MI Court: Medical Marijuana Can’t Be Sold In Dispensaries

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Graphic: The Pacific Northwest Inlander

​Medical marijuana dispensaries can be shut down as public nuisances, the Michigan Court of Appeals ruled in a decision announced Wednesday morning.

The three-judge panel, ruling on an Isabella County case, said the Michigan Medical Marihuana Act “does not include the patient-to-patient ‘sales,’ ” report Joe Swickard and John Wisely of the Detroit Free Press.

Unfortunately, the unfavorable decision can be used as precedent and applied to other cases.
A lower court had ruled that the Compassionate Apothecary was within the law when its operators allowed patients or caregivers to buy marijuana that other members had stored in their lockers rented from the facility. The owners, according to court papers, took at 20 percent cut of the price.
But Michigan’s medical marijuana law doesn’t include sales as “medical use,” according to the appellate judges’ 17-page opinion, and therefore it does not trump existing anti-drug laws.

“Defendants have no authority to actively engage in and carry out the selling of marijuana between … members,” the decision read. “We conclude that defendant’s operation … is a public nuisance.”
The ruling backs the Isabella County Prosecutor’s effort to close the dispensary as a public nuisance that violates the Michigan Public Health Code.
The unanimous order was signed by appellate judges Joel P. Hoekstra, Christopher M. Murray and Cynthia Diane Stephens.
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