[420 Girl]

Attorneys for law enforcement and the medical-marijuana community are staying busy. Tweaking an amendment to the state constitution is much more difficult than tinkering with legislation, so guidance is found in court decisions. In recent years, Colorado's courtrooms have hosted a few explorations of Amendment 20's gray areas:

Q. To how many patients can one licensed caregiver provide marijuana?

A. Denver District Judge Larry Naves in July 2007 tossed out the former state mandate of five, ruling the limit set by the state's department of health lacked public input and "does not appear to be based on any medical or scientific evidence." So the question is: How many patients can a caregiver have? The answer, apparently, is more than five.

Q. How many plants can a caregiver tend for each patient?

A. The amendment allows for six plants but also notes that patients and caregivers can argue that "greater amounts were medically necessary to address the patient's debilitating medical condition." That "greater amount" part has been tested in Arapahoe County, where the district attorney has declined to prosecute a 2004 case involving one licensed patient growing 12 plants and a 2007 case involving 71 plants.

Q. Do you even need a medical-marijuana license?

A. Maybe just a doctor's note or recommendation is enough, according to a Gunnison jury in 2006 that acquitted a man of felony charges leveled by police who found four marijuana plants growing in his garage. Ryan Margenau did not have a card from the state's registry program, but he did have a doctor's verbal recommendation to use marijuana to ease the pain of the 14 herniated discs he suffered in a car wreck. The jury, in what was Colorado's first medical-marijuana jury trial, said the doctor's advice was enough.

Q. If police destroy marijuana involved with a medical-marijuana investigation, do they have to compensate the patient or caregiver?

A. Police in Jefferson County, Aurora, Craig and Fort Collins reluctantly have returned marijuana-growing equipment and desiccated plants. The possibility of reimbursement — at the federal Drug Enforcement Administration's estimated value of $5,200 per plant — will be tested in a trio of lawsuits. The not-yet-filed lawsuits in Huerfano County, Fort Collins and Aurora would demand police pay for plants seized and destroyed in investigations that ended without prosecution.

http://www.420magazine.com/forums/in...ray-areas.html