Filling potholes in the law

At least something isn’t ambiguous about Montana’s medical marijuana law.

Flathead County District Judge Stewart Stadler recently ruled that the law clearly limits caregivers to providing marijuana to “qualified patients” in a case involving caregivers providing marijuana to one another. A Missoula judge issued a similar ruling earlier this year.

The plaintiffs in the case tried to argue that the law is ambiguous, but Stadler found that “no such ambiguity exists; rather, the clear and unambiguous language of the Act permits caregivers to provide marijuana only to qualifying patients who have named the applicant as caregiver.”

It’s revealing that the case involved two Flathead Valley men who face criminal charges after they were allegedly caught transporting three pounds of marijuana to Great Falls in February. Even though one was a licensed caregiver and the other a card-carrying patient, by all appearances they were involved in trafficking medical marijuana for profit.

And that is one of the biggest flaws in the law: It created a multimillion-dollar industry that far exceeded the intended restrictions of the law. Prosecutors maintain that three pounds exceeds limits on how much caregivers and patients can possess.

But there’s nothing unusual about this. There have been cases across the state where limitations have been exceeded to a point where it basically amounted to widespread drug dealing.

That was probably one of the main concerns for Montana legislators who passed legislation with provisions that were essentially aimed at taking the money out of the industry. However, a Lewis and Clark County judge has ruled that the new restrictions on compensation and how many patients a caregiver can have are unconstitutional.

We will see.

If that ruling holds up, it would appear the state wouldn’t even have the authority to restrict large grow operations. That would certainly not have been the intent of the Legislature, nor even of the citizens who voted to approve use of medical marijuana in the original initiative.

Maybe the revised legislation is not perfect, but it is far better than allowing would-be criminals to exploit a humanitarian law for selfish profit.