May 12, 2013
Dear Friend,
REGULATIONS FOR MEDICAL MARIJUANA PROGRAM FINALIZED

Regulations will go into effect May 24

Wednesday the Public Health Council voted to approve the regulations issued by the Department of Public health. There were many changes between draft regulations and the final version. You can read DPH’s Frequently Asked Questions about regulations here.

Thank you to the over 100 advocates and supporting organizations that worked with MPAA to present a unified message at the Listening Sessions, vet draft regulations, and respond to specific concerns through the final round of hearings a few weeks ago.

Thanks to your efforts, many of the provisions we supported in the draft regulations were not changed. Final regulations:
● Include language that leaves the determination of appropriate medical marijuana use to doctors and patients, rather than restricting it based on an arbitrary list of conditions.
● Set the dosage limit for patients is at 10 ounces over 60 days, but allows doctors to recommend higher dosages if necessary.
● Allow patients to visit doctors beyond their primary care when seeking a recommendation. Practices that include a focus on evaluating patients for possible medical marijuana recommendations are allowed – provided they do a full clinical check up, assess the patient’s full medical history, and have an ongoing role in his or her care.

Several improvements were made to draft regulations in response to the concerns voiced by MPAA and our members.

● Patients will no longer be required to designate a single dispensary. Instead they will be able to acquire medicine from any dispensary.
● The threshold for financial hardship still includes anyone on Masshealth or SSI, but the income level for others to qualify was raised from 133% of the Federal Poverty Line to 300%. This means a single person with an income of up to about $34,000 as opposed to just $15,300 a year will be eligible to apply for hardship cultivation. (Dispensaries are also required to offer subsidized or free medicine to patients with verifiable financial hardship.)
● Patients under 18 will be allowed to access medical marijuana even if they are not diagnosed as terminally ill, provided they get the approval of two doctors including a pediatrician, as well as a guardian.
● Language was added to clarify that if a condition is not presenting symptoms because it is being effectively treated by medical marijuana use patients remain eligible to receive a recommendation from a doctor.

You can read MPAA’s testimony about draft regulations, along with submissions from other stakeholders here.

Next steps:

Dispensaries are still on schedule to open by next year. The state will soon release information about how non-profits can apply for registrations to operate as dispensaries. No deadlines have yet been set.

While final regulations take into account a number of issues we organized around, we still have concerns about if implementation will ultimately allow safe access to all patients in need. This is a new law including some provisions never before seen in other states, so we will be working with patients and supporters to determine what issues come up as implementation proceeds, and how they can be addressed.

In the mean time, MPAA will continue to fight efforts in the legislature to roll back the initiative as we did last Monday May 6, where we assembled two panels of patients to oppose Senate Bill 1031 and other proposals heard by the Joint Committee on Public Health. Thanks to all of you who called or e-mailed your legislators to go on the record in opposition of 1031! Moving forward, we will also be working with advocates and governments at the local level to provide support as dispensaries are licensed and begin to open.

New regulations go into effect on May 24.

MPAA will be sifting through the regulations over the next several days and will post a new set of FAQs on our website.

Stay posted for news on the next MPAA meetings, and as always thank you for your support.

Massachusetts Patient Advocacy Alliance

SB 1031 was filed by state Senator John F. Keenan (D-Quincy), a longtime opponent of common-sense marijuana policies in the Commonwealth.

Senate Bill 1031 would reduce the number of dispensaries allowed in the state from a voter-approved 35, including a minimum of 1 and maximum of 5 per county, to only 10 dispensaries allowed state-wide. The proposal would also limit medical marijuana patients to a supply of two ounces per month, down from the 60-day supply of ten ounces recommended by the Department of Public Health.

Most notably, Senate Bill 1031 limits the list of qualifying conditions to cancer, glaucoma, HIV/AIDS, hepatitis C, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), Crohn’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, and multiple sclerosis. This restrictive list does not include chronic pain, ulcerative colitis, paralysis, PTSD and many other conditions that patients can find relief from medical marijuana.

Matt Allen of the Massachusetts Patient Advocacy Alliance was the first of many advocates who spoke against the proposed measures and the harm they would do to patient access. One man spoke movingly and concisely to the weak points of the proposed legislation in a statement that was read aloud by the man’s computer because his illness had rendered him voiceless. Several specialists in drug rehab spoke in favor of the bill, citing the usual concerns that marijuana would be diverted to the general public and especially children.

The provisions in the proposed bills that would prohibit the temporary use of home growing were also supported by landlords who expressed concerns that they would be forced to tolerate marijuana smoke and the smell of growing marijuana in old apartment buildings with imperfect isolation between apartments. One owner cited her century-old hardwood floors, which would be ruined by a grow operation of any kind.

The Joint Committee on Public Health is co-chaired by Sen. Keenan and Rep. Jeffrey Sanchez (D-Jamaica Plain), both longtime opponents of medical marijuana in Massachusetts.

Massachusetts residents are urged to contact their elected officials and encourage them to oppose Senate Bill 1031.
You can find your state legislator’s contact information here:

Thank you for taking the time to consider the public point-of-view!

I realize the nature of this unfortunate situation DPH has been thrust into.
Due to the political nature of the prohibition of cannabis, the safest
therapeutic substance we know of must be regulated by DPH as though it were
very dangerous. I’m sure the irony of sealing-off leakage of medical
cannabis into communities already knee-deep in “marijuana,” despite the
prohibition, is not lost on you folks.

Though I have only a few specific regulatory issues to comment on, my
comments, I hope, may help you in understanding my perspective on the entire
regulatory scheme, which I have good reasons to believe are widely shared
among the citizenry.

Doctors know almost nothing about cannabis and ignorance breeds fear

I can tell you from personal experience. My family doctor knew almost
nothing about the safest therapeutic medicine known – AMAZING! How could
such a thing happen?

Input from the medical community suffers from a complete lack of knowledge
regarding the low relative toxicity and wide efficaciousness of cannabis.
The toxic dose of cannabis is projected to be 40,000 times greater than the
effective dose. I say “projected to be” because a toxic dose of cannabis is
not possible to administer and so no actual toxic dose level can be
established. This makes cannabis a far safer medicine than any other
medicines our society considers “safe”; medicines like aspirin, Sudafed,
Advil, etc. Even the water you down those pills with itself is more toxic
than cannabis. Consuming a few gallons can kill you.

As far as medical usefulness goes, as Dr. Lester Grinspoon of Harvard said,
if cannabis were to be found just today – it would be hailed as a medical
miracle plant. I agree, as any objective person who was informed regarding
this issue would.

Please consider the irony of having a relatively toxic medicine – aspirin
(which kills 6-7,000 annually) – available on store shelves in unlimited
quantities for purchase w/o prescription or ID or age restrictions or
anything; when compared with the intense scrutiny you propose for medicinal
cannabis, which is tremendously less toxic. The difference in your need to
control cannabis and our present control of aspirin is not science based.
This is not medicine. This is not “public health”. This is politics. This is
politics where it does not belong.

The Massachusetts medical community and the drug warrior professionals all
confuse how they feel about cannabis, which is the product of a
decades-long, government sponsored, misinformed, propaganda campaign used to
try to frighten children from using cannabis as though that was actually
knowing something about cannabis. This propaganda campaign has left many who
give you input under the guise of authority badly misinformed regarding the
science of medicinal cannabis.

Please base your regulations on science and not on the political mess
prohibition has created.

Science says no other medicine has been used safely as long as cannabis has
and no other therapeutic substance is as safe as medicinal cannabis.

Those facts should take precedence over unreasonable fears born of an failed
organized governmental propaganda campaign, which has led many to believe,
though it is not true, that cannabis fries your brain.

Doctors don’t know anything about cannabis and it is not because cannabis is
not medicine. It is because of politics.

Medical schools have neglected to educate students on the properties of the
safest therapeutic substance known. How could such a thing happen?

They only tell their student, “It’s illegal so we do not need to learn about
it.” Where pharmaceutical companies make sure students are made aware of the
usefulness of their products (even “off-label” uses), no pharmaceutical
company has any interest in making sure students are aware of the usefulness
of cannabis. No broad long-term studies are financed for studies of cannabis
- not because it is not efficacious – but because it is not patentable.

There is no well-heeled corporate campaign with samples and studies and
literature and perks for doctors, when it comes to medicinal cannabis.

Patients most often are poor and denying them or their care giver friends
the right to grow their medicine for free or almost for free is immoral and
illogical.

Try being sick or injured for a long time and you will probably find – it is
hard to be ill or injured and make a good living. From my experience most of
the people who will need medical marijuana are not well-off. Even if they
are of independent means, $400 an ounce for medicine that would cost $25 an
ounce if not for the artificial price inflation associated with prohibition
is neither necessary nor is it reasonable.

Forcing patients to buy cannabis from Treatment Centers will create an
unnecessary and avoidable financial burden upon many of those who can least
afford it.

What I read in your Draft Regulations is just not true. Your draft
regulations postulate it will be less expensive for patients to buy cannabis
from Treatment Centers than it would be for a caregiver or the patient
themselves to produce. This is just not possible. If not for Reefer Madness,
a patient could grow his or her own medicine for the cost of dirt, sunlight
and rain ($0). CareGivers do it at the cost of goods sold, which for caregivers is very low.

Evan though they will be “nonprofit,” consider the cost structure associated
with running a full-time cannabis grow and sell operation, with:

Employees – healthcare, vacation pay, retirement and other benefits packages
on top of uncapped salaries

Facilities – Industrial grow and commercial retail facilities with all their
attendant overhead

Marketing – Treatment Centers will have incentives to market their service
to patients, which will be paid for, ultimately, by the patients.

CareGivers are nonprofit VOLUNTEERS and have no incentives to re-invest any
margin above costs-of-goods-sold in employees. facilities or marketing. I
recall you mentioning that the postulation that Treatment Centers would
lower patient costs was inspired by those looking to open Treatment Centers.
Their incentives to purposefully deceive you are readily apparent.

With only one patient per caregiver, there will not be enough capable caregivers to properly serve the patient population.

Those you should be most concerned with seem to have the least impact on
your regulatory rule-making process. If you had taken the time to make
yourselves aware of issues the patients are facing, you would know that
there is, already, a severe lack of caregivers. You know Treatment Centers
will not have cannabis on the shelves for many, many months. If you care at
all for the interests of the patients, you would not limit the number of
patients a caregiver can help.

Patients – not poorly inform and even misinformed doctors, not bureaucrats,
not politicians, not those who profit from cannabis- should have the lion’s
share of the say regarding regulations

For instance, the regulations you propose show little regard for a patient’s
financial situation. Most patients are poor. Whenever possible patients
should be allowed to grow their own medicine for free. If they can grow a
tomato, they can grow medical cannabis. Any other scheme shows disrespect
for the patients’ best interests.

Unfortunately the law will not allow patients to grow their own cannabis for
free or nearly so, if a Treatment Center opens in their area. This is a
terrible injustice that will be corrected in 2016 with the regulation of
adult cannabis use. For now, it seems, the only way to continue to allow
patients to grow their own medicine nearly for free is to stall the
licensing of Treatment Centers and regulate Treatment Centers as onerously
as possible.

The same is true of the patients’ use of caregivers, who would sell their
homegrown for much less than a Treatment Center could. Eliminating a
patient’s ability to access inexpensive medicine from a caregiver is not
reasonable or moral.

Legalization makes all this moot in 2016 – so lighten-up.

Twice the people have had their say regarding how our state treats cannabis
use and twice they have overwhelmingly instructed the state to leave
cannabis users alone. Perhaps twice is not quite enough. Perhaps a third
directive is what it will take to convince drug warriors that the public no
longer tolerates uninformed attitudes toward cannabis.

Frustration over the intolerable restrictions you propose will bring
patients to support the push for legalization which is coming in 2016 and
will, undoubtedly, pass. Thank you for inspiring action for the regulation
of adult cannabis use. At the same time, shame on you for making it clear
that medicinal control of cannabis makes it too hard for patients to get
cannabis and keeps the price of cannabis for patients in black-market range.

If you make the regulations this restrictive, many patients will continue to
do what they have done until now. They will get their medicinal cannabis
from their local black-market dealer. Many less well-off patients will grow
their own cannabis illegally, as many do now. And why not. This silly,
unenforceable prohibition is all but gone. Jury trials will no longer
convict patients who are growing.

The state will look like jackasses if they prosecute patients for growing
their own.

Cannabis prohibition is a cornered, doomed, wounded animal. Try not to be
used as a tool by what remains of this misguided prohibition beast.

Thank you again!

Bill Downing
*****************
Letter from Kathryn Rifkin, MassCann clerk:

Hello, Ms. Stanton,

Thank you for taking for testimony on Medical Marijuana. I must protest the unduly harsh nature of the proposed regulations – the regulations are geared more for the health and welfare of dispensaries and police action, and less for patients. By restricting the use of the herb to those who are dying, or to a few obvious maladies, these regulations are no incentive to come in out of the cold.

There are a couple of issues one must address before talking about cannabis – 1. Our respect for laws on the books, 2. The nature of prohibition. 3. The invasion of our privacy when one registers with the government, an entity that isn’t always trustworthy.

1. Living in a civilized society, we respect our democratically elected legislators and we trust that they do their due diligence when they legislate. We trust that the laws on the books have been carefully considered and will be for the betterment of society. When we see gross injustice at every turn concerning a law, then maybe the law was a bad one. And indeed, when we go back and study the tenor of the times, we see the yellow journalism vilifying cannabis is rank with racism and opportunism. Reefer Madness was a cynical ploy and trusting people believed what they heard in the media. Even the very name marijuana was used, evoking the fear of ‘wetbacks,’ instead of the medical name of this herb, cannabis. For this very reason, the medical establishment was blindsided, not realizing the proposed prohibition was to outlaw an herb that had been in the US Pharmacopoeia for 100 years, and millennia in the ancient Chinese Materia Medica, among others.

2. The horrendous violence and criminality wrecking our communities are characteristics of Prohibition, not of Cannabis. It’s elementary economics – when access to a valued thing is restricted, its price goes up. When risk of jail and property forfeiture is added, price skyrockets. When that much money is in the game, everyone wants a ‘piece of the action,’ as the mafia would say. Cartels spring up and banks will happily launder money. By keeping prohibition on the books, even law-abiding entities can ‘get a piece of the action,’ and these would include prisons-for-profit, the choice of paying for drug rehabilitation instead of going to jail, property forfeiture enriching police departments (who actually look for valuable properties with no mortgages). The corruption is rampant and is killing us. All this ends as soon as prohibition is stricken from the books, as we saw when the alcohol prohibition was repealed.

3. We all would like to come in out of the cold, but not for a situation that leaves us vulnerable to the vagaries of politics, and forced into a harshly restricted, expensive market. The paradigm is still escalating punishment, not least harm, SWAT teams still smash in doors and shoot the family dog and anyone else that moves. We want the violence to end. We want to be able to grow our own herb.

So you ask, why all the bother over cannabis? For a ‘high?’ A silly moment of ‘whee’ like the feeling of going over the top on a ferris wheel? Just to be able to relax and laugh a little? And the answer is that cannabis is a profoundly safe and effective medicine. It is fundamental to the regulation of one’s body’s functions, does not destroy the function of one’s organs like use of pharmaceuticals will, and will not kill anyone like alcohol, tobacco, and pharmaceuticals will.

Here is the science part;

All vertebrates, including humans, have a regulatory signaling system that triggers responses to external stimuli, and that will turn off the response in order to return the living being back to calmness, ‘homeostasis.’ So there are two parts to this regulatory system – an ‘on’ switch and an ‘off’ switch. Adrenalin, inflammation, etc, are responses to scary situations, to injuries and infections. However, if the ‘off’ switch is not triggered, one can get stuck in a chronic state of stress, or inflammation, etc.

Humans make two substances (this is new research, being done overseas and not here in Boston because of US prohibition, DEA, NIDA, etc) that work as the ‘off’ switch and they are called endo-cannabinoids, so named because they are very much like the active components, called phyto-cannabinoids, found in the plant cannabis. So, if your endo-cannabinoid system is running a quart low, you can top off by ingesting photo-cannabinoids.

As I mentioned above, this plant has been revered since ancient times, and humankind has been conducting a kind of Manhattan Project during the last several millennia, carefully selecting and planting the seeds of superior plants, and feeding the seeds of inferior plants to the family poultry flock. (PS, there is an entire discussion of the nutrition found in the seeds and leaves – as easy as this plant is to grow, there should not be any hunger anywhere on earth.)

Senator Susan Fargo expressed her concern to me about ‘self-titration,’ and I was so flummoxed that this was even a concern after millennia of use, that I didn’t know how to respond right away. I now have two responses. 1. The issue is a non-issue because there is no lethal dose. 2. Serving size of edibles is tricky because it takes an hour before any high manifests, while smoking provides immediate feedback as to a sufficiency. Also, if one doesn’t want to feel the high, one can get a strain with lower THC levels – that is, when we can safely take a sample to a lab without getting arrested.

Thank you for taking this testimony, and I will be present to testify in person on the 19th, if the creek don’t rise.

**********************
Letter from Andy Gaus, MassCann press secretary

Thank you for providing this forum to comment on the proposed DPH regulations on medical marijuana.

Two provisions in particular appear to make it virtually impossible for caregivers to provide the marijuana patients need while dispensaries are slowly organizing themselves:

1) Each caregiver must provide marijuana for only one patient.
2) The caregiver is not supposed to receive any compensation whatever from the patient for providing the marijuana.

Put these two provisions together, and very few people can practically step forward and become caregivers.

Bear in mind that growing marijuana indoors requires investing several hundred dollars in equipment to get started, paying high electrical bills in the ensuing months as well as ongoing costs for soil and fertilizer, and putting in hours of very real physical labor. If a patient grows for herself, these costs are repaid by the marijuana harvested and the relief it brings. But if a patient cannot grow for herself, the very considerable costs and burdens of producing the marijuana fall totally on the caregiver, with all compensation prohibited. This isn’t just unfair: it has the practical effect of making it virtually impossible to be a caregiver, which means no one can help the person who cannot grow for herself. If you wish to limit the ability of a caregiver to profit from their cottage industry, you could set a maximum number of patients (but not a maximum of one), or a maximum price per ounce, or both. A limit of, say, 20 patients per caregiver and $100 per ounce would keep caregivers and their homes from turning into for-profit dispensaries but would not leave patients with no one to turn to during a long period when cities and towns are enacting moratoriums and potential dispensary operators are clearing numerous legal hurdles.

The provision that a patient must have no more than two total sources of marijuana is also unnecessarily onerous. If all providers are supposed to use a common state database, any user of the database should be able to verify that the same patient isn’t filling the same prescription multiple times at different locations. If a further check is needed, patients could be issued something like a ration book.

One senses in all these regulations the underlying assumption that a set of air-tight regulations is both necessary and sufficient to prevent medical marijuana from being diverted to healthy recreational users, and that without such air-tight regulations, large-scale diversion is inevitable, with disastrous social consequences, particularly the increased availability to minors.

Let’s be realistic: recreational users, including minors, already have total access to marijuana if they want it. Kids themselves, when surveyed, report that marijuana is easier to get than alcohol. Those who get their dope from dealers needn’t fear being rejected as too young, and most of them get it, not from dealers, but from each other, in a vast informal network where everyone is both a user and a distributor. Likewise, almost all Massachusetts adults who wish to consume marijuana recreationally have found or could find a connection: marijuana prices have actually come down in recent years due to market saturation.

As officials responsible for public health, your first priority must be to make sure that patients who need marijuana for relief of painful and debilitating conditions can get it.

Minimizing diversion cannot be the main goal: it will never be effective for its stated purpose and is certain to cause unnecessary stress and pain for patients who need relief now and for the caregivers who would like to provide it .

Respectfully submitted,
Andy Gaus

BOSTON, MA – The Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts ruled Friday, April 5, that sharing a joint is not “distribution” of marijuana, and therefore not a crime under the state’s 2008 decriminalization law.

The Supreme Judicial Court released decisions in four cases that involved arrests made after voters overwhelmingly approved the decriminalization of possession of up to one ounce of marijuana in November, 2008. The law, which replaced criminal penalties with a $100 civil infraction, went into effect on January 2, 2009.

In three of the cases, the courts found police searches and arrests violated the bounds of the decriminalization law that was approved by voters. In the fourth case, the court ruled that the cultivation of marijuana remains illegal under the law.

Despite approval by Massachusetts voters of a ballot measure in 2008 that decriminalized possession of up to one ounce of marijuana, unwarranted investigations of marijuana possession continued, based on the theory that sharing marijuana is “distribution,” even when no money changes hands.

“The Commonwealth was simply wrong to argue that sharing marijuana constitutes criminal distribution,” Matthew R. Segal, legal director of the ACLU of Massachusetts, said Friday.

“Today’s rulings mean that people who share small amounts of marijuana don’t have to fear criminal prosecution or having police officers use the sharing of marijuana as a reason to search their belongings. Just as important, hopefully these rulings mean that police officers will focus on serious crimes instead of wasting their time investigating people sharing marijuana.”

In 2008, more than 65 percent of Massachusetts voters approved a measure meant to reduce punishments for marijuana offenders. Possession of up to one ounce of marijuana is still an infraction of the law punishable by a fine, but is no longer a criminal offense.

Nonetheless, the Commonwealth argued that sharing noncriminal amounts of marijuana constitutes distribution — a crime punishable by up to two years in prison. This approach was especially troubling when applied in ways that allow even stricter penalties, such as cases involving incidents in school zones.

In Commonwealth v Jackson, SJC-11319 and Commonwealth v. Pacheco, SJC-11216, the Court concluded that “social sharing” of marijuana does not constitute the crime of distribution.

The Court stated, “a defendant who gives drugs to others ‘distributes’ those drugs whenever the defendant serves as a ‘link in the chain’ between supplier and consumer,” whereas “the social sharing of marijuana is akin to simple possession, and does not constitute the facilitation of a drug transfer from seller to buyer that remains the hallmark of drug distribution.”

Thus, “the observation by police of several individuals using and sharing marijuana in a social setting does not provide the police with justification to conduct a warrantless search,” nor arrest them for any crime.

Commonwealth v. Pacheco stemmed from an incident that occurred after decriminalization went into effect, when a Massachusetts state trooper encountered a car with occupants who seemed to have used marijuana.

Upon ordering the occupants out of the car and searching the entire passenger compartment, he found nothing more than a single bag containing less than one ounce of marijuana. Nonetheless, the officer expanded his search to the trunk of the vehicle and to jackets and backpacks stored inside. Today the Supreme Judicial Court held that the search was unconstitutional.

“Massachusetts is already struggling to deal with the complications of the state drug lab scandal, which might require re-trying ten of thousands of drug cases, on top of the ordinary case load,” said Carol Rose, executive director of the ACLU of Massachusetts. “The Commonwealth should be doing everything it can to reduce the burden on our criminal justice system — not forcing more and more people into it for nonviolent drug offenses that Massachusetts voters have clearly said should be deprioritized in favor of fighting serious crime.”

In Commonwealth v Daniel, SJC-11214, as well as in Jackson and Pacheco, the Court decided that the discovery of a non-criminal quantity of marijuana does not justify a further search (in two cases of a car, in Jackson of a person’s backpack) for more marijuana, absent articulable facts supporting a belief that there was a criminal amount of marijuana in the location searched.

Daniel also held that the mere odor of burnt marijuana coming from a car and the recovery of a noncriminal amount from the driver, absent any evidence of impairment, did not provide reasonable suspicion that the driver was operating under the influence of marijuana.

Lastly, the Court in Commonwealth v. Palmer, SJC-11225 determined that the decriminalization statute did not repeal the crime of cultivation, even of cultivation of an ounce or less. Interestingly, three justices (Duffly, Lenk, and Gants) wrote a concurrence, stating that the crime of cultivation never encompassed cultivation purely for personal use but only if there was an intent to distribute. The majority opinion, however, rejects that interpretation of 94C, s. 32C(a).

Cape and Islands District Attorney Michael O’Keefe, president of the Massachusetts District Attorneys Association, said he disagreed with the court’s rulings.

“The public seems to have spoken on this. They seem to be saying that it’s OK to have this encouragement to dope-smoking,” said O’Keefe, who, along with most Bay State prosecutors, opposed the 2008 ballot initiative. “They can live with the consequences.”

The period for submitting written testimony is now closed. The Department of Public Health will consider the testimony in hand and issue the revised regulations in May.

2013 MASSCANN Board of Directors:                       Matt Sonnichsen, Bill Downing, Kathryn Rifkin, Emily Elmen, Lilith Astaroth, Bill Flynn, Cara Crabb-Burnham, Tony Santo, Chris Foye, Jeff Morris, Mark Ledewitz, Andy Gaus, Sarah Sparks

At the members’ meeting March 30 at Ming III Restaurant in Westborough, annual elections were duly held.
Matt Sonnichsen was reelected president.
Bill Downing was reelected treasurer.
Kathryn Rifkin was reelected clerk.
The remaining members of the board of directors are:
Emily Elmen
Lilith Astaroth
Bill Flynn
Cara Crabb-Burnham
Tony Santo
Chris Foye
Jeff Morris
Mark Ledewitz
Andy Gaus
Sara Sparks

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that police cannot bring drug-sniffing police dogs onto a suspect’s property to look for evidence without first getting a warrant for a search, a decision which may limit how investigators use dogs’ sensitive noses to search out drugs, explosives and other items hidden from human sight, sound and smell.

The high court split 5-4 on the decision to uphold the Florida Supreme Court’s ruling throwing out evidence seized in the search of Joelis Jardines’ Miami-area house. That search was based on an alert by Franky the drug dog from outside the closed front door.

Justice Antonin Scalia said a person has the Fourth Amendment right to be free from the government’s gaze inside their home and in the area surrounding it, which is called the curtilage.

“The police cannot, without a warrant based on probable cause, hang around on the lawn or in the side garden, trawling for evidence and perhaps peering into the windows of the home,” Justice Antonin Scalia said for the majority. “And the officers here had all four of their feet and all four of their companion’s, planted firmly on that curtilage – the front porch is the classic example of an area intimately associated with the life of the home.”

He was joined in his opinion by Justices Clarence Thomas, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.

Drug Dog’s Sniff Is An Unconstitutional Search, Rules Supreme Court