State’s Pot Market In a nondescript Seattle building

Medical Question Mark for State’s Pot Market In a nondescript Seattle building, with a strip-mall Starbucks across the street, dozens of marijuana plants sway under electric fans in 79.5-degree warmth, their limbering, strength-building version of hot yoga. To some this is a garden of Eden, full of healing plants that will be sold in the medical marijuana dispensary out Front. To others in the strange new world of regulated, taxed recreational pot, medical marijuana has become a threat, a rival dealer, an enemy of the state.

The state’s pot consultant, Mark Keirnan, says competition From medical marijuana could easily undercut the recreational system the state is trying to create, siphoning away millions in potential taxes. The going price For pot in the largely unregulated, untaxed medical system is about $10 per gram, said Kleiman, a UCLA drug-policy expert. For the state’s new highly taxed system, he said, that is a “very hard number to hit.”

Unlike the recreational system, the medical market also serves minors. And while the recreational system limits adults to possessing an ounce, the medical system allows patients to have a pound and a half of weed. “I don’t think the legal market (state officials] are imagining will be able to compete with the medical market if it remains as wide open as it currently is," Kleiman said. Some lawmakers share his concern.

Key House Democrats sounded the alarm earlier this year with a proposal to slap a 25 percent tax on medical marijuana. Now Senate Republicans and Majority Leader Rodney Tom, D- Mercer Island, are pitching the most sweeping revision of the medical system in the Legislature this year. The bill would impose taxes on medical pot, tighten rules on dispensaries and medical authorizations, and put medical weed under regulators at the Liquor Control Board, the agency implementing Initiative 502, which enacts the state’s recreational-pot system.

In Washington’s marijuana policy hothouse, where views are balkanized, suspicions flourish and egos clash, pot advocates are divided about what—if anything—needs to be done about medical weed. Some support the bill, SB 5887. “We need regulation. I’m tired of the murkiness of the system,” said John Davis, a longtime legalization activist and owner of two Seattle dispensaries. Others are adamantly opposed. Doug Hiatt, an activist and criminal defense attorney, says I-502 all but requires the state to throw medical-marijuana patients under the bus.

“You’ve got to keep a war on drugs going in perpetuity to prop up your state system," Hiatt said. Sen. Jeanne Kohl-Welles, D-Seattle, prime champion of medical marijuana in the state Legislature, is undecided. “[ have to think it through," said Kohl-Welles, adding that she sees “major issues with the bill.” Still others, such as 1-502 author Alison Holcomb, say leave medical marijuana alone for now and give the new law a chance.

Most medical patients will migrate to the recreational market, Holcomb believes, because of its clear legality, lack of stigma and product quality standards. “The bottom line is no one knows what’s going to happen," Davis said, about the state’s new system, untested on the planet. “I’ve been working in drug policy for 20 years and I’m flabbergasted every day because nothing like this has ever happened.”