HARRISBURG (TNS) — Legislation that would protect Pennsylvania’s more than 700,000 medical marijuana patients from wrongful driving under the influence convictions advanced out of the Senate Transportation Committee on Tuesday by a 13-0 vote.
The bill would treat medical cannabis like any other prescription narcotic. It would require proof of impairment that interferes with a person’s ability to safely operate a motor vehicle for them to be charged with DUI.
It now will advance to the Senate for consideration.
Sen. Camera Bartolotta, R-Washington County, the bill’s sponsor, said Pennsylvania’s zero tolerance DUI law currently creates the possibility for medical cannabis patients to be arrested, prosecuted and convicted for taking their medicine while driving, even if they’re not impaired. She called it the most serious issue facing the state’s medical cannabis patients.
“Senate Bill 167 is critically needed to protect the medical cannabis community as the penalties for a controlled substance significantly escalate,” she told the committee.
Criminal defense lawyer Patrick Nightingale from Pittsburgh told the committee medical cannabis users are at risk of losing their licenses or even being jailed, at a hearing last September.
“We’re only three years into this [medical marijuana] program and these patients presumably are going to be using medical cannabis for the rest of their lives,” he said. “They’re going to have a number two DUI come up pretty soon and a number three DUI where they are looking at a year incarceration for using medication that the state said is 100% fine to use.”
Bartolotta said when the medical marijuana law passed in 2016, it provided protections for employees, professional license holders and those involved in custody litigation but did not address the issue that has led to wrongful criminal convictions for DUI.
Deneke Weber of Harrisburg is among those who found herself charged with a first-time DUI offense because she showed her medical marijuana ID card to an officer following a one vehicle-crash last year.
The 35-year-old mother of six who contacted PennLive about her situation said she did not have any cannabis in the car with her and was not impaired at the time of the crash that she blamed on faulty tires that caused the car to veer into a guardrail.
Regardless, Weber said, “once they realized I was a medical marijuana patient, it didn’t matter.”
Weber, who owns a cleaning service business, said the protection this legislation would provide is critically needed.
“Every person that goes to a dispensary to buy and go home, they are at risk,” Weber said. “I’m just one and I really would like to help and hope this bill gets passed because we are not protected.”
Bartolotta said 33 states including those with no legal access to cannabis are required to provide proof of actual impairment. Pennsylvania is one of 12 states that have a zero-tolerance law for certain drugs including THC, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
}At the September hearing, representatives from the Pennsylvania State Police stated they didn’t see this proposed change in law as having a negative impact on highway safety, especially since the legislation doesn’t allow for medical cannabis patients to use their status as a legal consumer of this medication as an excuse for driving impaired in a DUI case.
Bartolotta made it clear to the committee her bill does not “give patients a free pass to drive while impaired by medical cannabis. The impaired motorist or patient shall, if convicted, suffer the most serious consequences under our DUI laws.”
Senate Transportation Committee Chairman Wayne Langerholc, R- Cambria County, a former prosecutor, agreed, saying, “they will be held accountable the same way an individual that was using [cannabis] without any proper prescription would be.”
If it becomes law, a committee staffer said the measure would not be retroactively applied to those medical marijuana patients who have been convicted of DUI despite not being impaired.
