Tallahassee Will Probably Ban Smoking Medical Marijuana Today

Friday, June 9, 2017 at 9:01 a.m.

When Florida overwhelmingly voted to approve medical marijuana final November, it is a honest wager many of the tens of millions of voters who checked sure on Amendment 2 imagined a future by which sick sufferers can be free to roll up a joint to smoke away their ache in peace.

Tallahassee is not interested by that individual future, although. After spending months making an attempt to sabotage medical marijuana by awarding rights to a tiny cartel of politically related license-holders, legislators in the present day will probably approve rules that outright ban smokable pot.

That reality has infuriated Amendment 2 supporters, together with John Morgan, the Tampa superlawyer who bankrolled the laws. Morgan is already promising a lawsuit if the invoice passes as written in the present day.

"I will be suing the state to allow smoke," Morgan writes in a short post on Medium. "It was part of my amendment."

The new guidelines have been hashed out yesterday by House and Senate committees that returned to Tally for a particular session after medical marijuana and the state finances stalled in the course of the common session. The full House and Senate will nonetheless must approve the principles in the present day, however the prospects look good.

The legislators did make a bit progress on the opposite main drawback with Florida's medical marijuana trade: the baked-in cartel system that helped tank the primary debate on medical pot.

With tens of millions of sufferers quickly to be eligible for the drug, the state to this point has granted solely seven licenses to corporations to develop and promote weed. That quantity is comically tiny. Massachusetts, with barely a fourth of Florida's inhabitants, will quickly have a whole lot of licensed growers; Colorado has greater than 500.

But these seven corporations that have already got their foot within the door have spent a whole lot of hundreds lobbying in Tallahassee this 12 months to stop anybody else from edging into their digital monopoly.

Lawmakers lastly budged on that drawback within the guidelines authorised in committee yesterday. They'll name for ten extra licenses to be handed out, with one assured to go to a black-owned farm and two mandated for citrus growers; the invoice would additionally cap the variety of dispensaries every firm can function at 25.

Seventeen corporations continues to be an absurdly small quantity for a state as giant as Florida. But some advocates praised that piece of the invoice for a minimum of making progress.

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"While it makes my head hurt that five new [medical marijuana] licenses are literally going to the losers of the previous process, this bill would have the effect of breaking up the cartel system and beginning to provide true access to patients," says Ben Pollara, head of United for Care, which spearheaded Florida's profitable medical marijuana marketing campaign.

But virtually everybody concerned in Amendment 2 agrees the ban on smokable pot is insane. Tally's invoice would enable vaping, drugs, and tinctures, however why not smoke? Legislators tried to forged it as a well being concern.

“Breathing in soot, breathing in ash, carries a definite detriment, which we didn't want to extend to medical marijuana,” Rep. Cary Pigman tells a local TV station. It's price noting that Pigman had to surrender his seat on a House well being subcommittee earlier this year after getting popped for drunk driving.

Pollara says that argument is nonsense and banning smokable medical pot clearly goes towards the desires of voters.

"If you've ever met someone who hears the word 'marijuana' and doesn't immediately think of the green, leafy stuff that you smoke, let me know. I've yet to meet one," Pollara says in a textual content message, including Morgan's hashtag on the problem: "#NoSmokeIsAJoke."

Tallahassee Will Probably Ban Smoking Medical Marijuana Today