year. Presidential elections bring out more voters, which is what MI Legalize was hoping for, but apparently they don’t want to wait four years before calling the question again. If public opinion trends keep moving in the direction they have been, it’s a question of when, not if, marijuana will be legalized.
The second development has a more immediate impact for the 212,928 medical marijuana patients registered in the state. Gov. Rick Snyder signed Public Acts 281-283 last week, setting up the system for medical marijuana sales in the state, and possibly giving us a preview of what a recreational sales system will look like down the line. The Michigan Medical Marihuana Act (MMMA) did not specifically account for marijuana dispensaries for distribution, and some counties enforced the catch-22 of “patients may have marijuana, but there’s no place to buy it.” Now there can be dispensaries, and it is up to local municipalities whether they want to allow them or not.
PA 281, the Medical Marihuana Facilities Licensing Act, regulates the growth, processing, transport, sales, and taxation of medical marijuana. The law creates three levels for growing licenses: up to 500 plants; up to 1,000 plants; and up to 1,500 plants.
PA 282 changes the Michigan Medical Marijuana Act to allow for extracts, oils, and infused products. That was another testy point, because the MMMA specifically referred to the “dried leaves and flowers” of the marihuana plant, but not extracts made from them. State law enforcement was never comfortable with high potency substances made from marijuana extracts.
A seed-to-sale tracking system for medical marijuana — known as the Marihuana Tracking Act, or PA 283 — was tacked on later in the process with backing from business interests and law enforcement.
The laws take effect immediately, although in practical terms the only one that matters is PA 282, for patients who need oils and extracts. The practicalities of how the licensing is administered will be up to a new state-appointed board.
Getting the laws in place is an important point in a long and ongoing process. Whether they are good or not depends on who you talk to.
“When we first started approaching public officials and legislators, most of them didn’t even want to talk to us about medical marijuana,” says Robin Schneider of the National Patients Rights Association. “Many didn’t believe there was medicinal benefit at all. We spent years debating with law enforcement about regulations, the need for transporting security, and seed-to-sale tracking. The two opposite sides had to meet in the middle.”
That was spoken like a veteran of political negotiating. Schneider has spent six years working in Lansing trying to get something like these laws passed and sees them as a good thing. She’s seen the opposition up close and personal, and believes this is a major victory, particularly for patients who need extracts and oils.
The regulations do reflect something of a law enforcement approach when you look at the seed-to-sale tracking and secure transport provisions. This generates questions as to how the governor-appointed Marihuana Advisory Council will approach its duties. Will it take an oppositional or nurturing attitude to a new industry in the state?
“The bills were driven, written, and approved by the law enforcement community, which will not have the same interests in the success of the program as the dispensary people,” says attorney Michael Komorn, president of the Michigan Medical Marijuana Association. “This is a police oversight program that has nothing to do with the medical marijuana act. It’s a license that is supervised by the law enforcement team akin to the liquor control system.”
At the very least, the new laws add layers of bureaucracy to the distribution of medical marijuana, which was expected. It also regulates where some of the money in a lucrative new industry will go. Dr. Gary Wolfram, a Hillsdale College economist, has given a conservative estimate that the state will collect $63 million annually in fees and taxes, while generating about 10,000 jobs.
The money involved helps draw in those reluctant to engage with marijuana. With tight budgets and reluctance to raise taxes, this is an opportunity for state resources. It also draws in others who want to get a piece of that financial action. Will there be a level playing field for anyone to join in? Or will it be stacked toward those who are — for lack of a better reference — friends of the governor?
“I’m still skeptical of this legislature and their plans,” says Jamie Lowell of the Third Coast Compassion Club in Ypsilanti, the first licensed dispensary in Michigan. “How will the state actually treat this process? I’m a little paranoid. I’ve seen enough shenanigans and tomfoolery to have legitimate questions.”
Lowell is active with the MI Legalize group and is feeling the sting of the state legislature’s action to block the legalization petitions, such as a law passed last spring that kept all the signatures collected from being counted.
Not everybody is holding hands and singing the praises of these laws. But they are adding some definition to contested provisions of the MMMA that have led to legal problems and even imprisonment for some. At least the question of whether dispensaries are legal in Michigan is settled. They are.
“I think it’s a good thing anytime you get a little more regulation and a little more transparency,” says Julius Dubose, founder of Dubs Apothecary, a self-described mobile facility that has had its wares at medical marijuana events in Detroit. Dubose wants to open a storefront facility soon. The new laws make that possibility much more clear.
“I’m open to any municipality that will allow it,” Dubose says.
Michigan’s new medical marijuana laws may not be the most enlightened, but they do provide more clarity for those who want to operate dispensaries and produce extracts. And for most, just knowing what the rules are will make a difference.
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.
DETROIT (AP) — Michigan sheriffs are paying for overtime and buying vests, guns, Tasers and vehicles with a little-known pot of state money that was set aside for medical marijuana enforcement.
They’re also leaving a lot of cash on the table, as only 18 of 83 counties this year applied for a slice of the $3 million.
“It’s mind-blowing to think they had this money out there and we had no clue about it,” said Sgt. James Every of the Ingham County sheriff’s office, which was eligible for $114,000 but didn’t apply.
Kent County, which is home to the western Michigan city of Grand Rapids, was eligible for $121,000 but also was unaware, Undersheriff Michelle Young said.
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“We could absolutely use it for compliance and enforcement,” she said.
Michigan voters in 2008 approved the use of marijuana to treat certain illnesses. Nearly 225,000 people have state-issued cards, but the law has confused many and has led to significant legal disputes, including over how to obtain and store the drug. Large illegal growing operations have been busted around the state.
Since 2015, lawmakers have set aside money for sheriffs for medical marijuana enforcement and education. It’s administered by the Department of Licensing and Regulatory Affairs. Every county was eligible this year for a portion of the $3 million, based on the number of new cards or renewals in that county.
Seventeen counties spent $823,000 in 2016, according to a state report. The largest, Wayne and Oakland, spent a combined 67 percent of that figure.
Oakland spent $282,661, much of it on training and investigation overtime. The sheriff’s office bought a $31,000 van, a $30,000 pickup truck and a $6,800 cargo trailer.
“We didn’t have equipment,” Sheriff Mike Bouchard said. “We’d come across huge illegal grow operations — hundreds and hundreds of plants — and we’d have to rent trucks or trailers. … The grant helps alleviate some of the costs necessary to do these activities, but it’s just a sliver.”
According to the Oakland County Sheriff’s Office Sept. 1, 2016, submission to the state report, the department:
Executed 59 search warrants,
Executed 19 “knock and talks” with 13 found to be compliant, 2 had no evidence located and 4 found to be non-compliant.
Initiated 19 educational contacts this year, with on criminal actions taken,
Seized 2,961 marijuana plants — or 1,122 pounds — since Jan. 1.
Macomb County has spent about $100,000 over two years, much of it related to investigations and training. The sheriff’s office also bought laptops, vehicles and raid vests.
“I want the guys as protected as they can be,” Det. Sgt. Gary Wiegand said of vests.
Wayne County said it spent $171,618 on wages for dozens of officers conducting surveillance from January through September on 32 marijuana dispensaries in Detroit. More than 600 vehicles were stopped.
The grants were used in smaller counties, too. Sanilac spent $2,850 on five semi-automatic weapons. Antrim spent $479 on night vision binoculars. Cheboygan purchased Tasers.
Young, the Kent County undersheriff, believes the grants haven’t been promoted enough. The Department of Licensing and Regulatory Affairs declined to be interviewed.
“We have not been surprised by the participation rate as this was and still is a new program,” spokesman Michael Loepp said.
The deadline to apply for the next round of funding is Jan. 1.
Wiegand said Macomb County bought a trailer to haul and store illegal marijuana plants.
“We took more than 100 plants out of a person’s house,” he said. “It’s hard to put all that in the property room.”
One issue reported by the Oakland County Sheriff’s Office is that patients or caregivers are becoming better at cultivating marijuana and the plants are growing big enough to provide one pound of marijuana. With 12 plants per patient, they are going over the 2.5 ounces, the office reports.
“The MMMA does not provide a legal remedy for the patient or the caregiver to address this issue,” Oakland County Sheriff’s Lt. Brent Miles wrote.
The Department of Licensing and Regulatory Affairs (LARA) is responsible for the state’s regulatory environment and makes the delivery of services more efficient for consumers and business customers. LARA oversees the licensing and regulation of more than 1.2 million individuals and entities on an annual basis.
