Fight brews over marijuana vending machine sales

Marijuana proponents seek vending machine sales like are found with newspapers and other machines

Carol Forsloff---In one of the unlikeliest of incidents, a marijuana clinic in Arizona is being sued for not paying the money it obtained from sales of marijuana from a vending machine. Even as the rest of the nation's 20 states that have legalized marijuana and are now grappling over methods of distribution, the inventor of the vending machine wants his fair share of the take from a self-activated device that offers a Heinz variety of marijuana goodies based upon prescription need.

It turns out Prescription Vending Machines et al. is suing the Non-Profit Patient Center and two of its officials in Maricopa County Court. The plaintiffs include Kind Clinics and Medicine Dispensing Systems who maintain that defendants David Pieser and Theodore Brinkofski owe money from their medical marijuana store located in a small town near Las Vegas, in Dolan Springs. The vending machine is said to be able to distribute 60 varieties of medical marijuana and is able to verify the identity of a patient by using biometric recognition.

In the meantime, the states where medical marijuana is legal continue to grapple how to serve users best. As it is, in many cases there are no distributors and no laws set up for distribution in many states, like Hawaii  that passed a law to do so that will not be in effect until January 2015, even as Oregon just passed this year a bill  to allow distributors officially to offer their medical marijuana in special centers and locations and will have a directory of the retailers. But so far there don't appear to be any vending machines in most of them.