Medical marijuana card renewal: Eight months starting now?

• George don't forget this is a democracy and the old guard are dying. Have a nice evening. Peace.

• Thanks for the advice, George. But I have a job: reviewing marijuana and marijuana dispensaries for this paper.

• Good! now take the time to get a job and get off the bong and quit the dope.

• The application form for minors has been corrected. Notice that the Department breaks apart the word "caregiver" into "care-giver", likely reflecting its insistence on ignoring the special sense of the word as used in Article XVIII, Section 14 of our Constitution and presaging its intent again to try to require that medicinal cannabis providers (caregivers) become personal assistants to their five-or-fewer patients. The recommendation form asks doctors to opine as to whether patients are homebound -- again, likely because of the Department's design on caregivers. The CDPHE has demonstrated a history of minimal compliance, non-compliance, and malfeasance in its administration of the medicinal cannabis program and has been found by the District Court to have violated Colorado's open government law repeatedly. The people at the Department who have failed to abide by the law must be dismissed; instead, they are proceeding to divert patients' fees for purposes unrelated to the medical marijuana program and are acting directly against the Constitutional provision and enabling legislation they have been obligated to implement for over a decade.

• Calonge claims that no one wants to clear the backlog of applications more than he does, and I believe it is true that the CDPHE asked for more staff, but the fact is that his and the Department's obsession with curtailing supposed medical fraud completely outweighed all other considerations, certainly including the explicit provisions of the Constitution regarding the processing of applications. SB109 was written largely to their specifications, and it is all about stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars out of the medical marijuana program fund to finance a Grand Inquisition of recommending physicians by the CDPHE and Board of Medical Examiners, not about meeting the constitutional mandates imposed on the Department ten years ago. The real issue of concern is that the Department apparently is trying to use its nonfeasance as an axcuse now to return all those backlogged applications -- for whiteouts or mistakes if it can find them, but on the pretext of nonpayment of the registration fee (because the Department has allowed all the checks and money orders accompanying the applications it is processing to expire) if it cannot. The CDPHE is in almost complete noncompliance with the requirement that it administer the medical cannabis program spelled out in the Constitution and the Colorado Revised Statutes. We need patients to sue the CDPHE, the State in general (against both the shameful, blatantly unconstitutional bills passed by the General Assembly), and all the public officials who are failing to do their jobs and deliberately violating Colorado law. I have been trying to get the Department to confirm that it plans to return all applications with payments it has failed to cash for well over a week without a response -- I'll try again tomorrow. P.S. The CDPHE in its ineptitude today released an erroneous, illegal form for patients under the age of twenty-one -- no patient eighteen or over should use this form. Supposedly the Department is correcting it -- it was so sure that Romer would succeed in putting language into HB1284 directly contradicting Article XVIII, Section 14's age requirements that it went ahead and produced this form even though a month has elapsed since the bill became law without that particularly offensive provision in place. The CDPHE's incompetence is the only saving grace in its administration of the medical cannabis program.

• Damn now I feel like I should cut and paste something.

• Article XVIII, Section 14, Sub-paragraph 3(c) states: (c) Within thirty days of receiving the information referred to in subparagraphs (3)(b)(I)-(IV), the state health agency shall verify medical information contained in the patient's written documentation. The agency shall notify the applicant that his or her application for a registry identification card has been denied if the agency's review of such documentation discloses that: the information required pursuant to paragraph (3)(b) of this section has not been provided or has been falsified; the documentation fails to state that the patient has a debilitating medical condition specified in this section or by state health agency rule; or the physician does not have a license to practice medicine issued by the state of Colorado. Otherwise, not more than five days after verifying such information, the state health agency shall issue one serially numbered registry identification card to the patient, stating: (I) The patient's name, address, date of birth, and social security number; (II) That the patient's name has been certified to the state health agency as a person who has a debilitating medical condition, whereby the patient may address such condition with the medical use of marijuana; (III) The date of issuance of the registry identification card and the date of expiration of such card, which shall be one year from the date of issuance; and (IV) The name and address of the patient's primary care-giver, if any is designated at the time of application. So, why is CDPHE allowed to continually break the law? Many applicants, including myself, have been waiting for months.

• 1) In response to passage of California's medical marijuana law, the White House had the Institute of Medicine (IOM) review the data on marijuana's medical benefits and risks. The IOM concluded, "Nausea, appetite loss, pain and anxiety are all afflictions of wasting, and all can be mitigated by marijuana." While noting potential risks of smoking, the report added, "we acknowledge that there is no clear alternative for people suffering from chronic conditions that might be relieved by smoking marijuana, such as pain or AIDS wasting." The government's refusal to acknowledge this finding caused co-author John A. Benson to tell the New York Times that the government "loves to ignore our report � they would rather it never happened." Joy, JE, Watson, SJ, and Benson, JA. Marijuana and Medicine: Assessing the Science Base. National Academy Press. 1999. p. 159. See also, Harris, G. FDA Dismisses Medical Benefit From Marijuana. New York Times. Apr. 21, 2006 2) Donald Tashkin, a UCLA researcher whose work is funded by NIDA, did a case-control study comparing 1,200 patients with lung, head and neck cancers to a matched group with no cancer. Even the heaviest marijuana smokers had no increased risk of cancer, and had somewhat lower cancer risk than non-smokers (tobacco smokers had a 20-fold increased lung cancer risk). Tashkin D. Marijuana Use and Lung Cancer: Results of a Case-Control Study. American Thoracic Society International Conference. May 23, 2006. 3) Researchers at the Kaiser-Permanente HMO, funded by NIDA, followed 65,000 patients for nearly a decade, comparing cancer rates among non-smokers, tobacco smokers, and marijuana smokers. Tobacco smokers had massively higher rates of lung cancer and other cancers. Marijuana smokers who didn't also use tobacco had no increase in risk of tobacco-related cancers or of cancer risk overall. In fact their rates of lung and most other cancers were slightly lower than non-smokers, though the difference did not reach statistical significance. Sidney, S. et al. Marijuana Use and Cancer Incidence (California, United States). Cancer Causes and Control. Vol. 8. Sept. 1997, p. 722-728. 4) In a 1994 study the government tried to suppress, federal researchers gave mice and rats massive doses of THC, looking for cancers or other signs of toxicity. The rodents given THC lived longer and had fewer cancers, "in a dose-dependent manner" (i.e. the more THC they got, the fewer tumors). NTP Technical Report On The Toxicology And Carcinogenesis Studies Of 1-Trans- Delta-9-Tetrahydrocannabinol, CAS No. 1972-08-3, In F344/N Rats And B6C3F Mice, Gavage Studies. See also, "Medical Marijuana: Unpublished Federal Study Found THC-Treated Rats Lived Longer, Had Less Cancer," AIDS Treatment News no. 263, Jan. 17, 1997. 5) Federal researchers implanted several types of cancer, including leukemia and lung cancers, in mice, then treated them with cannabinoids (unique, active components found in marijuana). THC and other cannabinoids shrank tumors and increased the mice's lifespans. Munson, AE et al. Antineoplastic Activity of Cannabinoids. Journal of the National Cancer Institute. Sept. 1975. p. 597-602.

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