By Dave Phillips Twitter: @dave_phillips1 Digital First Media Simply driving with marijuana in your system is not necessarily illegal if you're a medical marijuana patient in Michigan. The state Supreme Court issued a ruling in the case of Rodney Koon on Tuesday, stating that police must prove that medical marijuana users are impaired in order to make an operating while intoxicated arrest. Oakland County Chief Assistant Prosecutor Paul Walton said the ruling was not a surprise. “We honestly thought that's the way the court would decide it,†he said. “It's not going to change a whole lot in the way we respond to it. We kind of anticipated this going in. The issue is if a cardholder is showing impairment.†The ruling will not affect many cases in the Oakland County Prosecutor's Office, as there are only a few that have yet to be resolved. “We'll pull (those cases) and see, but it would have been a discussion we had before,†Walton said. The Supreme Court's unanimous decision in the Grand Traverse County case was telling to Farmington Hills-based attorney Thomas Loeb. “The fact that the Michigan Supreme Court was unanimous in its opinion and didn't even require oral argument ... is proof positive that some judges get it right,†said Loeb, who was one of the attorneys representing Koon. The case began with a traffic stop in Grand Traverse County on the evening of Feb. 3, 2010. (snipped) http://www.thenewsherald.com/articles/2013/05/24/news/doc519e7f0a78715196937016.txt
​This is incredibly good news! Hopefully the rationale behind it spreads to other jurisdictions as well. Their unanimity definitely says something for the cause and the fact that people are finally starting to open their eyes to the reality surrounding the effects of cannabis vs. biased discrimination against its medicinal users.
It's a start, but we need to come up with a better way of testing impairment than leaving it up to a LEO's perception of impairment.
It's time to start implementing funded studies showing the effects of driving while stoned like they did with alcohol..