Global Ganja Report

Former state troopers in the Oregon legislature have revived a bill that would make it harder for people to qualify for a medical marijuana card and tighten controls on the those growing it. The Omnibus Cannabis bill, or House Bill 3664, got a hearing last week in the House Rules Committee at Salem. Under the bill, cannabis caregivers must be over 21 years of age, and must submit to a national background check each time they re-apply for a permit. In the most controversial measure, the bill would open the entire registry of medical marijuana growers to police four times a year, whether they are investigating a crime or not.

Robert Wolfe of the Oregon Marijuana Policy Initiative said that activists were left out of meetings to draft the bill, and say it sets such a high standard for doctors that they would not be able to issue any medical marijuana cards. Voters in 1998 made Oregon one of the first states to allow people to use cannabis to treat medical conditions. The legislature revised the law in 2005 to ease restrictions on how much cannabis patients and growers could have on hand. This year, lawmakers offered more than a dozen bills to revise the law. A working group of former state troopers offered a bill combining some of the measures, but it failed to make a deadline to get through normal channels—prompting the current re-introduciton. (AP, May 18; NORML, May 17)

Photo by Barbara Doduk