Why some NC doctors can’t — or won’t — sign a marijuana form for the Cherokee dispensary

The Cherokee nation has yet to issue medical marijuana cards and already some North Carolina doctors won’t — or can’t — sign the necessary paperwork to buy the first batch of legal weed in the state.

Linda Shetters said she was shocked when her primary care doctor in Brevard refused to sign a form from the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians’ Cannabis Control Board last week. She needs the signature to buy medical cannabis products at the soon-to-open tribal dispensary in the North Carolina mountains.

Shetters lives in Sapphire, roughly 50 miles southeast of the dispensary set to open by December near Harrah’s Cherokee Casino Resort.

By signing the form, a doctor acknowledges that a patient has the medical conditions they say they do — conditions that help qualify them for a cannabis card.

Shetters was born with cerebral palsy and has been diagnosed and treated for anxiety, peripheral neuropathy, restless leg syndrome and chronic pain, she said.

“I have hurt all of my life,” she said. “Now I finally have an option that’s not the pharmaceutical industry option but a natural option.”

During a previous visit this year, Shetters said her doctor promised to sign the form once the EBCI Cannabis Control Board made it available.

When she showed up with the form last Thursday, her doctor delivered the bad news: UNC Health Pardee, the health care network to which his practice belongs, informed its doctors not to sign the Cherokee paperwork. Doctors could violate federal law by doing so, Shetters said her doctor told her.

“If I didn’t have to follow the rules, I would sign it right now,” she said her physician told her.

In The Charlotte Observer’s exclusive look earlier this year at the Cherokee grow operation — now called the Great Smoky Mountain Cannabis Company — leaders and workers described the groundbreaking business as essential for both community prosperity and health.

However, beyond the Cherokee tribe’s sovereign Qualla Boundary land, it’s murky if patients who don’t live there will find willing doctors or have problems taking marijuana home, given state and federal laws.

Marijuana and NC hospitals

Shetters contacted the Observer soon after she left her doctor’s office on Thursday.

She is a 60-year-old mother of two and has five grandchildren and four “step-grandbabies.”

She also worked most of her adult life, in factories, in the furniture industry and as a golf course landscaper.

Using medical marijuana means she could drop three fourths of her drug store prescriptions, she said.

Letting doctors sign the forms remains “an unsettled legal issue,” according to a statement to the Observer from Dr. Greg McCarty, chief medical officer for UNC Health Pardee, and Dr. Richard Hudspeth, CEO for Blue Ridge Health.

That’s because marijuana — despite growing retail availability and decriminalization in many states — remains an illegal drug under federal law. The health care systems receive federal funding, the doctors said.

The unsettled legal issue is whether federal enforcement officials or federal courts would consider signing the Cherokee form aiding and abetting the distribution of medical marijuana, the doctors said.

According to the doctors’ statement: “Since aiding and abetting distribution is illegal under federal law, and until this legal uncertainty is resolved, the medical leadership of UNC Health Pardee and Blue Ridge Health decided to err on the side of legal caution and instructed all Pardee BlueMD providers to refrain from signing application forms for medical marijuana.

“It is unfortunate to us as health care providers that patient care gets caught up in legal issues beyond our control,” the doctors said.

North Carolina’s two largest hospital systems, Charlotte-based Atrium Health and Winston-Salem-based Novant Health, didn’t reply to requests for comment last week. Neither did Shetters’ doctor.

At Duke Health, Cherokee form signing “does not appear” to be an issue “as yet,” a spokeswoman said.

In April, the pro-legalization Marijuana Policy Project reported: “Except in very rare circumstances, at the federal level, marijuana and marijuana products are illegal and subject to criminal law enforcement through the Drug Enforcement Agency, or DEA.”

A Congressional Research Service report from earlier this year points out the “expanding policy gap” between U.S. law, federal agencies and states with some form of legalized marijuana. “Thus far, the federal response to states’ legalizing or decriminalizing marijuana largely has been to allow states to implement their own laws ... Federal law enforcement has generally focused its efforts on criminal networks involved in the illicit marijuana trade,” the CRS report points out.

Cherokee marijuana dispensary

The Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians last month voted with 70% support to legalize recreational marijuana on EBCI lands. On Monday, the EBCI election board certified to Tribal Council the results of the election.

The historic vote is a step beyond a previous decision by the tribe to regulate and sell through the dispensary medical marijuana to eligible adults.

The day before the vote, hundreds of Eastern Band members in North Carolina stood patiently in line for a sneak preview of their tribe’s long-planned medical marijuana dispensary superstore.

Sales won’t start until later this year, tribal officials told the Observer. But seeing the huge turnout for the three-hour open house, they expect it to be a tremendous generator of jobs and economic success for the tribe.

“It’s definitely surpassed what we were expecting,” said Jared Panther, a 25-year-old plant health technician at the tribe’s grow operation who greeted visitors at the event.

The dispensary is in the tribe’s massive, refurbished old bingo hall on U.S. 19 near Harrah’s Cherokee Casino Resort, 46 miles west of Asheville in the Great Smoky Mountains.

The EBCI Cannabis Control Board will issue cards first to tribal members who qualify to purchase product at the dispensary, and then to North Carolina residents.

“To date, no cards have been issued,” Neil Denman, control board executive director, said in an email to the Observer last week.

The board plans to begin issuing the cards this week, he said.