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1. DC approves applications for those seeking to run one of 15 dispensaries
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At Least 1 – 1.5 Million Americans are Legal Medical Marijuana Patients

Market for these patients in sixteen states and D.C. estimated at between $2 – $6 billion annually

MAY 31, 2011 - We don’t know his or her name, but somewhere in one of sixteen states and the District of Columbia is America’s 1,000,000th legal medical marijuana patient. We estimate the United States reached the million-patients mark sometime between the beginning of the year to when Arizona began issuing patient registry identification cards online in April 2011.

16 states, the Capitol, and ONE MILLION legal marijuana users.

Between one to one-and-a-half million people are legally authorized by their state to use marijuana in the United States, according to data compiled by NORML from state medical marijuana registries and patient estimates.  Assuming usage of one-half to one gram of cannabis medicine per day per patient and an average retail price of $320 per ounce, these legal consumers represent a $2.3 to $6.2 billion dollar market annually.

Based on state medical marijuana laws, the amounts of cannabis these legal marijuana users are entitled to possess means there is between 566 – 803 thousand pounds of legal usable cannabis allowed under state law in America.  These patients are allowed to cultivate between 17 – 24 million legal cannabis plants.  There may possibly be more, as California and New Mexico “limits” may be exceeded with doctor’s permission and some California counties explicitly allow greater amounts, so there may be as much as 1 million pounds of state-legal cannabis allowed under state law in America.

Yet after fifteen years, one million patients, and a million pounds of legal marijuana, few if any of the dire predictions by opponents of medical marijuana have come to fruition.  Medical marijuana states like Oregon are experiencing their lowest-ever rates of workplace fatalities, injuries, and accidents.  States like Colorado are experiencing their lowest rates in three decades of fatal crashes per million miles driven.  In medical marijuana states for which we have data (through Michigan in 2008), use by minor teenagers is down in all but Maine and down by at least 10% in states with the greatest proportion of their population using medical cannabis.

Fourteen of the seventeen medical marijuana jurisdictions have mandatory registries while two (California and Colorado) offer optional registries and one (Washington) has no registry system.  Estimating California’s patient numbers is hampered by its registry system being on a county-by-county basis.  California NORML’s Dale Gieringer estimates between 2% – 3% of the state’s population are holding medical marijuana recommendations – meaning possibly over one million medical marijuana patients in California alone.

California’s patient population can be estimated from data from other medical marijuana states where patients are required to register, shown in the table below. The top two of these are Colorado and Montana, which, like California, have a well developed network of cannabis clinics and dispensaries, and which report usage rates of 2.5% and 3.0%, respectively. Other states, where medical marijuana is less developed, report lower rates of 1% and less. However, California is likely to be on the high side because it has the oldest and most liberal law in the nation. Significantly, California is the only state that permits marijuana to be used for any condition for which it provides relief – in particular, psychiatric disorders, such as PTSD, bipolar disorder, ADD, anxiety and depression, which account for some 20%-25% of the total patient population. Adjusting for this, usage in California could be as much as 25% to 33% higher than in Colorado and Montana, which would put it well over 3% of the population (1,125,000).

A 2%+ patient population estimate is supported by data from the Oakland Patient ID Center, which has been issuing patient identification cards to its members since 1996. The OPIDC serves patients from all over the state, but especially the greater Oakland-East Bay area of Northern California, where its cards are honored by law enforcement. As of 2010, the OPIDC had issued ID’s to 19,805 members from five East Bay cities (Oakland, Berkeley, Alameda, Hayward and Richmond), amounting to 2.4% of the local population.Because the cards were issued over a period of 14 years, they include numerous patients who have lapsed, moved, or deceased. On the other hand, they do not include many other local patients who have current recommendations but never registered with the OPIDC.

We have made a similar estimate for Washington State’s patients, who are the only ones in the nation with no registry system in place (Gov. Gregoire recently signed a bill that initiates a voluntary registry).  With a law very similar to Oregon’s concerning qualifying conditions, applying Oregon’s 1.04% patient population figure gives us about 69,000 patients in Washington. However, Washington State’s larger urban centers (Seattle and Spokane), combined with a more liberal law than Oregon’s regarding who can sign recommendations (osteopaths, naturopaths, and nurse practitioners can recommend in Washington) and the lack of a state registry’s burden to patient compliance with the program suggests a higher estimate of 1.5% – 2% may be appropriate.  Numbers like Colorado’s 2.5% and Montana’s 3% are improbable as Washington lacks the greater patient access to dispensaries seen in those states.

Delaware, New Jersey, and D.C.’s programs are not operational yet, so they are not shown in our data table.  Most of the other state’s programs produce reports of patient registry numbers.  With Arizona signing up over 3,600 patients since mid-April, when it’s online-only registration went into effect, Arizona is on track to register over 30,000 patients this year.

Quick Facts about Medical Marijuana States:

• The 1.1 – 1.5 million estimated and registered medical marijuana patients in America are legally entitled to cultivate 17 – 24 million cannabis plants and possess 283 –  402 tons of harvested buds.
• The seventeen jurisdictions with medical marijuana encompass over 90 million Americans and 162 votes in the 2012 Electoral College.
• Patients make up over 3% of the population of Montana, almost 2.5% of Colorado, over 2% of California. and over 1% of Oregon, and Washington.
• After Michigan at 0.76% of population, every other medical marijuana state has less than 3 in 1,000 (0.3%) patients in its population.
• California, Colorado, Washington, Michigan, Oregon, and Montana comprise over 98% of the legal medical marijuana patients in America.
• More than 3 out of four (77% – 83%) of all medical marijuana patients live on the West Coast.
• Rhode Island and Vermont, two states where over 10% of the adult population uses marijuana monthly, have patient populations of 0.29% and 0.05%, respectively.
• Monthly teen use of marijuana is down in every medical marijuana state except Maine.
• Annual highway fatalities are down in every medical marijuana state except Rhode Island.
• Incidents of workplace injuries and illnesses are down in every medical marijuana state.

16 states, the Capitol, and 750,000 legal marijuana users.

We don’t know his or her name, but somewhere in one of sixteen states and the District of Columbia is America’s 750,000th legal medical marijuana patient.  The United States reached the three-quarter-million-patients mark as Arizona began issuing patient registry identification cards online in April 2011.

Fourteen of the seventeen medical marijuana jurisdictions have mandatory registries while two (California and Colorado) offer optional registries and one (Washington) has no registry system.  Delaware, New Jersey, and D.C.’s programs are not operational yet.  Most of the other state’s programs produce reports of patient registry numbers.  With Arizona signing up over 3,600 patients since mid-April, when it’s online-only registration went into effect, the fourteen operational programs have served well over 750,000 legal medical marijuana patients.

Quick Facts about Medical Marijuana States:

The 754,799 estimated and registered medical marijuana patients in America are legally entitled to cultivate 11,200,739 cannabis plants and possess 197.78 tons of harvested buds.

The seventeen jurisdictions with medical marijuana encompass over 90 million Americans and 162 votes in the 2012 Electoral College.

Patients make up over 3% of the population of Montana, almost 2.5% of Colorado, and over 1% of California, Oregon, and Washington.  After Michigan at 0.76% of population, every other medical marijuana state has less than 0.3% patients in its population.

Rhode Island and Vermont, two states where over 10% of the adult population uses marijuana monthly, have patient populations of 0.29% and 0.05%, respectively.

Most importantly, in all of these states, trains still run on time, fewer teenagers are using marijuana, economies still produce goods and services, traffic safety has increased, and hoardes of pot zombies aren’t roaming the streets in search of sttrraaiinns!

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1. Delaware becomes the 16th medical marijuana state
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(Washington Post) DOVER, Del. — Gov. Jack Markell has signed legislation making Delaware the 16th state to allow the use of medical marijuana.

The new law allows people 18 and older with certain serious or debilitating conditions that could be alleviated by marijuana to possess up to six ounces of the drug. Qualifying patients would be referred to state-licensed and regulated “compassion centers,” which would be located in each of Delaware’s three counties. The centers would grow, cultivate and dispense the marijuana.

Some highlights of the Delaware law:

• Patients may possess up to six ounces of usable cannabis
• Patients may purchase cannabis from three state-licensed dispensaries
• Patients may not grow their own cannabis
• Dispensary workers must be 21 years old and five or more years since a drug misdemeanor.  Drug felons are excluded.
• Patients may get cards for cancer, HIV/AIDS, cirrhosis, ALS (Lou Gehrig’s), Alzheimer’s agitation, and PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder)
• Patients may get cards to deal with cachexia or wasting syndrome; intractable nausea; seizures; or severe and persistent muscle spasms
• Pain patients can only get a card if their pain has not responded to previously prescribed medication or surgical measures for more than three months or for which other treatment options produced serious side effects
• Patients may designate caregivers and caregivers may only assist up to five patients.
• Only the weight of usable medicine is considered against a patients limits, not the weight of preparations (e.g. the three grams of medicine in the ten ounces of brownies counts only as three grams, not ten ounces)
• Patients shall not be considered DUID solely for the presence of marijuana metabolites in their urine
• Schools may not discriminate against patients in enrollment*
• Landlords may not discriminate against patients in housing*
• Medical care, including organ transplants, shall not be denied to patients
• Employers may not discriminate against patients in hiring, promotions, and firing.  Positive urine screens for marijuana cannot be used against patients*
• Patients may not be discriminated against in cases of parental rights and child custody.

*unless failing to do so would cause the school or landlord  or employer to lose a monetary or licensing-related benefit under federal law or regulations.

(Delaware Online) DOVER – The Delaware Senate sent Gov. Jack Markell legislation late this afternoon that would make Delaware the 16th state to legalize marijuana use for medical purposes.

Under Senate Bill 17, physicians could recommend marijuana for patients suffering from cancer, HIV/AIDS, multiple sclerosis, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), Alzheimer’s disease and post-traumatic stress disorder.

People with other chronic disease or debilitating medical conditions could qualify if other medicines or surgical procedures have failed to relieve their pain or caused seizures, severe or persistent muscle spasms and intractable nausea. Physicians and patients would have to have a “bona fide physician-patient relationship” and other medical treatments would have to be exhausted before marijuana is recommended, according to the legislation.

While I am thrilled that PTSD will be covered, making Delaware the third state (California and New Mexico are the others) to cover that mental illness, I am less than enthused about the “medicine of last resort” aspect to protecting those with pain, seizures, spasticity, or nausea.  The state could argue that the pharmaceutical opioids, even though they cause you all sorts of awful side effects, do actually help your pain, so you don’t get to use safer non-toxic non-addictive cannabis.

The “bona-fide” relationship means few patients will actually get their cards, as so many of their “bona-fide” physicians can’t or won’t sign for medical marijuana.

Also, patients cannot grow their own but may possess up to 6 ounces of medicine purchased from three state-licensed dispensaries… and we’ve seen how much the current administration is threatening the other state-licensed dispensaries in Rhode Island, Colorado, and Arizona.

It is progress… but as the map gets filled with more “green” medical marijuana states we should be coloring them with increasingly lighter shades of green.

New Jersey - The (No Medical Marijuana) Garden State - coming soon to a state near you!

In 2010, New Jersey passed the first medical marijuana law that did not allow the patient to grow their own low-cost medicine, instead requiring them to pay street prices for cannabis sold through dispensaries.

The District of Columbia followed suit when setting up their rules, despite the fact that the initiative that passed by 69% back in 1998 allowed an “exemption for cultivation [which] shall apply only to marijuana specifically grown to provide a medical supply for a patient.”

Marijuana Policy Project then wrote Arizona’s new law which forbids home cultivation if the patient lives within 25 miles of a dispensary.  The reasoning given was that the dispensaries would need to be guaranteed a clientele in order to remain viable.

Download audio file (Halo-makes-dispensaries-viable-MPP-Andrew-Mey.mp3)

So imagine you’re a 70-year-old glaucoma patient in Phoenix living on SSI.  A friend donates to you a small closet grow and you’re producing a few ounces for yourself at about $12.50/ounce.  Next month, an entrepreneur applies for and is approved to open a dispensary 18 miles away from your rent-subsidized apartment.  Your choices are to move seven miles farther away on your fixed SSI income and keep growing or to sell your grow equipment and start buying those $300 ounces at the dispensary that you can only get to after a lengthy bus ride.  Don’t worry, nobody on the bus or at the stop in your bad neighborhood will smell the ounces of weed on you as you bring them home every couple of weeks (you’re not allowed to stock up – two ounces per fortnight only).  Because we want to be sure a place that sells marijuana in a storefront doesn’t go out of business, since marijuana is such hard commodity to market.

We at NORML had warned that continued focus on medical without an eye toward full legalization would eventually lead to a “box canyon” where opponents say, “Oh, you want medical marijuana?  All right, we’ll make it medical. You don’t grow your own Vicodin, do you?” and begin to eliminate home growing provisions, the only protection cannabis consumers have against government and/or corporate overpricing, strain degradation, and pharmaceuticalization of cannabis into pills, sprays, and inhalers that will make possession of raw plant material by patients just as criminal as it is now for non-patients.

Two current medical marijuana states, New Mexico and Montana, face efforts to outright repeal medical marijuana.  Two current medical marijuana states, Arizona and New Jersey, don’t allow for home cultivation.  Now, New Hampshire, Delaware, Idaho, Maryland, and New York have medical marijuana proposals that forbid home grows and require street-price dispensary shopping.  Proposals in Connecticut, Iowa, Illinois, Kansas, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and West Virginia would be similar to the current thirteen medical marijuana states that allow registered home cultivation.

NORML supports all these proposals, because what kind of pro-marijuana organization could oppose protecting patients from arrest for marijuana possession, even if they had to buy it at a dispensary?  At least the dispensary is clean and safe and reliable and tested and secure compared to the streets.  But we remind all supporters of medical marijuana that only through legalization for the healthy will you ever get reasonable prices, peace of mind, and avoid the eventual box canyon the DEA and FDA want to steer you into.

"Damn. We woulda had him for felony distribution and cultivation, but he flushed the grow tent, lights, ballasts, ducting, soil, pots, plants, grinders, scales, and sixteen pounds of processed pot when we served the warrant." So, it wasn't a "low-flow", then?

We told you about the Supreme Court hearing arguments in a case that could determine whether cops can break down your door for merely smelling marijuana.  We’ve told you of the deaths of cannabis consumers during surprise midnight no-knock warrants.  The reason drug cops have to break down your door in the middle of the night with no warning is so that you won’t use the time between “*knock knock* Police!  Open up, we have a warrant!” and you opening the door to destroy any evidence.  There’s some logic there for some drugs, since it would be fairly easy to flush a kilo of powder cocaine, a bottle of pills, or the liquid chemicals used to manufacture other drugs down the toilet.

Cannabis?  Not so much…

(Delaware Online) Two people were arrested Thursday after they tried to flush 1,038 grams of marijuana down a toilet in the Fox Run apartment complex in Bear, police said.

The marijuana clogged the toilet, allowing officers to confiscate it and an additional 59 grams, Weglarz said. They also found a loaded .32 caliber handgun, a digital scale, drug paraphermalia and the stolen computer, he said.

Yeah, if you try to flush over two pounds of organic matter, you’re going to flood a toilet.  That’s why they don’t use those “low-flow” johns at the Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest.  Any amount of marijuana large enough to consider someone a major trafficker is also too large to flush and any amount small enough to flush is a consumer amount not worth the violence and risk of a no-knock raid.  If you suspect the person of growing marijuana, there’s even less justification for the no-knock raid.  Lights, ballasts, pots, and soil don’t flush well at all.

So what’s the reason for the no-knock pot raids?  Shock and awe.  Psych warfare against cannabis consumers.  An excuse to use the shiny new military toys the local cops just bought with federal grant money they get for busting more pot smokers.  The sheer thrill of playing commando some trigger-happy cops enjoy.  The justifiable reaction to the demonized “druggies” cops are inculcated to see as an “enemy”.  But protecting evidence in a pot case?  Hardly.

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Legislation that seeks to legalize the physician-supervised use of medical marijuana has been reintroduced in the Delaware Senate.

Senate Bill 17, The Delaware Medical Marijuana Act, amends state law so that physician-supervised patients with an authorized “debilitating medical condition” can possess and use up to six ounces of marijuana for medical purposes. The measure would also provide for the establishment of non-profit “compassion centers” that would be licensed by the state to produce and dispense medical cannabis. Home cultivation is not explicitly authorized under the bill.

While NORML believes that barring patients from home cultivation is unduly restrictive, we also recognize that passage of this legislation will protect certain qualified medical marijuana patients from arrest, and seeks provide these patients with a safe and legal source for their medicine. It is our hope that this measure may be expanded or amended during the legislative process so that it is in even better accordance with patients’ needs and practices.

SB 17 has been referred to the Senate Health and Social Services Committee. Members of the Committee may be contacted here.

Originally posted here:
Delaware Senate Considers Regulating Medical Marijuana