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Medical marijuana dispensers trapped by conflicting laws (w/video)

 
Published April 9, 2015

BLOOMFIELD, N.M. — Charles C. Lynch seemed to be doing everything right when he opened a medical marijuana dispensary in the tidy coastal town of Morro Bay, Calif.

The mayor, the city attorney and leaders of the local Chamber of Commerce all came for the ribbon-cutting in 2006. The conditions for his business license, including a ban on customers younger than 18 and compliance with California's medical marijuana laws, were posted on the wall.

But two years later, Lynch was convicted of multiple felonies under federal law for selling marijuana. He is one of hundreds of defendants and prisoners caught up in the stark conflict between federal law, which puts marijuana in the same class as heroin with no exception for medical sales, and the decisions by many states to authorize medical uses.

"I feel so left out of society," said Lynch, 52, who is out on bail and appealing his conviction, from a battered trailer behind his mother's house here in northwestern New Mexico. He is waiting to see if he must go to prison.

Now, though, a legal wild card has been injected into his case and those of several other defendants in California and Washington state.

In December, in a little-publicized amendment to the 2015 appropriations bill that one legal scholar called a "buried land mine," Congress barred the Justice Department from spending any money to prevent states from "implementing their own state laws that authorize the use, distribution, possession, or cultivation of medical marijuana."

In the most advanced test of the law yet, Lynch's lawyers have asked the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeal to "direct the D.O.J. to cease spending funds on the case."

But the Justice Department strongly disagrees, saying the amendment does not undercut its power to enforce federal drug law. It says the amendment only bars federal agencies from interfering with state efforts to carry out medical marijuana laws, and that it does not preclude criminal prosecutions for violations of the Controlled Substances Act.

With the new challenge raised in several cases, federal judges will have to weigh in soon, opening a new arena in a legal field already rife with contradiction and paradox. At latest count, 23 states plus the District of Columbia permit medical marijuana. Four states have authorized recreational sales as well.

"If any court, especially the 9th Circuit, declares that the provision precludes federal prosecution of state-compliant individuals, this will be huge," said Douglas A. Berman, a professor at the Moritz College of Law at Ohio State University and editor of the Marijuana Law, Policy & Reform blog.