The patients say Senate Bill 6032 was supposed to protect them by straightening out the vagaries of Initiative 692, the 1998 measure that legalized medical marijuana. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Washington developed the bill with patient groups, and Sen. Jeanne Kohl-Welles (D-Seattle) got it through the Senate.

It’s now facing a do-or-die vote March 28 in the House’s Health Care & Wellness Committee. But many of the patients and advocates who originally testified for the bill showed up in Olympia this week to speak against it at a House hearing.

They say the Senate gutted the bill, taking out the protections for small marijuana co-ops that brought them to Olympia in the first place. They’re angry at the ACLU for continuing to support the legislation, which they say has the potential to do more harm than good.

“It’s a bad bill. It’s got ambiguous language that could screw a lot of people over,” says Doug Hiatt, an attorney for medical marijuana patients who’ve been arrested.

Under current law, medical marijuana users and their providers cannot be prosecuted as long as they have no more than a 60-day supply on hand. But Hiatt says bill language that would have also protected co-op growers — those who supply more than one patient — was stricken. He says another clause that outlaws seizing a patient’s marijuana supply or a grower’s plants was also rewritten to allow the police to document what’s at the scene, along with taking a sample.

Hiatt says the wording still leaves it up to the police whether to arrest a patient or provider — something that incenses Dale Rogers, who operates a home-spun medical marijuana dispensary in Seattle called Capitol Hill Compassion in Action.

“I figured after 13 years of doing this,” says Rogers, “it’s time to stop the arrests.”

The no-arrest provisions got cut, he says, thanks to pressure from the Washington State Association of Prosecuting Attorneys, which joined the Washington Association of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs in opposing the bill.

Rogers and others are also unhappy with a new part of the bill. By January 2008, it calls for the agency to adopt rules for what constitutes a 60-day supply of medical marijuana and, by July 2008, to make a recommendation to the Legislature as to how it should be dispensed.

That, says Rogers and Ric Smith, a medical marijuana user who goes to kidney dialysis three times a week, could spell the beginning of the end for the type of small co-ops that medical marijuana patients use to share costs.

“I understand that there is concern and questions about the unknown,” says Alison Holcomb, director of the ACLU’s Marijuana Education Project. But “we don’t know what recommendations the Department of Health will make. [And they] are simply that — recommendations. They will not be codified into law until another bill is introduced that discusses those features.”

Even as amended, she points out that the bill stops seizure and finally protects growers who supply only one patient — important first steps that the ACLU can build on in next year’s Legislature.

“While it’s not a perfect bill,” Holcomb says, the ACLU supports it because “practical progress is better than perfection.”