Like most people looking for marijuana, Bobby Ebert used to turn to a drug dealer. But unlike those who use the plant for recreation, Ebert relies on it for medication and needs a safe supply he can count on. And though he's registered with the state as a legal medical marijuana user, he still struggles with finding a trustworthy source for his medication.
Ebert, who is 48, smokes marijuana to help with pain caused by neuropathy and a bad back and to help lessen the nausea caused by his AIDS medication. He now relies on appointed caregivers for marijuana, but sometimes they don't come through, and the variability among the plants can be tricky to navigate.
But soon Ebert may no longer have to worry about tracking down his medicine from these sometimes unreliable sources.
Almost two years after Rhode Island began allowing medical marijuana, the state legislature is looking for a way to get marijuana to patients without relying on the illegal drug trade.
On Feb. 26, State Sen. Rhoda Perry P'91 and State Rep. Thomas Slater, both Democrats, introduced a bill that would give the state's 357 medical marijuana patients legal access to their medication. The new bill - essentially an amendment to the Edward O. Hawkins and Thomas C. Slater Medical Marijuana Act of 2006 - calls for the creation of a nonprofit, Department of Health-controlled "compassion center."
The compassion center would be able to "acquire, possess, cultivate, manufacture, deliver, transfer, transport, supply, or dispense marijuana, or related supplies and educational materials" to patients and caregivers, according to the bill.
To receive a license for medical marijuana today, a patient must have a doctor sign a Department of Health form stating "that medical marijuana will do more good than harm," says Jesse Stout '06, executive director of the Rhode Island Patient Advocacy Coalition, known as "Rhode Island's non-profit grassroots medical marijuana community," according to the group's Web site.
"We register patients who have specific qualifying diagnoses, and they have to be certified by their physician," says Charles Alexandre, chief of Health Professions Regulation at the Health Department.
There is no provision on how to get the marijuana, Alexandre says, so patients must use their caregivers to obtain the marijuana. A person with a license for medical marijuana can appoint two caregivers. But these caregivers can be unreliable, and the strains of marijuana can vary, Stout says.
The bill was referred to the Rhode Island Senate Health and Human Services committee and the House Health, Education and Welfare committee, and hearings are set to take place within the next couple weeks, according to Perry.
"We're giving patients somewhere to go" by creating "this safe-access mechanism," Stout says. A compassion center would give patients a "store to go to" like they would for any other medicine. They would "also have the benefit of reliability and consistency," he says.
"A lot of people end up going to street dealers," Stout says. "We're trying to address this by making it so sick people have a safe and regulated place to access this medicine."
Finding a source for his medical marijuana was sometimes "scary," says Ebert, who used to work for rock bands in New England, especially when "your own caregiver is threatening to take something from you." One of Ebert's caregivers was acting more like a street dealer, he says, threatening him and trying to take money from him. "He was just thinking about money."
The new legislation would also allow patients to legally give marijuana to one another and give them the option of having the Department of Health tell them about any clinical medical marijuana studies.
Stout says he "envision(s) a compassion center that is able to offer reduced price or even free marijuana for patients who are poor."
RIPAC faces opposition from the governor, and Stout expects the legislation to run into a veto eventually. "Hopefully we'll have enough time for an override," he says.
Though some may worry that medical marijuana will be approved for those who don't really need it, "experience so far ... tells me that we're actually having the reverse problem," Stout wrote in an e-mail to The Herald. "Some doctors have not read the law yet and won't recommend marijuana because they still think it's illegal."
The state police opposed the legalization of medical marijuana in 2006, Stout says. "They didn't want to see patients go to drug dealers," he says.
Now that the legislation includes state regulation of medical marijuana, Stout expects the police to be more supportive.
The history of marijuana as medicine can be traced back over 4,000 years, Stout says. "People were using marijuana as medicine ... way before we had governments," he says. But marijuana's role in medicine didn't fully reemerge until the 1990s when "states started passing new laws allowing medical marijuana research and use."
But Peter Friedmann, an associate professor of medicine who studies substance abuse, is not convinced of the drug's medicinal usefulness. "I'm not sure that its benefits for pain are known even now," he wrote in an e-mail to The Herald.
"I'm one of those folks who believes we need more studies to really know what the long-term effects are," Friedmann says. In general, the medical community agrees with this, he says.
"Within the medical community, there probably is consensus that we need more information in terms of the types of conditions for which it might be useful," Friedman says. "But there probably are some conditions it will prove to be useful for."
Still, Friedmann worries about the potential for abuse. "For the various indications for which we would use medical marijuana, there are other compounds that are less abusive," he says. There are "plenty of good medications" for glaucoma other than marijuana, he says.
"The fact that it has psychoactive effects makes it potentially abusable, and I have concerns whether we need to make commercially available another potentially abusable substance," Friedmann says.
Stout admits that there is some possibility for addiction, but he says marijuana is only psychologically, not physically, addictive.
"(It's) true that there is some dependence potential, like any other substance," Stout says. But he thinks getting patients effective medicine for "severe, debilitating, chronic symptoms" is more important than whether they're using more of the drug than necessary.
"It's helped me a lot," Ebert says. Before he started using medical marijuana, Ebert took opiate painkillers. But they "made me so sick," he says.
"Those things will mess up your life so bad - it's phenomenal," Ebert says. But medical marijuana is different."It's natural - if it's grown right."
"It's totally different from being addicted to those other drugs where I didn't know where I was and I didn't like myself," Ebert says. "It's a shame to see all these people messed up on drugs ... and it's legal."
Now, Ebert is trying to build support for the new legislation.
"I've got a lot of support behind me ... and I'm helping other people before I go."
