If the Senate thought it could force its way in the House with the passage of Senate Bill 964, they’ll have to think again, as the medical marijuana bill is unlikely to pass the lower chamber anywhere close to the form it left the Senate.
The bill is currently sitting on the speaker’s desk, but Rep. Ann Lininger, D-Lake Oswego, told The Lund Report that the bill will likely be routed to the Committee on Ways & Means because of the significant costs on the Oregon Health Authority to set up a tracking system and inspect medical marijuana grow sites. She’s doubtful it’ll make its way out of there -- although the reforms of the medical marijuana system will likely be rolled into another bill.
SB 964 aims to reform the medical marijuana system by requiring growers to record and report the status of the plants they’re growing and the processed weed they’re disbursing to prevent medical pot from entering the black market. Their product will also have to be tested for purity. Sen. Ginny Burdick, D-Portland, who shepherded the bill on the Senate floor, noted that a patient would use an ounce or two a month, while they may have enough plants to produce pounds of excess marijuana.
All the legislators seem to agree on those points. The problem with the bill from the House standpoint is that it makes it easy for cities and counties to ban medical marijuana dispensaries, essentially making permanent a 2014 law that allowed cities and counties to pass moratoriums to keep marijuana pharmacies from their jurisdiction through April of this year.
House members want voters to approve any local bans, but SB 964 gives that right to city councils and county commissions, and forces voters to collect signatures to overturn such a decision with a ballot referendum if they don’t like it.
The marijuana dispensaries had actually existed for years in a legal gray area, but won state sanctioning in 2013.
A joint committee of the House and Senate has been meeting since early February to implement Measure 91, which legalizes marijuana but after 33 meetings, it hasn’t passed any legislation.
Lininger said the gridlock has come about because while the House Democrats have supported the voters’ position legalizing marijuana, only one senator on the committee had, Sen. Floyd Prozanski, D-Eugene.
That differing philosophy has created an impasse that may delay the ability of the Legislature to adjourn by the end of June. While the House Democrats have approached their work from the standpoint of enacting the will of the voters, the majority of the senators have approached their work by looking for ways to mitigate or roll back the voter initiative.
“You can see that philosophy play out on how to let cities and counties keep medical dispensaries out of their communities,” Lininger said. “It’s not just a technical issue. It’s about whether there’s going to be a statewide policy for legalizing and taxing marijuana.”
The Senate pulled an end-run on the House and established a Senate-only marijuana committee that proposed the avenue for local pot bans that was not supported by the House Democrats on the joint committee. Rep. Peter Buckley, D-Ashland, compared the Senate’s action to “taking their ball and going home when they don’t get their way.”
Buckley is among the most powerful lawmakers in Salem, serving as the state budget chairman from the House of Representatives.
Medical vs Recreational
SB 964 would actually make it more difficult for marijuana patients with AIDS and cancer to get medical pot than a college student who wants to smoke pot for fun, since Measure 91 explicitly prevents local jurisdictions from barring marijuana sales in their communities unless citizens gather signatures and pass a local ban through the ballot box.
“We’re going to make it harder for epilepsy or cancer patients than an adult to buy cannabis for the weekend? That sounds nonsensical,” said Lininger.
Medical marijuana patients could line up with recreational users at their weed stores, but they’d have to pay taxes on the product, and recreational pot shops are entitled to a profit. Medical pot will remain untaxed and dispensary owners can only sell weed at cost.
(To close the discrepancy, Sen. Jeff Kruse, R-Roseburg, has introduced an amendment to another bill, House Bill 3400, that would overturn the heart of Measure 91 and allow communities to ban all recreational pot businesses, including producers, processors, wholesalers and retailers.)
Medical marijuana advocates have been furious. “It’s a terrible bill for patients,” said Anthony Taylor, the lobbyist for Compassionate Oregon, a top medical marijuana advocacy group. Taylor doesn’t want lawmakers tasked with implementing Measure 91 -- which addresses recreational, not medical marijuana -- to touch their program at all, which voters also approved, 17 years ago.
He called the reporting system outlined in SB 964 “unworkable” and “unenforceable,” and accused lawmakers of making it harder on medical marijuana patients than the average recreational home grower, whose cache becomes legal on July 1. He questioned whether the Oregon pot ending up on the black market was really from medical growers, because federal laws against marijuana escalate for anyone with more than 100 plants.
But even some Senate supporters of legal marijuana, such as Sen. Elizabeth Steiner Hayward, D-Beaverton, wanted to end the loosely regulated medical marijuana program altogether, and allow people who need weed for medical use to purchase it as an over-the-counter drug.
Prozanski agreed with medical pot critics that the unmonitored system is leaking marijuana onto the black market and those problems need extinguished if a legitimate, legal recreational market is ever to be created. He told The Lund Report that the reporting requirements only affect growers, some of whom may have as many as 96 plants -- not caregivers or individual patients who keep their own weed garden for personal use.
Prozanski voted initially to support SB 964, but became the only senator to oppose the bill on the floor, telling his colleagues he came to believe that the Association of Oregon Counties and League of Oregon Cities had been negotiating in bad faith, displaying evidence that they had coached their members to change their bylaws to adhere to federal laws that ban all use of marijuana, which could negate anything Oregon voters or legislators decide.
He said the dispensary opponents come to their arguments from a classic position of propaganda that marijuana has no legitimate use, either herbal or for pleasure. “It has been around as a medical and cultural product for centuries.”
The advocates of SB 964 -- Kruse and Burdick -- have supported the bill and the opportunity for local governments to easily keep bans in place for medical marijuana dispensaries as a path to bipartisan compromise and a means to avoid litigation, but Prozanski said litigation was inevitable.
“I wanted to protect the program and the integrity of the program,” Kruse said. “It’s easier for a city council to change their mind than it is to overturn the will of the people.”
Access to Medicine
The policy that allowed cities and counties to temporarily ban medical marijuana dispensaries came about as a grand bargain, and was sharply opposed by liberal lawmakers like Rep. Mitch Greenlick, D-Portland, and Rep. Paul Holvey, D-Eugene, as setting up a bad, novel precedent of allowing local governments to block access to medicine.
“There’s no other time that we’ve allowed a city or a county to limit the access of medicine in the state,” Prozanski said.
SB 964 gives the local governments 180 days to extend that limitation indefinitely with a simple majority vote of a city council or county commission. If voters don’t like the ban, they’ll have to canvass their communities for signatures and then overturn it in the ballot box. The 180-day window was set to create transparency and allow for local ballot measures in November 2016 for communities that go ahead with bans.
Prozanski fought to include a provision that if a community does ban dispensaries in its jurisdiction, a dispensary in another locality will be free to deliver their medical product to a patient in a community with a ban. “I’ll do anything in my power to make sure patients have access to medicine,” he said.
