Lawmaker to introduce bill allowing sale of medical marijuana

By Joe Schoenmann

Tuesday, Sept. 21, 2010 | 6:16 p.m.

A state senator plans to introduce legislation to allow special pharmacies in Nevada to sell medical marijuana.

Sen. Michael Schneider, D-Las Vegas, said he has spent a year working with doctors and talking to state administrators about how to craft the bill that he will bring to the Legislature in 2011.

Nevada currently has a 9-year-old law that allows people to possess six marijuana plants that can be cultivated for medical use. Schneider, though, said marijuana is difficult to grow, the current law is not very scientific and it sometimes criminalizes people who seek marijuana for medical use.

His bill would allow “compounding pharmacies,” to distribute marijuana based upon prescriptions written by physicians. It wouldn’t be a one-joint-fits-all model, but would be specialized so if a doctor thinks someone needs a smaller or larger amount of THC, the active ingredient in marijuana, the pharmacy would be able to produce it.

"I'd like to see it as a pilot for the state, no amateurs involved, and people who need medical marijuana would get it just like people get painkillers or antibiotics today," he said. "What's wrong with that? There's nothing wrong with that."

He knows it might be controversial. But he goes back to a recent conversation with some friends, where the husband had such severe migraines that doctors were unable to treat them. It got to the point that the man's doctor suggested he “go get some (marijuana) and try it.”

"So they potentially committed a felony (by finding some marijuana), when all they wanted to do was try to get some relief from a very bad medical condition," Schneider said.

Schneider said he also knows of a Republican in the Nevada Assembly who is also planning to introduce a medical marijuana bill next session. He would not reveal the Assemblyman's name. "He can talk about that when he wants to."

The senator and assemblyman, however, were mentioned, generally, Tuesday afternoon by medical marijuana activists who addressed the Clark County Commission in response to raids by ski-masked Metro officers and federal agents two weeks ago.

The group of about 30 people let Michael McAuliffe speak for them, urging commissioners to support laws to protect medical marijuana users to "stop wasting taxpayer dollars."

"Has this really been the best use of our funds?" he asked.

County Commissioner Steve Sisolak, who sits on Metro's Fiscal Affairs Commission, which oversees Metro spending, said he had not talked to Metro brass about the raid. But he said he completely supports any move to make medical marijuana more available to those who need it.

"What's the sense of making it legal if it's not available to people it might help?" he said. "It wasn't fair to pass this law to give people a false hope that they can get this relief, then not make it available to them."

Commissioner Chris Giunchigliani, who served in the Assembly and championed the current medical marijuana law, which passed in 2001, said the raids were heavy-handed.

"Why can't they set up a meeting and talk to them, do it more safely?" she said.

Back in 2001, she said, she had also wanted the state to grow medical marijuana and mark it genetically before it was distributed to pharmacies. That way, if some was sold illegally on the street, it could be traced to whatever pharmacy distributed it.

"We were dealing with a very conservative mindset that didn't want to accept the will of the voters who had spoken quite loudly," she said.

In 2000, Nevada voters approved a ballot initiative to allow the use of marijuana for medical reasons.

During his speech, McAuliffe held up broken security camera equipment that he said Metro officers destroyed during a raid on the Nevada Compassion Center, 4760 S. Pecos Road. Bianca Anderson, an tax preparer who volunteers at the center, said officers told her they destroyed the equipment so their identities would not be released to the public.

The funny thing, she said, was that they all wore ski-masks and sunglasses.

"No one could see them anyway," Anderson said.

No one was charged and the search warrants have been sealed by the court, so no one is sure why the raids were conducted, McAuliffe added.

Attorney Nancy Lord, working on behalf of McAuliffe and the loosely organized group of medical marijuana users and distributors, said she is about to file several motions against the police department.

"This was a complete violation of their First Amendment rights," she said.

The Compassion Center, Anderson said, helps people go through the state process to obtain legal permission to use medical marijuana.

When she was interrogated by a Metro cop, Anderson said the cop tried to make her feel bad for doing volunteer work for the center and "picking the wrong path in life."

It had just the opposite effect.

"It's kind of nice to be part of something bigger than yourself for the first time in my life," she said.