The People Have Spoken (Twice): Open Montana Dispensaries Now, Not Next July
A state law that limited medical marijuana providers to three patients apiece took effect on Aug. 31 after a five-year battle, leaving thousands of registered users without legal access to the drug.
Earlier this month, Montana voters passed Initiative 182 to repeal the three-patient limit, but the writers of the ballot measure accidentally put in a July 1, 2017, effective date, instead of making it immediately effective.
One lawsuit was filed Tuesday and another was to be filed this week asking District Judge James Reynolds of Helena to issue an order that would re-open marijuana dispensaries immediately.
You and I and everybody else knows that when the public voted on I-182, they didnt get into the minutia of the effective date, said James Goetz, a Bozeman attorney representing the Montana Cannabis Industry Association. Lets get on with it and help these poor people who want their medicine and cant get it.
The Montana Cannabis Industry Association is asking Reynolds to rule that the delayed effective date was the result of whats known as a scriveners error that courts can correct.
Another advocacy group, Montanans Ensuring Access to Natural Medicine, released a draft update to a separate lawsuit it filed in September with four medical marijuana patients. That lawsuit is also before Reynolds, and it asks the judge to rule that the three-patient limit is unconstitutional and to block it from being enforced until the initiative takes effect July 1.
Such a ruling also would allow dispensaries to reopen immediately.
Reynolds was the judge who handled the legal challenge to the Montana Legislatures 2011 law that included the three-patient limit and other restrictions on the drug. Reynolds twice blocked that provision of ...
