Patients and advocates of the medical marijuana program in Washington are up in arms upon learning the proposed provisions to the current medical marijuana system. The three state agencies and the governor’s office that make up the state’s med marijuana administrative agency have created the I-502 Initiative, which is tasked with cleaning up the conflicts between having medical and recreational marijuana programs. The state Liquor Control Board is in charge of implementing the I-502, while the DOH and the Department of Revenue would allow state-registered patients to purchase tax exempt marijuana from one of 334 stores statewide, but would decrease the amount a patient is legally allowed to possess from 24 ounces to three ounces. It would also require doctors to register their patients with the state, remove the affirmative defense for medical marijuana patients and end the right to petition for new qualifying medical conditions to be added to the current list.
The provisions would also eliminate a patient’s right to grow their own either individually or collectively. Existing dispensaries must comply with the I-502 Initiative’s guidelines, while those that fail to do so will be shut down.
While many medical marijuana advocates welcomed the new tolerance that the state governments of Colorado and Washington developed toward cannabis, the provisions proposed by Washington are ignorant of the unique needs of the medical population. It’s like saying a farmer can only purchase three pounds of fertilizer for his 100 acre field at a time because every citizen is allowed to buy fertilizer.
Washington must recognize that they can’t use a bull dozer to trim the orchid that is the conflict between legal medical and recreational marijuana.
