Adhering to new state law, San Benito supervisors approve
medical marijuana ID card program
San Benito supervisors reluctantly approved a program last week
that will provide seriously ill San Benito residents dependent on
the medical benefits of marijuana with state-issued ID cards.
The Medical Marijuana ID Card Program is finally becoming a
reality throughout the state due to state Senate Bill 420, which
requires all counties to implement a method of issuing the cards in
conjunction with local health departments. While the county
resolution to launch the program passed unanimously on Tuesday,
several supervisors
– particularly Anthony Botelho – voiced reservations on the
issue of medicinal pot use.
Adhering to new state law, San Benito supervisors approve medical marijuana ID card program
San Benito supervisors reluctantly approved a program last week that will provide seriously ill San Benito residents dependent on the medical benefits of marijuana with state-issued ID cards.
The Medical Marijuana ID Card Program is finally becoming a reality throughout the state due to state Senate Bill 420, which requires all counties to implement a method of issuing the cards in conjunction with local health departments. While the county resolution to launch the program passed unanimously on Tuesday, several supervisors – particularly Anthony Botelho – voiced reservations on the issue of medicinal pot use.
“I’m pretty concerned about this entire program,” Botelho told fellow board members and the audience. “I’m not that excited about medical marijuana. I’m really not.”
Kathy Flores, the county’s head of Health and Human Services, presented the board with a brief history of the state’s voter-mandated legislative action regarding the decriminalization of medicinal marijuana. In 1996, California voters passed Proposition 215, which allowed physicians to prescribe marijuana to ease pain and stimulate appetite in seriously ill patients, such as cancer victims. But the law was so vague that it did not provide a way for law enforcement to differentiate between genuine patients and recreational users of the psychotropic drug known to stimulate appetite, induce relaxation and ease pain.
So in 2003, voters overwhelmingly passed Prop. 22, which added detail to the legislation. But it took yet another state law, SB 420, passed last year, to force counties to establish medical marijuana ID card registries.
“SB 420 provides a way to protect them (patients) from prosecution and wrongful arrest,” Flores told the board. “Applicants just can’t walk in and get a card. A physician must attest that they have a serious condition, such as cancer or AIDS.”
Once applicants obtain a doctor’s order, they can apply for the ID card at the county Health Department at 1111 San Felipe Road. The department will have 30 days to verify the prescription, after which a photo ID card from the state is issued to the patient. The patient’s name is also placed on a data list maintained by the California Highway Patrol in Gilroy. Flores said state health officials estimate San Benito will have up to 230 people applying for the cards, but said it is unclear how they arrived at that number. She thought it was a little high.
The program, she added, will be funded through the fees for ID cards. Fees throughout the state fluctuate wildly, from $50 to $450 to obtain a card, though the average fee is about $60. Patients on Medi-Cal would be able to get a 50 percent discount on the fee. The fluctuation in county-set fees bothered Supervisor Reb Monaco, who seemed to be fully supportive of the program.
“Frequently, these patients are at the bottom end of the (economic) scale of being able to afford these fees,” Monaco said.
Medical marijuana is valuable in managing the pain for some patients, and can mean the difference between life and death in others, said Wayne Justmann, a nationally recognized medical marijuana advocate who co-founded the movement with Dennis Peron in San Francisco. Justmann, the first patient in San Francisco to receive a city-issued medical marijuana ID when San Francisco established its own registry in 2000, has been HIV positive for 18 years. Without the legal ability to smoke pot, he said, the pain caused by his disease would be excruciating.
“I suffer from peripheral neuroprophy,” said Justmann in an interview with The Pinnacle. “Everything burns because the nerves are dying. Your fingers burn. Your toes burn. If I wasn’t using cannabis I’d have to use Percoset – talk about addictive drugs that are expensive and destructive to the body. And doctors who treat me here recognize this.”
Justmann, who serves as a spokesman for some eight Bay Area medical marijuana dispensaries and care centers, said marijuana – unlike a synthetic pill – can be taken in myriad delivery systems: by cooking it into butter, peanut butter, brownies and even jelly. Some patients, he said, particularly those afflicted with cancer, must be able to ingest or smoke marijuana in order to keep nausea caused by chemotherapy at bay, which in turn enables them to keep down and digest other life-saving pills to treat their illness.
“We have folks who come in from their chemotherapy and they’re just ruined, they’re drained,” Justmann said. “We give them a brownie or a cookie with cannabis butter and within 20 minutes you see a sense of relief. The best patient I ever saw was a 4 year-old girl. We had to get special documents for her. Her father brought her in and she had had a tracheotomy, with muscle tremors in her arms and legs. The father would smoke a joint and exhale into her windpipe, just a small amount, and you could see slowly the tremors cease in frequency, making this child more comfortable. It was remarkable. And cannabis, damn it, it worked.”
Several supervisors said they realized they had no choice in the matter of the ID card program, but fretted that the registry could lead to the opening of a county marijuana dispensary – or cannabis club – such as the legal pot clubs in Oakland, San Francisco and Santa Cruz, where patients can obtain legally their therapeutic weed.
“I don’t want to support a program that doesn’t pay for itself,” Botelho said. “And what’s to prevent people from going to another county to acquire it?”
Flores explained to the board that she expected the county to recoup the costs of establishing the program – which includes the cost for a digital camera to take headshots for the photo IDs – within a year. The issue before board members, she added, was to implement state law, but they have the discretion to either limit or totally ban the establishment of county dispensaries as well.
“My knee-jerk reaction to dispensaries is to avoid that in this county,” said Supervisor Don Marcus.
Supervisor Jaime De La Cruz also gave his opinion, which took on several directions. He said he had many seriously ill friends who use marijuana to ease the side effects and pain caused by their diseases, so he sees the value in its therapeutic use. But his next statement seemed incongruous with the first.
“I cannot support legalizing marijuana,” he said adamantly. “The other side of the coin is that individuals might sell it to kids! If you are asking us to support a selling center, I cannot support that,” he told Flores.
“What applicants do with their prescription they have to do legally,” Flores assured him. “The whole issue of a establishing a dispensary is not Public Health’s role,” she reiterated.
Justmann said that shutting the door to the idea of a legal county dispensary would be a heartless mistake.
“In today’s society, the narrow mindedness overwhelms me,” Justmann said. “This herb has been in existence since the beginning of mankind. It’s not like heroin, which has to be processed. It grows naturally. Please don’t let legislation turn us into criminals. We can use cannabis and be functional in our pain.
“Why deny something that’s going to give us comfort?” he added. “So it’s all right to get loaded and have cocktails but someone who is sick can’t help themselves to stop the nausea? That’s wrong? Do you mind if I get a decent night’s sleep?”
The county’s three lead law enforcement officials – Sheriff Curtis Hill, Hollister Police Chief Jeff Miller and CHP Commander Otto Knorr – also weighed in on the issue of a medical marijuana registry. None of the lawmen had an issue with it. They said they expect fraud to occur – as it does with all laws – but didn’t expect they’d have to contend with a rash of fake IDs. The cards are uniform throughout the state.
Hill took it further, however, when he told the supervisors he had already drawn up draft resolutions for them to consider: one to heavily regulate any future medical marijuana dispensary in the county, and another to outright ban the concept.
Botelho thought the latter was a grand idea.
“I advise making a resolution to ban dispensaries,” Botelho said.
Monaco jumped back into the discussion, and managed to get Botelho’s attempt to forever ban legal cannabis dispensaries off the table.
“The task at hand is not dispensing,” Monaco said. “Let’s just get this behind us and we’ll deal with dispensaries at a later date.”
Monaco then moved to approve the medical marijuana ID card program, De La Cruz made the second and the vote was unanimous. The fee for obtaining a card has yet to be decided.
Justmann said he hopes the San Benito supervisors reconsider creating a legal dispensary.
“They could be bigger men if they could find out how to make it work,” he offered. “You have to make these things work. People are suffering in your county and you have to look those people in the eye and say, ‘What am I going to do for you?’ What are you going to do, send them up to Alameda County?”
In 1999, the White House commissioned the Institute of Medicine to do a thorough and in-depth study on the possible medical benefits of marijuana. The commission verified that marijuana does have medical benefits and should be made available to patients who need it. Since then, many prestigious medical organizations and scientific groups have fallen suit with the study, and advocate for the legalization of medical marijuana.
Since 1996, eleven states, including Nevada and Hawaii, have legalized medical marijuana, contrary to federal law.
For more information about San Benito County’s medical marijuana ID cards, call the Health Department at 831-636-4180.
