Article by Dan Adams, Boston Globe
An arm of the White House’s antidrug office has asked Massachusetts and several other states where medical marijuana is legal to turn over information about registered patients, triggering a debate over privacy rights and whether state officials should cooperate with a federal administration that appears hostile to the drug.
Dale Quigley, deputy coordinator of the National Marijuana Initiative, or NMI, has asked Massachusetts health officials for data on the age, gender, and medical condition of the state’s approximately 40,000 registered medical marijuana patients. Quigley is a former police officer in Colorado with a long history of speaking out against legalization.
The NMI is part of the federal High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area initiative, a law enforcement effort directed by the White House’s Office of National Drug Control Policy.
In an interview, Quigley said the data are for a routine research project, in which he is looking for any correlation between how strictly states regulate medical cannabis and the rates of marijuana use among different age groups within the general public in those states.