Butte – On Harrison Avenue, a billboard blares the slogan “NO POT SHOPS.” On either side of the sign – a campaign ad opposing a citizen ballot initiative to fix Montana’s gutted medical marijuana program – sit two shuttered dispensaries.
Although Montana voters overwhelmingly passed an initiative legalizing medical marijuana in 2004, a Republican-dominated Legislature effectively destroyed the program in 2011 with bill that finally went into effect Aug. 31 of this year, after a lengthy court fight.
Among a litany of new restrictions, Senate Bill 423 capped the number of patients each provider could serve at three, making profitable operation of a dispensary – where most patients get their marijuana – impossible.
Within two weeks, 93 percent of the 12,730 patients registered with the state health department’s medical marijuana program lacked a provider. According to an October report from the health department, 5,249 patients dropped out of the program in a little over a month, 40 percent of all enrollees.
“It’s only a matter of time before it creates this big black market,” said JJ Thomas, owner of the Marijuana Company, the dispensary just across the street from the “NO POT SHOPS” sign.
Thomas closed up shop after SB 423 went into effect, the sign on his dispensary promising patients they’d reopen in November if ballot initiative 182 passes.
I-182 would remove the three-patient limit for providers and retool the state’s medical marijuana program, replacing one that as of now mostly exists on paper.
“The drug task force in Butte actually called me and made me take down all of my signage on the building because in SB 423 it’s illegal to advertise a marijuana business, even though I was closed and I’m no longer providing,” Thomas said.
If I-182 passes and Thomas can start growing again, he still won’t be able to serve all his former patients until he’s regrown his stock.
“It’ll be a slow rebuilding process, the better part of a year probably to get back to where we were before we closed,” Thomas said.
Patient cut off by law and crime
One of JJ’s cut-off patients is Rene Glenn, who lives just down the street from the Marijuana Company. Glenn was hit by a van while riding her bike at 11 years old, bruising the right frontal lobe of her brain. In the 27 years since, Glenn said the only skill her damaged brain has let her retain the knowledge of is driving a car. Damage to the right frontal lobe makes decision-making difficult, but since Glenn enrolled in Montana’s medical marijuana program in 2009, she’s achieved the clarity she needs to care for her three kids.
“If Mom does better, the family does better,” Glenn said.
Legally disabled since childhood, Glenn’s had a rougher year than usual. Last July, a hospital nurse found Glenn’s 16-year-old son Jordan unconscious and bleeding from his head next to his bike in front of the post office. He was airlifted to Billings’ St. Vincent Hospital for neurosurgery while Glenn and the rest of the family drove the 200 miles on Interstate 90. Glenn said Jordan wasn’t expected to survive and they all wanted to be there to say goodbye.
They wouldn’t have to, though it took months for Jordan to recover enough to leave the hospital. Without her medical marijuana, Glenn said she couldn’t have made it through the eight weeks the family spent in the Ronald McDonald House as Jordan lay in an artificially-induced coma, dripping spinal fluid out his nose as surgeons rebuilt his skull.
Glenn said Jordan was lucky to avoid the brain damage she didn’t and that he brought home a report card of straight As at the end of spring semester.
Around the same time, the Marijuana Company warned Glenn that the new law limiting dispensaries to three patients might come into effect before the election, so the family pinched pennies to stockpile enough medical marijuana to last until early November in the hope I-182 would pass.
Glenn didn’t count on a neighbor from down the street breaking into her house and stealing a third of her marijuana and the rest of the family’s other medications less than a month before the election.
She said Jordan was upstairs during the burglary, terrified and clutching a baseball bat. He recognized the burglar’s voice when the intruder tried to pacify the family dog, and police later arrested the man after finding a pill bottle under Glenn’s name in his garage. Police haven’t found Glenn’s marijuana, and she doesn’t expect them to. Glenn said she’ll run out just shy of Election Day, with no legal way of filling her prescription. She’s desperate, having been cut off from medical marijuana by both sides of the law.
“Do they want us to go back to the dealers on the street? Is that what they want us to do?” Glenn said.
The man holding the sign
The main opponent of I-182 is Billings car dealer Steve Zabawa.
Zabawa paid for the “NO POT SHOPS” signs peppering Western Montana cities and has spent, by his own estimate, more than $100,000 opposing medical marijuana in this election cycle – first at the head of a failed ballot initiative and now as the head of Safe Montana, the main opposition group to I-182.
For all intents and purposes, Zabawa is the entire organized opposition. Nearly all of the money donated to Safe Montana came from his pockets and according to campaign finance reports, the group has received donations from only eight people other than Zabawa: two Miles City ranchers ($100 and $50); a Victor drug court coordinator ($100); a researcher from Johns Hopkins University ($50); Montana Supreme Court candidate and UM law professor Kristen Juras ($50); a Billings medical transcriptionist ($100); a retired Bozeman man ($100); and Robert Saunders, a wealthy 27-year-old Billings candidate for Legislature who listed an address in Sheridan, Wyoming ($1,500).
Zabawa’s no stranger to marijuana, admitting he smoked in college and after graduation until he had a son. He was even among the majority of Montanans who voted to legalize medical marijuana in Montana in 2004.
He turned against the current incarnation of medical marijuana during what some call the height of the system abuse around 2010. That was when traveling doctors tripled enrollment in just a little over a year, sparking backlash from the Republican Legislature in the form of SB 423. When a dispensary opened down the street from his child’s junior high school, Zabawa felt betrayed by the program he voted to create.
Despite claims to the contrary, Zabawa said he supports medical marijuana but that both the current system and I-182 are designed for drug dealers and abusers to operate within the confines of the law. He supports a highly regulated medical system with FDA-approved marijuana coming from a pharmacist, not the system in place now – and definitely not legalized recreational marijuana.
According to Zabawa, recreational marijuana is a gateway to abusing other drugs, claiming Colorado’s legalization in 2013 led to a meth epidemic. He said everyone in Montana knows legalized recreational marijuana is the true endgame of the I-182 medical movement and that “most people aren’t going to get tricked twice on the compassion pitch.”
“They’ve seen the tragedy in Colorado and don’t want that in Montana,” he said.
While Zabawa believes medical marijuana is helpful for some patients, he considers even the deflated number of patients too high. “How many of them do you think really need that medicine?” he said.
Zabawa asserts that most medical marijuana patients in Montana are drug addicts faking illnesses to get high legally. He claims to have traveled the state extensively and talked to thousands of patients about their illnesses, determining most of them did not need medical marijuana by their own admission.
He said it doesn’t matter that most patients are cut off from medical marijuana by the three-patients-per-provider law, because they don’t need it and the law weeds them out and serves those who do.
Zabawa dismisses claims by patients that they can’t afford to grow, saying that if their life really depended on marijuana as they claim, they’d find a way. He said the market as it exists now will strain out the fakers as real patients cover their needs through small-scale cooperative grows.
The pot against America
Zabawa views I-182 as an existential threat to the families of Montana.
Though offering no hard evidence, Zabawa claims a vast conspiracy between the Montana Commissioner of Political Practices and interstate drug cartels masquerading as local medical dispensaries to pave the way for the legalization of recreational marijuana through a faux medical-only ballot initiative funded by dark-money narco dollars.
Zabawa said I-182 isn’t meant to help the sick but to open up Montana to recreational marijuana. He claims the Yes on I-182 initiative group is actually a front for their largest donor, the Montana Cannabis Industry Association, which he contends is itself a front for an interstate drug cartel disguised as the Bozeman-based medical marijuana dispensary Montana Buds.
In a five-page complaint to the Montana Commissioner of Political Practices, Zabawa pointed to the September federal indictment of Montana Buds owner Chuck Campbell on marijuana distribution charges – carrying potential life sentences if convicted – as evidence of illegal drug money funding I-182. Calling Campbell the largest provider of marijuana in the state and a significant donor to the Montana Cannabis Industry Association, Zabawa said that “if nearly $200,000 spent to fund the I-182 campaign is being funded by gains from the sale of illegal recreational marijuana, Montana voters have a right to know.”
Commissioner of Political Practices Jonathan Motl rejected Zabawa’s complaint, saying the accusations were completely unfounded. He also ruled against Safe Montana and Zabawa himself on multiple campaign finance violations reported to his office by Yes on I-182.
After the rejection of his complaint, Zabawa expanded on his allegations of corruption in an interview with the Standard, calling Motl “the largest source of dark money in Montana.” He said Motl ruled in favor of Yes on I-182 because he is best friends with CB Pearson, the Montana head of M+R, a policy strategy group Yes on I-182 hired to push their campaign.
“I’m not telling you anything that isn’t 1,000 percent true,” Zabawa said.
“That entire statement is nonsensical,” said Motl, who compared Zabawa’s relationship to the realities of campaign finance to “a bull in a china shop.”
Motl said he’s not “best friends” with Pearson and that the two simply volunteered together 10 years ago at Montana Common Cause, a now-defunct government corruption watchdog. Motl said he would have recused himself – as required by law – from addressing Zabawa’s complaint if he had business or personal relationships with any of the involved parties.
Chuck Campbell’s attorney, Herman Watson, called Zabawa’s accusations regarding Motl and Campbell “pathetic.”
“Steve can have as much fun as he wants to with the truth but if he keeps lying about people publicly, he’s going to get in trouble,” Watson said. “I would suggest that if he keeps making unfounded allegations of illegal conduct, that he probably ought to get a good lawyer.”
“This isn’t the first time Zabawa has been incorrect. This referendum is going to pass regardless of what he says or does,” Watson said.
Zabawa disagrees.
“People are going to vote loud and clear.” Zabawa said, “You’re going to see that.”
News Moderator: Katelyn Baker 420 MAGAZINE ®
Full Article: Medical Marijuana Patients Desperate – Opponent Claims Cartel Conspiracy
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