Police Chief Schoen is a doctor now? Apparently he is not alone. All over Oregon, police have suddenly gained medical expertise regarding how much medicine is "reasonable" for sick persons to own, but only if that medicine is cannabis. They all express platitudinous alarm at the problems caused by the Oregon Medical Marijuana Act and speak of the need of law enforcement to force the Legislature to curb the benefits of a law they claim was written by "legalizers" so that it could not be enforced.

That view may surprise the police lobbyists in Salem who made sure the law says only what they wanted. The OMMA was passed by voters, but was changed by legislators to suit police before it even took effect. As I have witnessed in the several times it was considered by the Legislature, the legislators made explicitly clear that no bill would pass without police approval, and so some years, nothing passed. Every aspect of the law says exactly what the police demanded for passage. Anyone claiming otherwise is either ignorant of the facts or wishes our citizens to be kept so.

It is noteworthy that even the most resistive lobbyist could not defend the limits now being proposed by Schoen and others as "reasonable" because they could not explain how they possible could be made to work. All those limits did was guarantee that every patient would be out of compliance nearly all the time.

The average patient I work with uses one ounce of cannabis weekly, making Schoen's "reasonable" amount last 10 days, and then what? Considering that the worst grown two plants can produce more than 11/2; ounces, the patient must immediately break the law or go without. Cannabis medicine can not be made to magically disappear and reappear when needed by the patient just to suit arbitrary limits based on ignorance.

The police lobbyists also made it clear that their agencies had no desire to be in the business of "inspecting" medical cannabis gardens due to the extraordinary drain on their resources that required. Given that cities and counties are starving budgetarily, the lobbyists were wise to do so. They were happy with being able to contact the OMMP in seconds day or night to determine if a garden or patient was registered. While they did miss the old days when any cannabis plant they found solved a "crime," they agreed that times had changed and they needed to change with them. It is not excessive to ask our local police to change with them also.

It is absolutely not acceptable to give falsely sympathetic lip service to those who need cannabis to survive while striving to deny them the ability to possess it in genuinely useful amounts. Pointing to those few registrants who are found in violation of OMMA as reason for drastic restrictions ignores the fact that those restrictions will only hurt the law-abiding patients and growers. Those who ignore the limits will not be affected.

Claims such as "40 percent of registrants are out of compliance" raises the question, "Where are all the prosecutions of that 40 percent?" While some police claim they are confused by the law and are afraid to act and some claim budget restraints, the real reason we do not see the prosecutions is that the claim is false. With 30,000 registrants it would take 300 per year to equal a 1 percent violation rate. 40 percent would be 12,000 per year, clearly a false claim.

Another action the police lobbyists could not defend was denying needed medicine to citizens who have served their sentence for a crime. Oregon law allows even the worst ex-criminal to have opiates or any other medicine to treat afflictions, so how do we logically and fairly deny them access to cannabis? The answer, we can't, so we don't.

I would modestly suggest that the "safety, the fabric and the livability of our neighborhoods" which so worry Schoen are threatened more by his attempt to corrupt our Neighborhood Watch program, used to help keep genuine bad guys and real crime at bay in our residential neighborhoods, by converting it into a program requiring that neighbors spy on law-abiding neighbors and attempting to use it to build a power base for an extremely narrow, retrogressive, prohibition-oriented political agenda.

It's time for Chief Schoen to get back on the beat, solving real crimes, and out of our medicine cabinets.

Laird Funk lives in Williams and was an author of the original OMMA. He serves on the DHS Advisory Committee on Medical Marijuana but writes here as a private citizen.