To recap: Last night, as the state senate was preparing to pass Sen. Jeanne Kohl-Welles' bill clarifying Washington State's laws on medical marijuana, an amendment was added to the bill that appears to ban advertising for pot, medical or otherwise.

Those who are following the bill closely say that Republican State Senator Mike Carrell, of Lakewood, took to the senate floor and waved around a copy of the Little Nickel—and its medical pot advertisements—to make his point that the bill needed to specifically regulate print ads. (The bill already banned television and radio ads for medical pot, using language similar to the langauge found here, in Washington's general ban on advertising controlled substances.)

So, an amendment—sponsored by Welles and Republican State Senator Michael Baumgartner, of Spokane—was added to specifically state that the medical pot bill's advertising restrictions extend to newspapers and magazines, too.

"The amendment was requested by some senate Republicans, who did end up voting for the bill," Welles told me in an e-mail this morning. (Not true in Carrell's case; he voted no despite the amendment.)

Now. What, exactly, does the current version of the bill say about medical pot advertising? Here's what it says:

No person, partnership, corporation, association, or agency may advertise cannabis for sale to the general public in any manner that promotes or tends to promote the use or abuse of cannabis. For the purposes of this subsection, displaying cannabis, including artistic depictions of cannabis, is considered to promote or to tend to promote the use or abuse of cannabis.

A fine of $1,000 can be levied against producers or distributors who take out ads that violate this rule, and media (now explicitly including print media) that knowingly run ads that violate this rule face unspecified sanctions.

Alison Holcomb, drug policy director for the ACLU of Washington, tells me that the ACLU doesn't support this amendment, but she also doesn't see any First Amendment problems with it (since its limit on speech are narrowly tailored to a specific government interest) and she mainly wants to make sure the larger bill to clarify rules on medical pot gets passed. "To us the most important thing is to get the regulatory framework in place," Holcomb said. "As the long as the First Amendment issues are being respected, we’re OK with it."

But, if the intent of the overall bill is to create clarity, doesn't this amendment create a lack of clarity as to what kinds of ads "tend to promote the use or abuse of cannabis"?

“It’s an excellent question," Holcomb said.

Ads with visual depictions of pot would pretty clearly be prohibited by the bill, she said. And an ad that read “You should come try our cannabis, it’s the best in the world!” might also run afoul.

However, Holcomb also noted that there's no good Washington State case law on what “promote or tend to promote” actually means in the context of controlled substances advertising. The issue has simply never been tested in court here. She suggested some additional language be added in the state house, where the bill goes next, to clarify matters.

“I don’t want to tie people up in courts and waste money litigating this issue," Holcomb said. “I think that it would be helpful, to the extent that we’re going to have some kind of advertising restrictions in place, to spell those out more specifically so that the dispensaries have some clarity about what’s acceptable and what’s not.”

UPDATE: As a couple of commenters have pointed out—and as anyone who looks regularly at Slog or the print edition of the The Stranger will have noticed—this paper, like the Little Nickel and others, runs ads from medical marijuana providers.