Our Mission

 
Patients & Families United exists to serve the interests and needs of Montana’s medical marijuana patients, safely and legally.
Support and Information Network:   Our members constitute a statewide support system that can provide all kinds of help and advice.  Some of our members are very experienced , knowledgeable caregivers, for example.   And all our members are caring patients (and their friends and relatives) who know what it’s like to struggle with a serious illness whose best proven remedy remains illegal under federal law – perhaps the only medicine in the world that patients are required to produce for themselves, while simultaneously following rules and restrictions that make it difficult to succeed even under the best of circumstances.  Our website’s blog allows members to communicate to each other privately and “publicly” – and our periodic meetings (and planned conferences) offer members a chance to help each other in person.  Lifelong friendships result from participating in our group.

We Work Together to Improve the Law:  Patients & Families United helped develop House Bill 311 at the 2007 Montana Legislature, which sought to make the law more workable for patients.  We continue to focus energy toward building support for improvements that we intend to propose again at the 2009 Montana Legislature:
·         Allow physician assistants and nurse practitioners to make medical marijuana recommendations, just as these healthcare providers already can prescribe other drugs when warranted by a patient’s condition.  This would be a huge help to patients in rural Montana, whose daily healthcare needs are served most entirely by PAs and NPs.
 
·         Create a new category of registrant to allow for legal transport of medicine from a registered caregiver to a registered patient.  Currently, when a patient’s spouse picks up medicine from a caregiver, the spouse may be committing a technical violation of the law during the drive home.
 
·         Change the allowable plant- and medicine-limits to conform to the federal government’s IND medical marijuana program.  These changes would acknowledge the realities of:  patients’ legitimate medical supply/consumption needs; Montana’s short growing season; and the complexity and growing-difficulties of the cannabis plant.
 
·         If you have other suggestions for improving Montana’s law in key ways, we want to hear them.  Email us at info@mtmjpatients.org.
 
We Work to Educate the Public and Special Audiences:  Members of Patients & Families United are endeavoring to educate the general public – and especially physicians, law enforcement, and elected officials at all levels of government.  We want everyone to understand the facts about medical marijuana.   Overwhelming voter support for Montana’s medical marijuana law signals that it’s time for the federal government’s longstanding war on marijuana patients to come to an end.

Public Speaking & Presentations:  Do you belong to a Montana community group that would like to learn more about medical marijuana and the state’s compassionate law?  Would you like to learn more about Patients & Families United?  Email us at info@mtmjpatients.org.