BrewsNBuds
Active Member
The State is not going to give you an answer. This forum has all the answers you need.
Here's some background on the topic, for those who are new here or simply frustrated about the law's verbiage.The politicians in Providence wrote the law this way because the grey area is soon to become the "taxed and spent" area. Eight years ago, before Slater and Greenleaf centers, under the law patients had to go to the street for their meds. There were always hand-to-hand cannabis for cash transactions going on during that early period, and the MMP card held harmless those patients who had successfully cleared the permitting process. Numerous articles in the Journal talked about the "suffering patients forced to disappear into the shadows and engage with drug dealers to obtain their meds." The card was essentially a "get out of a police encounter free" license.
Now the Rhode Island General Assembly, obsessed with spending other people's money enriching themselves until the State is dead to rights bankrupt, wants to fill the gray area with an excise tax on medical marijuana sales. Any further regulation is going to hurt patients. It already has, as we have seen caregivers retire from being caregivers because of increased licensing fees and new patient designation fees. The Department of Health won't even let you update your home address without charging you a $25 fee. Caregivers are becoming patients again, thereby decreasing plant counts, shrinking the supply of medicine, and driving prices upward. A tax and spend plan for cannabis is going to hurt patients even more, as Slater and Greenleaf will be the only entities collecting this tax. How will any other type of sales be taxed, short of opening cannabis c-stores (which Connecticut is doing now, charging $1,000,000 for the concession)? Any Rhode Island growers ready and willing to register their full name and home address as marijuana production sole proprietorships? Do you want some State worker thug with computer access to know exactly where your grow is? Yea... I didn't think so. But that's the only way I can see that they're going to be able to come and take the money so they can spend it on stuff they like.
Anyway, don't worry about where your grow is as it relates to the Dept of Health Medical Marijuana Program application. We've already had a test case in Cranston in 2012 by a poster on this forum who was harassed by Cranston Police at a caregiver grow away from home. Everything was legal, the paperwork was posted in a conspicuous place, plants and finished meds were within State limits, and the cops had to let him go. If you grow in your house, your shed, in a cargo container, in an old machine shop, or in a clearing on your land in Foster, its OK as long as that structure or land or dwelling is owned by or leased to you (or you have written permission from the property owner to occupy that portion of his real estate for your own use).
Above all of this other stuff (stop me if I've told you this one before) is the 4th Amendment to the United States Constitution, which protects you from law enforcement entering your private property to find evidence to arrest you and help convict you of a crime in court. When in doubt, don't open the door. If they really want to talk to you, go out on the porch, offer them a Narragansett, and don't say anything stupid. But whatever you do, if you want to stay out of trouble, don't open that door. And that's it.
