Health and Fitness ? Panel: Montana's medical marijuana law too ...

HELENA ? Law enforcement officials and a criminal defense
attorney said at a conference Tuesday they find the Montana medical
marijuana law ambiguous and leaving a lot open to legal
interpretation because of conflicting federal law.

Conference moderator Lee Banville, a University of Montana
professor, asked the panelists if law enforcement had the tools
?that help you sort of navigate this water between the complicated
space between a federally illegal product and a state-sanctioned
system.?

Blue Corneliusen, a deputy Cascade County sheriff and president
of the Montana Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, said
authorities have tried to figure out how to take Montana voters?
mandate to legalize medical marijuana in 2004 and ?put it in the
scope of still fighting crime.?

?Initially, because it was passed by initiative, there was a lot
of ambiguity in it, which led to quite a bit of gray area for the
application of criminal law enforcement,? the deputy sheriff
said.

He praised some of the changes passed by the 2011 Legislature to
clarify the law.

?We fight crime,? Corneliusen said. ?That?s what law enforcement
does. We don?t determine what the crimes are. Those are set by the
Legislature, and we enforce those.?

Agreeing about the ambiguity of the law was Josh Van de
Wetering, a Missoula criminal defense lawyer, former federal
prosecutor and adjunct professor at the University of Montana law
school.

?I think it?s very much still a moving target,? he said. ?I
think it?s very much ?Alice in Wonderland.? The federal patina over
everything, I think, creates a lot of confusion and a lot of
frustration for people.?

If anything, the situation is getting ?more foggy,? and both law
enforcement and his clients want clarity, Van de Wetering said in a
speech at the Burton K. Wheeler Institute?s conference on medical
marijuana.

***

Retired Denver police officer Tony Ryan said
the confusion is part of a much larger issue.

?It is the entire war on drugs that creates this entire
problem,? said Ryan, who is on the board of the group known as Law
Enforcement Against Prohibition. ?Without the war on drugs, we
wouldn?t have these issues with marijuana. We wouldn?t have to have
the discussion about medical marijuana because people would be
allowed to have it as medicine.?

He told how some countries had decriminalized drugs, taking
crime out of the drug problem and making it a health issue
instead.

?Law enforcement can go out and enforce laws that mean something
to people,? Ryan said, drawing applause, adding: ?There?s rapists
and child molesters and people with computers now that want to meet
your 14-year-old daughter in the dark in the park, and I think
that?s more of a threat than somebody that wants to smoke
marijuana.?

Ryan said he wasn?t a narcotics officer but instead focused on
bank robbers in his 36-year career as a Denver police officer.

Van de Wetering said if people want the entire class of
marijuana crimes eliminated in federal law, they must lobby their
members of Congress.

But he warned, ?There are a lot of folks in Congress for the
last 30 or 40 years that got a lot of mileage out of pushing the
war on drugs, and they?ve gotten re-elected that way.?

Another possibility, Van De Wetering said, would be for Congress
to pass a law to reschedule marijuana to give it a lower ranking
under the Controlled Substances Act than it has now. Another
option, he said, is to establish a national medical marijuana
program.

?

Article source: http://missoulian.com/news/state-and-regional/article_30376c3a-e408-11e0-a366-001cc4c03286.html

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Source: http://medicaltips.biz/2011/09/21/panel-montanas-medical-marijuana-law-too-murky/

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