MA Medical Marijuana Delays/Missteps Continue to Outrage Advocates

Thursday, October 30, 2014

Nicholas Handy, GoLocalWorcester Contributor

With the upcoming election marking the two-year mark for when voters overwhelmingly passed the medical marijuana law, advocates from throughout the state are becoming outraged that there are still no dispensaries open and no seeds in the ground.

Rather than keeping the best interests of the patients in mind, these advocates say that politics have become priority, something that is only really harming the people who need the medicine the most.

“Overall, we are still very disappointed in the lack of movement on this law; after all it has been almost two years since the law was voted on and passed by the residents of Massachusetts,” said Matthew Allen, Executive Director of the Massachusetts Patient Advocacy Alliance. “The Department of Public Health did an impressive job with creating robust regulations to follow but the Patrick administration has shown a real lack of political will and the emphasis has shifted from the needs of the patients to politics.”

Allen says that there has been some forward progress in recent weeks – the state recently implemented the registration system – but efforts across the board have been too little, too late. Current projections for the first batch of medical marijuana dispensaries have them opening sometime this winter.

Policy Vs. Patient Care

While patients and advocates alike are happy to hear that the first round of dispensaries are close to opening, the fact that so few are opening and that they are opening a year later than the original timeline set forth is proving to be disheartening.

Many medical marijuana advocates believe that the Department of Public Health began to create a sound and effective process to begin with, but politics and other priorities got in the way of assisting patients. While bumps in the road can be expected for any new process or initiative, it was politics and not legitimate problems that caused these lengthy delays.

“DPH did a good gob with the regulations initially, it was a good regime,” said James Smith, Legal Counsel for Good Chemistry of Massachusetts, the organization that was denied a license in Worcester, in a recent segment of Focus Report on WGBH. “But then what happened was the process became very political. The process was taken from the DPH and went into the higher ups in the state government. That changed everything. DPH is about health and medical use of marijuana is about health. This is about medicine.”

Need Time to Make Things Right

While delays and missteps have been the source of a lot of outrage, the Department of Public Health and the Medical Use of Marijuana program have kept with the same mindset and message: all good things take time.

Rather than rushing an inferior process and product, the program wants to create a process that is efficient, error-free, and something that works for the patients and everyone else involved. Because other states that have implemented medical marijuana systems have taken as much as four or five years, DPH and the program feel that Massachusetts is right on track.

“We are actively inspecting dispensaries now, with the first facilities set to open later this winter,” said Scott Zoback, MMJ Program spokesman. “No one said starting a new industry from scratch would be easy, but we have taken the time to ensure public safety and patient access to quality programs across the Commonwealth.”