Medical pot, subsidized housing clash

 
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Kathy Heller may lose her subsidized housing because she is permitted to use medical marijuana (Aug. 30, 2011)

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The section about medical marijuana on the Michigan Department of Community Health’s web site (file photo)

 

 

Updated: Tuesday, 30 Aug 2011, 6:35 PM EDT
Published : Tuesday, 30 Aug 2011, 4:27 PM EDT

By Henry Erb

SPARTA, Mich. (WOOD) – Kathy Heller has degenerative discs in her back and has been controlling the pain with medical marijuana. She applied for and received a medical marijuana permit from the state of Michigan.

She lives in subsidized housing, utilizing a Section 8 rent supplement through the Wyoming Housing Commission which governs her area. She showed them her medical marijuana card and they made a copy.

A year later, they sent her a letter terminating her rent subsidy for her apartment.

Michigan is one of 15 states , plus the District of Columbia, that permits the legal use of medical marijuana. But the federal government maintains pot is illegal, and its rules are clashing with state law.

“We’re federally funded,” said Rebeca Geerling of the Wyoming Housing Commission, “and federal rules (and) regulations pretty much supercede or govern what our agency does.”

But Target 8 investigators found the federal government does give local agencies leeway to allow medical pot users to keep their subsidies.

Geerling, though, said, “We try to stick closely to our policy.” And that policy is to terminate anyone using drugs.

“I figure if the state says it’s OK, then the government should say it’s OK, too,” Heller told Target 8.

Without her nearly $600-per-month subsidy, she said, her apartment would use up her whole disability check.

“I’d probably have to move back in with somebody, like I was before I lived here.”

She said the Wyoming Housing Commission told her they’d let her keep her rent subsidy if she did not renew her medical marijuana card.

“So what do I do then?” she asked. “Go back to the doctor and get all those pain killers all the time and be hopped up on pills in front of my kids? Or smoke a joint in my bedroom and come out and be sociable with with kids and not laid up on the couch on muscle relaxers?”

Heller hopes to hear the results of her appeal by mid-September.

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