I’m writing today to inform you that if you have a medical marijuana program and are thinking about legalizing marijuana use by all adults, that legalization will affect your medical marijuana program.
The campaign for Washington’s Initiative 502 repeatedly claimed their language did not change medical marijuana laws. Legalizing marijuana can’t change medical marijuana.
So when aspects of the criminal prohibition are eliminated, how could the exception not change? What would we be making an exception for? Pacific Northwest Chicken Littles In Washington and Oregon, the exceptions for medical marijuana are based on the fact that patients need a lot more marijuana.
If you ask the medical marijuana advocates, all of these changes are tantamount to repealing medical marijuana altogether and imprisoning every medical marijuana patient, and they’re all the fault of legalizing marijuana for all adults. If you ask the medical marijuana advocates, it’s all the fault of passing I-502, because the state wants to funnel medical patients into the taxed commercial system.
In Oregon, the latest changes to our medical program include a potential increase in third-party grower fees from $50 to $200, restricting medical marijuana cards to Oregon residents only, and the elimination of card-stacked gardens in favor of urban and rural garden limits of 12 plants / 72 pounds and 48 plants / 576 pounds, respectively, with double those limits grandfathered in for existing large grows.
While I’m not in favor of adding more restrictions to medical marijuana, it’s also really difficult to crank up the outrage machine when, even with the changes, Pacific Northwest medical marijuana patients have it better than patients almost everywhere in the United States.
Already, as medical marijuana advocates there review the most-likely initiative to pass, the one submitted by billionaire Sean Parker, they are blaming the passage of the recent medical marijuana laws on the legislature’s desire to regulate the system in advance of legalization’s inevitable passage.
California, Arizona, Nevada, Massachusetts, Maine and any other medical marijuana state considering legalization, let’s just get it out in the open-legalization will change your medical marijuana program. If you’re waiting for the perfect “True Legalization™” that won’t affect medical marijuana, you’ll never legalize marijuana.
Any adult who needs marijuana medically can just go into a store and buy it; no more having to register with the state and pay for the privilege of not being arrested, no more having to prove some condition from a list or claiming any ailment and pay a doctor for a permission slip, and no more public condemnation of medical marijuana as some ploy to smoke pot legally.
Washington’s legislature finally legalized concentrates, lowered marijuana’s commercial tax rate, and now the price of commercial marijuana across the river from me in Vancouver, Washington, is $60-$70 per half-ounce, way lower than the $240-$280 per ounce price I find in Seattle medical marijuana dispensaries.
Medical marijuana states know full well that nobody can promise your medical marijuana program isn’t ever going to change. Even if marijuana legalization doesn’t happen, as evidenced by recent changes proposed in Michigan and Hawaii’s programs, medical marijuana will change.
MAPH Enterprises, LLC | (305) 414-0128 | 1501 Venera Ave, Coral Gables, FL 33146 | new@marijuanastocks.com
