What a difference two years make.
In the summer of 2009, medical marijuana dispensaries were sprouting like weeds throughout the state, buoyed by a state court case and new federal interpretation of medical marijuana enforcement. Those dispensaries operated unfettered by any local regulations and only modest state rules that were established by a decade-old constitutional amendment and interpreted in a variety of ways by different authorities.
But this is the summer of 2011, and voters in a host of communities throughout Colorado have banned medical marijuana dispensaries from within their boundaries.
For the dispensaries that remain in Colorado and for the caregivers who still can provide medical marijuana, even in communities where dispensaries have been banned new state regulations took effect July 1 that will change substantially the way they operate.
Some dispensary owners and caregivers say the new rules are so heavy handed that they just may drop out of the business.
Pardon us for not being overly sympathetic to their lament, but the new state regulations are hardly onerous or unreasonable.
Among other things, they require background checks for everyone working in the medical marijuana business to screen out felons and use video surveillance of pot growing and selling operations to keep the drug from being sold on the black market. In addition, caregivers, who can serve up to five patients and dont have retail outlets, will have new registration requirements that include mandates that they list what they are growing and for whom.
One Front Range dispensary owner said she planned to close her shops, according to an Associated Press story in The Daily Sentinel last Monday. She referred to the new rules as Big Brother tracking.
But those rules are the direct result of the situation that developed in 2009 the Wild West atmosphere that prevailed, when there were almost no clear rules and anyone with a predilection for pot could open a dispensary and a growing operation.
Many Coloradans grew understandably skeptical whether all that retailing was truly serving only those with real ailments that marijuana could alleviate.
Furthermore, its become abundantly clear through votes on dispensary bans throughout the state that most Coloradans who voted for a medical marijuana amendment in 2000 didnt foresee or approve of creating a massive marijuana retail industry in the state.
Under that 2000 amendment, Coloradans have a right to use medical marijuana if their physicians say it could help alleviate their medical symptoms. But the state has an equal right to regulate medical marijuana to ensure that operations related to it are safe and that the pot doesnt end up in the wrong hands.
Thats exactly what the rules that took effect Friday aim to do.
