Charles Wynott of Westbrook heard the reaction over and over again last year while he was out gathering signatures to put Maine's new-and-improved medical marijuana law on the ballot.
"People kept saying, 'I thought we already did this,'" said Wynott.
They thought right. It's been almost 10 years since Mainers voted 61 to 39 percent to make marijuana legal for people with cancer, HIV/AIDs and other medical problems known to be alleviated by a few puffs of pot – provided they have a letter from their doctor indicating the treatment is legitimate.
But the citizen-initiated statute, however popular a decade ago, has always suffered from a glaring Catch-22: While a qualified patient can possess as much as an ounce and a quarter of marijuana, there's no legal way to obtain it.
Meaning that before you enjoy the protection of one law, you first have to break another.
Come November, that could change.
Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap announced Monday that the Maine Marijuana Policy Initiative has cleared the 55,087-signature threshold needed to put its "Maine Medical Marijuana Act" on this fall's ballot.
The lengthy piece of legislation would change lots of things – upping the legal possession limit to 2 ounces, creating an official patient registry complete with state-issued identification cards, even expanding the list of "debilitating medical conditions" to include things like Alzheimer's and Crohn's diseases.
But of all the changes, none will generate more buzz (so to speak) in the coming months than the creation of "nonprofit dispensaries" around Maine to sell marijuana to card-carrying customers.
Why? Because regardless of what Maine and a dozen other states with medical marijuana laws may say, the federal government still considers pot illegal – with no exceptions.
And while the feds have generally shown little interest in going after individual patients and their modest stashes, its drug agents have made headlines repeatedly in recent years raiding medical-marijuana dispensaries in California – the only state that now authorizes them.
The vast majority of the raids in California occurred under the Bush administration's gung-ho Drug Enforcement Administration.
And while yet another bust occurred just two days after President Obama took office last month, the new administration later promised that the DEA heretofore will have better things to do than interfere with the legitimate use and distribution of medical marijuana.
Still, fellow Mainers, we have an important choice to make.
Do we leave well enough alone until the federal government comes to its senses and explicitly declares medical-marijuana patients noncombatants in the anything-but-successful war on drugs?
Or do we pass this law, give legitimate patients the weed they need to make life more bearable and, in the process, tell our friends in Washington, D.C., to wake up and smell the cannabis?
Jonathan Leavitt, executive director of the Maine Marijuana Policy Initiative, predicts the latter.
"Our polling indicates that there is overwhelmingly strong support for this across the state, across party lines, across genders and across age," Leavitt said.
The Maine Marijuana Policy Initiative's long-range objective is to decriminalize marijuana completely and instead tax and regulate it.
But the goal right now, Leavitt said, "is for qualified medical patients to be able to get their medicine."
Wynott, who recently founded the Maine chapter of Americans for Safe Access, agreed.
HIV-positive for 20 of his 44 years, Wynott said marijuana has worked wonders in alleviating the pain and discomfort stemming from his disease and treatment.
And while he's twice succeeded in using Maine's current law as defense against possession citations, he's well aware of the statute's limitations.
Wynott said his organization frequently hears from ailing Mainers who might well qualify for medical marijuana. The problem is, they haven't a clue how to get their hands on it.
"There's no real way for us, as a legitimate organization, to get them access to it," he said. As a result, "right now it's all happening on the underground."
If you or someone you know has been there and done that, Wynott asks that you give him a call at 854-9272 or e-mail him at charleswynott@yahoo.com.
"We're not trying to recruit by any means," Wynott said. "We just want to know who's out there."
It's about time.
Columnist Bill Nemitz can be contacted at 791-6323 or at:
bnemitz@pressherald.com
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