Angry telephone calls started coming in to the state Department of Public Safety almost as soon as the June 27 issue of the Hawai'i Tribune-Herald hit the streets.

A front-page article on medical marijuana mentioned that the department had provided a database with patient names and addresses, the locations of their plants, their certificate numbers, and their prescribing doctors.

The breach of privacy was an inadvertent mistake, and the newspaper did not name any of the patients, but many were alarmed because the information is like providing a roadmap for a stash of legal pot.

"Nobody here was a very happy camper," said James Propotnick, the department's deputy director for law enforcement. "People started calling. ... We were notified immediately. I don't think the paper was hot off the press 15 minutes and we started getting calls."

On Monday, Clayton Frank, the department's director, sent letters of apology to the 4,200 medical marijuana patients statewide, informing many who had not read the article that their confidential information had been compromised.

The letter explained the information had been forwarded by e-mail to a Tribune-Herald reporter who had asked for statistics on medical marijuana users. The department's information technology personnel have since isolated the list and added other internal controls to prevent it from being mistakenly released in the future.

David Bock, the newspaper's editor, said the newspaper complied with the department's request to destroy the information.

"We just wanted to know the number of people in Hawai'i County who were currently receiving medical marijuana," Bock said. "And they erroneously sent us the list with the actual names."

Hawai'i is one of 12 states that allow marijuana to be used to help treat debilitating medical conditions such as cancer, glaucoma, HIV/AIDS and chronic back or neck pain. The law, approved by the state Legislature and signed by then-Gov. Ben Cayetano in 2000, allows patients or their primary caregivers to grow plants at their homes.

Patients are limited to three mature plants, four immature plants, and up to three ounces of marijuana. Under the law's administrative rules, patient names and other information is confidential and can only be disclosed to law enforcement as verification that patients are in the program.

Patients on the registry are exempt from state law prohibiting marijuana possession but not federal laws against the drug.

Some in the medical marijuana community distrust the department's narcotics enforcement division, which oversees the program, and are disappointed with law enforcement's opposition to its expansion.

Dennis Shields, an ordained minister who lives in Captain Cook on the Big Island and has one of the first registry cards, said he was extremely distressed when he read the newspaper article. He said he does not believe the information that was released has been destroyed.

"Right now, it's sitting on some server somewhere," Shields said, doubting the information was erased. "I don't believe that, no. It's unverifiable. And I'm traumatized by that. I've been damaged."

Propotnick said the department would never knowingly release the information publicly and responded quickly after discovering what happened.

"It has to do with safety," he said. "Let's say that there's a whole lot of people who want to steal marijuana and you publish the list with the names and addresses. Now what have we done?

"We simply wouldn't do it as a matter of safety and as a matter of privacy. They have a right to their privacy."

The privacy breach is another wound for activists who watched as a proposal at the state Legislature to expand the program was reduced to a task force and then vetoed by Gov. Linda Lingle on Tuesday. The state Senate voted in a one-day special session to override the veto, but the state House did not take up the bill, so the veto stands.

State Rep. Joe Bertram III, D-11th (Makena, Wailea, Kihei), wanted to create a secure growing facility on Maui and expand the amount of marijuana patients can legally possess but settled for a task force at the University of Hawai'i that would study cultivation and other issues surrounding the law.

Gov. Linda Lingle, in her veto message, said the bill was "objectionable because it is an exercise aimed at finding ways to circumvent federal law. The use of marijuana, even medical marijuana, is illegal under federal law."

Bertram said the privacy breach, combined with the veto of the bill and the lack of a House override, shows a disregard for patients.

"It's a travesty," he said.