Closed.

Medical marijuana dispensaries are not allowed in Michigan. The Michigan Supreme Court upheld a lower court ruling that the medical marijuana initiative approved by voters in 2008 does not allow registered patients to sell medical marijuana to other registered patients. Patients are still allowed to grow their own medical marijuana. From the Court’s opinion:

Nevertheless, the immunity from arrest, prosecution, or penalty provided to a registered qualifying patient in § 4 of the MMMA for engaging in the medical use of marijuana can be rebutted upon a showing “that conduct related to marihuana was not for the purpose of alleviating the qualifying patient’s debilitating medical condition or symptoms associated with the debilitating medical condition, in accordance with this act.”5 Because the MMMA’s immunity provision clearly contemplates that a registered qualifying patient’s medical use of marijuana only occur for the purpose of alleviating his own debilitating medical condition or symptoms associated with his debilitating medical condition, and not another patient’s condition or symptoms, § 4 does not authorize a registered qualifying patient to transfer marijuana to another registered qualifying patient. Accordingly, while the Court of Appeals erred by excluding sales from the definition of “medical use,” we affirm on alternative grounds its conclusion that the MMMA does not contemplate patient-to-patient sales of marijuana for medical use and that, by facilitating such sales, defendants’ business constituted a public nuisance.

(emphasis mine)

The Michigan Supreme Court is the highest court in the state so this ruling is final. To legally get medical marijuana dispensaries in Michigan will likely require a new law either approved by the state legislature or adopted by the state’s ballot initiative process.

In the meantime patients in Michigan may find it more difficult to get access to medical marijuana.

Photo by O’Dea under Creative Commons license

Medical marijuana dispensary (photo: Thomas Hawk)

The problem is not that Harborside has been involved in any form of tax evasion or attempts to defraud the government. The issue is that the IRS has determined that an obscure provision of a 1982 federal law prevents a marijuana dispensary from qualifying for the standard deductions that any other normal business could use. From the San Francisco Chronicle:

Harborside Health Center owes the Internal Revenue Service back taxes for 2007 and 2008, based on a federal law prohibiting marijuana dispensaries – unlike other businesses – from deducting payroll, insurance, rent, workers’ compensation and other operating costs from its revenues.

“We think this assessment is unfair and inaccurate. We have no choice but to fight this,” said Harborside executive director Steve DeAngelo. “I’m profoundly concerned on behalf of our patients.”

As part of the case study, we use Los Angeles’s experience ordering the close of hundreds of dispensaries to test the commonly held belief that medical marijuana dispensaries increase local crime. Contrary to conventional wisdom, press accounts, and some statements by law enforcement, our analysis suggests that the closing of the medical marijuana dispensaries is associated with an increase—rather than the expected decrease—in local crime in a short-term ten-day period. Overall crime increased almost 60 percent in the blocks surrounding closed clinics in the ten days following their closing. We offer a variety of plausible hypotheses to explain this finding. Further research is necessary to determine whether the effect is truly the result of marijuana dispensaries preventing crime in the local neighborhood. Although the current study cannot offer a definitive answer as to why crime increased around closed dispensaries, it should give jurisdictions reason to question the commonly held view that dispensaries attract and even cause crime in their neighborhoods.

The conventional wisdom that medical marijuana dispensaries cause or increase crime is idiotic. That should have been clear to anyone with a basic understanding of economics.

Nothing about marijuana itself makes people want to commit crimes. The only reason marijuana is associated with crime is because the prohibition against marijuana criminalizes the black market that arises to supply it and undermines incentives to report other crimes to police.

Since it is illegal to sell, dealers can become tempting victims for robbers, because robbers know dealers can’t go to the police for help. This same dynamic could encourage dealers to get illegal weapons for self protection or use violence to settle disputes, since prohibition prevents them from being able to deal with their grievance using the court system. These criminal problems caused solely by prohibition go away when law abiding businesses are allowed to sell marijuana legally.

The reality is that legal medical marijuana dispensaries have all the same incentives as any other legal business to work hard to reduce crime in their communities.   The study suggests that is what the dispensaries have been doing.  Like any legal business, they don’t want their store or employees to be robbed.  They also risk losing costumers if their area has the reputation for being “unsafe.” The dispensaries benefit from putting in security systems and quickly alerting the police to stop any nearby violent crime.

In 2004 Vermont first legalized medical marijuana but under the old system patients were either required to grow their own or get marijuana from the black market. Since raising marijuana to the point it can be harvest takes awhile, patients were potentially be forced to suffer unnecessarily for weeks or months if they didn’t want to break the law.

With a regulated dispensary system patients in Vermont should be able to get relief more quickly.

Gov. Shumlin has proven to be a supporter of more reasonable marijuana policies. During the 2010 election he campaigned on both creating medical marijuana dispensaries and decriminalizing minor possession of marijuana.