Some Stations Worry About Taking Ads from Medical Marijuana Dispensaries

Medical marijuana dispensaries in the 14 states where they're legal are increasingly looking for advertising time on TV and radio stations, industry executives and marijuana advocates said in interviews. Some stations worry that accepting the ads could jeopardize their FCC licenses, because the businesses violate federal law. But they don’t want to pass up the revenue, said Greg MacDonald, president of the broadcasters association in Montana, where medical marijuana was recently legalized.

"Every sales person comes into the station with a local newspaper” full of medical marijuana “and says, ‘Why can’t we do this?'” MacDonald said during an NAB Show panel. The fear is that at license renewal time, a complaint or claim about a station’s running an ad could put its license at risk or prompt a large fine, he said. Media Bureau Chief Bill Lake said, “This is a question I've never heard before."

The FCC may have to clear up its policy on the matter soon, because the issue isn’t going away, said Brian Vicente, the executive director of Sensible Colorado, a medical marijuana advocacy group. “Medical marijuana is kind of here to stay, and I have a hard time picturing major blowback” against “stations that are doing these ads,” he said. Dispensaries in Colorado are running regular radio spots, he said. “We have ads running regularly on radio stations and some that are beginning to show on TV as well.”

Though DOJ issued a memo last year telling U.S. attorneys not to “focus federal resources in your States on individuals whose actions are in clear and unambiguous compliance with existing state laws providing for the medical use of marijuana,” stations that accept the ads need to perform due diligence on an advertiser to make sure it isn’t a drug trafficker masquerading as a legal dispensary, Fletcher Heald lawyer Harry Martin wrote on the firm’s blog. Stations whose signals cross state lines may also be subject to federal prosecution, he said. And ad copy should be carefully screened to make sure it obeys state laws, he said.

Stations in California could face a whole new set of questions now that a ballot initiative seeking to change the marijuana possession and sales laws has been certified for the November election. “I don’t think anyone is going to come down on someone for supporting a ballot initiative, provided it doesn’t promote the use of illegal narcotics, which I guess is a very fine line,” Martin said. “I'd be very careful in terms of having my clients broadcast those ads. They could contain information that could be problematic."

Radio spots in favor of the initiative are running in Los Angeles and San Francisco, according to the website of Tax Cannabis 2010, a group supporting the initiative. In the spot, a former Los Angeles deputy sheriff says the change in law would “provide billions to fund what matters and allow police to focus on violent crime."

"I'm not really sure there is that much of an issue here,” said Stephen Gutwillig, the California director of the Drug Policy Alliance. “It seems like it’s still a step removed from advertising sales of a substance that the federal government still considers a controlled and banned substance. I don’t anticipate that advertising in this election will run afoul of federal laws.”