Patients Air Frustrations With Pot Law

Olympia, WA -- Patients such as Penny Simons, who smokes marijuana to relieve her debilitating respiratory and heart disease, told lawmakers Thursday of their frustrations with the new voter-approved medical marijuana initiative.

Simons, 34, of Renton, said she smokes pot for medical reasons even though her doctor won't give her the documentation the law requires.

"He's afraid he's going to wind up in prison," she said. " ... I don't smoke it to get stoned. I smoke it to function.

"If that makes me a criminal, then I'm a criminal," she said.

Initiative 692, which took effect Dec. 3, authorized the use of marijuana by patients with certain terminal or debilitating illnesses, including cancer, AIDS and glaucoma. It does not provide any legal way for them to obtain it, but with a doctor's note, patients, or their designated caregiver, can possess up to a 60-day supply.

But the initiative leaves patients to deduce that they must grow it and how much constitutes a 60-day supply.

There is nowhere they can turn for easy, accurate information.

They are rebuffed when they turn for answers to the state Department of Health.

A legislative analyst said the Health Department cannot write rules that would offer a clearer interpretation because the initiative does not explicitly give the department rulewriting authority.

And state officials are wary of drawing the wrath of the federal government.

Department spokeswoman Patricia Brown told members of the Senate Health and Long Term Care Committee that her department has received numerous questions from health care providers, patients and others seeking clarification. But the department typically tells them to just read the language in the law, although that language is vague.

Brown said she refers patients to their doctors for discussion of how much pot to take.

Seattle's Tim Killian, who was campaign manager for 1-692, said in an interview that the law was written as specifically "as the federal govemment's laws would allow a state law to be written."

The state is unfamiliar with the new law and wary of possible federal lawsuits. He noted a federal injunction against Oakland, Calf., for crafting a model for the distribution of medical marijuana in that state.

"I think that the federal goveniment have got their foot on this, and it's tough for the Department of Health to even do what they need to do," Sen. Lorraine Wojahn, D-Tacoma, said during the hearing.

"Unless we can remove that barrier of the federal government, we're going to be in big problems, I believe.'

Federal law currently classifies marijuana as a Schedule I drug, meaning it is dangerous and has no medical benefit.

Lawmakers took no action but seemed to agree the law needed to be amended to give the Department of Health more authority to interpret the initiative.

Copyright 1999 The Daily Herald Co.

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