By Albert Lea Tribune and Associated Press

ST. PAUL — The Minnesota Senate passed a bill Tuesday legalizing medical marijuana that is more ambitious than Gov. Mark Dayton and law enforcement officials have said they would support.

The legislation, approved by senators on a bipartisan 48-18 vote, would allow patients to use marijuana in the form of pills, oil and vapor to ease their symptoms but would prohibit them from smoking the drug. Minnesota would be the only state with legalized medical marijuana to ban patients from smoking it to ease their symptoms.

The margin by which the measure was approved in the Senate is enough to overcome a potential veto by Dayton. The Minnesota House expects to consider its medical-marijuana measure on Friday.

District 27 Sen. Dan Sparks, DFL-Austin, voted in favor of the measure.

“I am sympathetic for some of the folks that have this chronic ongoing pain,” Sparks said.

Twenty-one other states and the District of Columbia have legalized medical marijuana.

State law-enforcement groups oppose any proposal that would allow plant material in the hands of patients. They say legalizing the possession of the marijuana plant, even for medical reasons, would lead to wider distribution of the drug. Police, prosecutors and sheriffs say, among other things, that it would lead to more drugged-driving incidents and ultimately wind up in the hands of children.

“We’re tremendously opposed to the Senate approach,” said Dennis Flaherty, executive director of the Minnesota Police and Peace Officers Association. “The House bill is much different. In that bill, you do not get raw crude marijuana. In the Senate bill, (patients) are allowed to have 2.5 ounces of marijuana.”

Flaherty also praised the tighter control over marijuana in the proposed House bill. Patients could obtain medical pot at only one facility in the state. The Senate bill stipulates 55 alternate treatment centers that would grow, harvest, process and dispense marijuana beginning on July 1, 2015.

Dayton said Monday that law-enforcement’s opinion was only one consideration in determining his final stance.

“Are the people who need to be helped going to be helped? Are the people who need to be protected going to be protected?” Dayton asked.

Many medical-marijuana patients argue the smoking prohibition is shortsighted. Some conditions, such as chemotherapy-induced nausea, render patients unable to consume the drug in pill or oil form. Smoking is a method that provides immediate relief, and it doesn’t require an expensive vaporizing machine to provide the necessary dose, they say.

“A vaporizer is cumbersome,” said Pat McClellan, 47, a Burnsville resident who uses one to treat his mitochondrial myopathy, a type of muscular dystrophy. “It takes both hands to use and the high-end ones, which don’t break like the other ones, can cost $500 to $700.”

Several Republican senators and the Minnesota Family Council, a Minneapolis-based nonprofit, opposed the bill. They argued that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration should approve marijuana for medical use before Minnesota legalizes it.

“If we’re going to listen to someone who (just) says he’s a doctor, why don’t we rely on snake oil, bloodletting and the ever-popular leeching,” said Sen. Warren Limmer, R-Maple Grove, during the debate.

Supporters of legalization including some doctors, scientists, several Minnesota lawmakers and parents of ill children who argue that years of evidence from many states where medical marijuana is legal that shows the drug relieves disease symptoms when no other medicine does. They also say the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration and the National Institute on Drug Abuse continue to hold up medical marijuana research because it’s classified among the most dangerous drugs, which is why so few government-approved studies exist.

The Senate proposal would put the Minnesota Department of Health in charge of implementing the state’s medical-marijuana program.

Patients must apply for a photo-identification card and must suffer from a specified set of conditions caused by maladies including epilepsy, cancer and glaucoma. The patient must be examined by a medical doctor or doctor of osteopathy. That doctor must issue a written opinion that the patient likely would benefit from marijuana treatment.