(Providence Journal) PROVIDENCE — The Rhode Island Department of Health is moving forward with plans to create the state’s first medical marijuana clinic where patients who use the drug for medicinal purposes can legally purchase it.Compassion centers are to be operated as independent nonprofit entities overseen by boards or principal officers, to be regulated by the Health Department, much like a hospital or a nursing home. The state will not play a role in the day-to-day operations, but it will check to ensure that protocol is followed.
Centers must have “a fully operational security alarm system” with marijuana to be stored in locked areas within the clinics, according to the regulations. If clinics elect to grow marijuana at a second site, that location too must be equipped with proper security.
Staff and board members may not have felony drug convictions and must undergo background checks to be conducted by the attorney general’s office. They must also participate in training sessions at the facility.
This will make four states in which the buying and selling of marijuana is allowed by the state. Rhode Island and New Mexico have “compassion center” language with state controls and a very limited number, while California and Colorado both tolerate the fast-growing number of dispensaries operated in those states.
As I looked through the comments I noticed one that asserted that the Rhode Island compassion center would be broken into “all the time”. This is where the prohibition of marijuana for the healthy endangers the access for the sick. Dispensaries and compassion centers get robbed because of the great profit in prohibition and massive demand from non-medical users with no other access. Then the public gets stories on their news about the violence associated with a dispensary or compassion center and attributes that to allowing medical access, rather than where it belongs, on the prohibition.
Medical marijuana is a wonderful step, but it’s just a step. We must legalize marijuana for all its users or patients will always suffer from high prices, restricted access, and the danger of theft and violence.
