January 11, 2010 07:16 PM UTC

Romer (For Mayor?) Abandons "Middle Ground" Medical Pot Bill

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• by: Colorado Pols

As the Denver Post reports:

The fight to regulate the rapidly growing number of medical-marijuana dispensaries took a drastic swing toward shutting down the hundreds of Colorado storefronts after state Sen. Chris Romer announced Sunday that a pending pot bill would reflect the wishes of law enforcement groups.

The attorney general, sheriff’s organizations and police groups want a five-person limit on the number of patients a pot provider – dubbed a “caregiver” – can serve.

Romer, a Democrat from Denver, said the bill reflecting that cap will likely be introduced once the legislative session starts Wednesday by state Rep. Tom Massey, R-Poncha Springs, who could not be reached for comment.

It’s a stark departure from Romer’s original bill, which would have required dispensaries to provide other health services and to register their products in a database for law enforcement purposes.

Romer, at one point the dispensaries’ most vocal legislative champion, distanced himself from the new bill and said the concession follows a Friday-afternoon meeting with the governor and law enforcement representatives. He also blamed pot advocates for being too resistant to regulation.

“Almost all the cannabis people thought my bill was too restrictive. Maybe they need to wake up,” Romer said. “When the sheriffs roll their bill out, they’ll understand how reasonable my bill really was.”

It’s an interesting situation now, where the prospect of no legislative guidance on the hot-button issue of medical marijuana dispensaries seems increasingly likely unless something is done. The police-supported bill from Tom Massey is considered by many legislators to be far too restrictive to pass in its current form, but without some kind of regulation of this ‘budding’ industry at the state level, local governments are likely to continue passing starkly variable regulations of their own. On the other side, potential business owners and investors need a regulatory framework to provide security for their investment, and constitutionally-sanctioned medical marijuana consumers need a legitimate source for their medication.

Overarching all of this is a persistent feeling in the legislature that the state has far more important matters to attend to right now than a ‘crackdown’ on medical marijuana. Speaker Terrance Carroll reacted cooly to Chris Romer’s bill for this reason, we can’t imagine he’ll like Massey’s bill any better. Politically speaking, too much of this talk could also be troublesome for Democrats getting out the vote among young liberals–an important component of the Barack Obama electorate.

Our view is pretty uncomplicated: we think patients should be able to get what Amendment 20 guarantees them without having to venture into the criminal underworld to get it (which, curiously, is what the law enforcement-favored bill would seem to do), and we would really, really like to help balance the budget with all this wonderful new taxable economic activity.

As for Romer, it doesn’t seem like he’s made very many friends on either side of this issue despite his attempt to play the broker. Law enforcement thought he was making too many concessions to ‘the potheads,’ and the well-organized dispensary owners thought he was too friendly to interests who would just as soon see the feds shut down medical marijuana in Colorado entirely–constitution or no constitution. In the case of Attorney General John Suthers, like it was for his predecessor Ken Salazar, the latter is pretty much accurate.

Epilogue: Romer’s name is in play (among several) as a possible candidate for Denver Mayor should John Hickenlooper make the jump to the gubernatorial race, and Denver has voted twice to fully decriminalize marijuana–do you suppose that’s why he’s backing away from this issue?