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MEDICINAL STRUGGLES. Two months after the Hawaii Supreme Court’s disciplinary board issued a surprise opinion, warning lawyers to avoid assisting budding medical marijuana businesses or risk committing a federal crime, the state Supreme Court rightly made a rule change that lets lawyers do their jobs without fear of legal reprisal.

The disciplinary board’s opinion was always just that — an opinion — but it threw a major kink into the formation of would be pot dispensary businesses: Lawyers began dropping clients rather than putting their own livelihoods at risk.

Even the most risk-tolerant entrepreneur would be nuts to move forward without proper legal advice in a brand new industry with serious built-in legal challenges, substantial capital requirements and intense ongoing regulation. Some were reduced to seeking out-of-state legal advice to keep their organizational work moving forward — hardly a desirable option, given significant legal differences between the laws of different states and the fact that Hawaii doesn’t let attorneys admitted to the bar of another state practice here without first being admitted to the Hawaii bar.

The Supreme Court received 70 comments in support of the rule change, many of them from such leading lawyers as former state Attorney General David Louie. The court’s order allows lawyers to provide “counsel or assist a client regarding conduct expressly permitted by Hawaii law, provided that the lawyer counsels the client about the legal consequences, under other applicable law, of the client’s proposed course of conduct.”

While that bit of forward progress earned a collective sigh of relief from the legal community, the week’s news wasn’t all good for the fledgling industry. The state Department of Health hit the brakes on writing administrative rules governing medical marijuana businesses on Thursday, saying it won’t publish draft rules until Jan. 4.

That’s only a few days later than the department’s previously announced date of Dec. 30, but it’s unacceptably problematic for two reasons:

• Applications for one of the eight initial medical marijuana business licenses are due between Jan. 11 and Jan. 29, meaning entrepreneurs will have, at the most, only 3½ weeks to ensure their applications and business plans are in compliance.
• The department also announced Thursday that it doesn’t plan to hold a public hearing or accept public comments prior to unveiling its draft rules. And it doesn’t have to: The Legislature provided an exemption from any hearing or comment requirement when it passed the marijuana-dispensary bill last spring.

We realize this is a heavy lift for the Health Department, made significantly more difficult because of the comically poor transition of the state’s medical marijuana program to the department from the Department of Public Safety, which previously managed it.

Public Safety dumped a backlog of 1,000 medical marijuana patient applications on the Health Department. The applications were stuffed in 128 bankers boxes, and had been individually copied and filed into what is described as a “primitive database.” The dispensary program had no policies, protocols or general fund money, and Public Safety coughed up only a single employee position to help staff the program under Health.

Even worse for the actual patients, though, the Health Department has done away with Public Safety’s practice of providing temporary cards to patients while they wait for their formal cards to be granted, partly on advice from Attorney General Doug Chin. This move is being sharply criticized by at least two key legislators.

How can a state with a 15-year track record of allowing marijuana for medicinal use continue to manage its way forward so poorly? Refusing to provide temporary help to hundreds of medical marijuana patients and moving at a snail’s pace to create administrative rules while accepting no public input are moves we might expect of states where the idea of legal marijuana is brand new. Yet Hawaii was one of the first states to legalize medical marijuana.

The Health Department won’t announce which dispensary applicants are getting licenses until April 15, and dispensaries are .

The Health Department needs to step up its process and work to approve these applications much sooner than it now anticipates.

In the meantime, unless they can point to an actual problem that occurred, health officials should go back to providing temporary cards to patients who need immediate help.

LIBERATING LOW-LEVEL OFFENDERS. It’s tough to find anything these days in Washington that draws bipartisan support, but reform of the criminal justice system is just such an issue. Our nation’s prisons are ridiculously overcrowded — 2.2 million inmates are currently behind bars — with far too many individuals there for petty drug offenses, typically driven by addiction. The price of keeping them there is unsustainable and does neither the nation nor the offenders any appreciable good.

The independent federal sentencing-policy panel, the U.S. Sentencing Commission, last year shortened sentences for low-level drug offenses and made the change retroactive, making an estimated .

So far, about 13,000 have been approved for reductions averaging 25 months, cutting average sentences from 11 years to nine years. For some — including 31 inmates in Hawaii — that means their sentences are now complete. They’ll be released beginning this Friday. Another 110 will be released in coming weeks and months.

A total of 297 Hawaii inmates are eligible for early release. Of those released here and nationwide, most will go to halfway houses or home confinement and later be put on supervised release; the remainder aren’t U.S. citizens and will be deported.

All of which is less expensive and makes infinitely more sense than keeping them behind bars.

President Obama has said criminal justice reform is a top priority for his remaining time in office. He made it the topic of his , noting the more than four-fold increase in the national prison population over the past 30 years and the $80 billion we spend annually to keep those offenders imprisoned.

“Over the last few decades, we’ve locked up more non-violent offenders than ever before for longer than ever before. That’s one of the real reasons our prison population is so high,” he said. Though many undoubtedly deserve to remain there, justice also means “allowing our fellow Americans who have made mistakes to pay their debt to society and rejoin their communities as active, rehabilitated citizens.”

The 31 Hawaii inmates who will begin to be set free this week represent an important first step toward that just end in this state — and toward a criminal justice system that makes far better sense for this country.