Crowd calls for veto of marijuana restrictions

A crowd of people lined the streets near the Whitefish Performing Arts Center on Thursday to urge Gov. Brian Schweitzer to stop a bill that is expected to effectively bring an end to the state’s medical marijuana industry.

With T-shirts and placards that read, “Veto 423,” the crowd swelled to more than 200 people of all ages at one point just before Schweitzer was scheduled to speak at a forum.

“I’m not even a medical marijuana user. I think it’s just a matter of personal liberty,” Whitefish resident Josh King said. “There were hundreds of jobs in this state that were built on this law.”

King added that House Bill 423 is “repeal disguised as regulation.”

Schweitzer has stated he’s not willing to veto HB 423. He vetoed a bill that would have completely repealed the medical marijuana law, but he has said that vetoing HB 423 would lead to continuation of a “wild West” medical marijuana environment for another two years.

Voters approved the state’s medical marijuana law in 2004, but in the last couple of years the number of card-holding patients has mushroomed to nearly 30,000 and the number of caregivers has grown to nearly 5,000.

Advocates of repeal or regulation say the law didn’t turn out the way voters wanted.

Whitefish resident Morgan Phelps said House Bill 423 is so draconian it doesn’t reflect what voters wanted, either.

Phelps contends that the original law allowed for the state to regulate the industry through administrative rather than legislative powers, but that never happened.

“I think there was certainly some problems,” he said, most notably that there are “way too many pain patients between 18 and 25.”

But HB 423 is too severe, according to Phelps, who predicted there will be a ballot initiative response to restore some measure of the industry.

Phelps said he’s concerned the state could experience an even more “wild West” environment with black-market marijuana.

That’s partly because people who have invested thousands of dollars in medical marijuana business ventures “are stuck, and they don’t have any options.”

“I was probably one of the biggest players in this industry,” said Ryan Blindheim, who owned the Black Pearl dispensary in Olney, one of 26 across the state that were raided by state and federal law enforcement in mid-March.

Blindheim said he invested about $300,000 in the business, including the purchase of an 18,000-square-foot warehouse and advanced growing equipment and technology.

He said he’s effectively been out of business since the raids.

Blindheim said he believes the state has failed the industry by not adequately regulating it over the last few years.

“I’ll be honest. This industry will attract a lot of people with bad intentions,” he said. “We were let down by our own state ... We were asking, if not begging for guidelines. The bottom line is there are people out there who needed this.”