New Hampshire Governor Says No to Latest Medical Cannabis Expansion Bill
Gov. Chris Sununu vetoed a bill that would have removed the health-care provider requirement from the New Hampshire medicinal marijuana laws. As it stands, patients must have at least a three month relationship with a healthcare-provider before they can be certified to receive medical cannabis.
Citing his belief that a strong provider-patient relationship was necessary to ensure proper treatment, the republican governor did allow the passage of other measures in 2018, and earlier this year, that will help the state’s medical marijuana market. As of Aug. 20, 2019, physician assistants will be able to recommend medicinal cannabis, and regulators are now permitted to allow the states medical marijuana operators, all four of them, to open a second provisioning center in their area. Legislation passed last year has already resulted in the recent opening of the state’s fifth provisioning center, for a market of roughly 8,000 patients.
Franklin Bioscience Most Recent Acquisition for Florida Marijuana Business Jushi
Pennsylvania based Franklin Bioscience will be purchased by Jushi, a Florida based marijuana company, for the sum of $63 million in a combination of cash, debt, and stock. Franklin holds licenses for up to 12 medical marijuana provisioning centers in Pennsylvania.
On June 10 Jushi began trading publicly on Canada’s NEO exchange under the ticker symbol JUSH, and have been entering into acquisition agreements ever since. These include Dalisto, a Virginia based marijuana processing company, and The Healing Center, an adult-use provisioning center in San Diego. Jushi CEO Erich Mauff admits the company would have liked to stay private longer, but it was always the plan to go public. Current plans for further purchases include California, Illinois, Nevada, New York and Ohio, and other states where licensing is hard to come by.
Regulators in Alaska Deny On-Site Consumption Application Number One
Unable to come to a majority opinion on how to interpret state law, Alaskan regulators vetoed the first application for on-site consumption in a 2-2 vote. The Fairbanks Cut, a provisioning center, who would have been the first in the state to legally allow patients to consume cannabis in the retail location, plans to appeal the desicion. The discrepency lies in the use of the phrase “free-standing”, half the regulatory board arguing that The Faribanks Cut did not meet this criteria as it shares the building with another business.
Utah Regulators Delay Cultivation Licensing
On July 15, the deadline set for the state regulators in Utah to announce who will receive cultivation licenses for medicinal marijuana, state regulators reported that they would not be making any announcements until the end of July. Utah is issuing 10 grower licenses, for which eighty-one farmers and entrepreneurs have applied. Voters approved medical cannabis in the state last year. Licensing for processors will be tackled next, and is expected “possibly as soon as” 2020.
Study Finds Teen Use Declining in Legalized States
Analyzing data from national and state Youth Risk Behavior Surveys from 1993 to 2017, researchers from Montana State University, University of Oregon, University of Colorado-Denver and San Diego State University took a look at the likelihood of use in the past 30 days among high school students in states that had legalized marijuana. The data came from 27 states and the District of Columbia, where medical mairjuana has been legalized, and the seven states where recreational has been legalized during the past 25 years. The results: recreational marijuana laws were associated with an 8% decrease in the likelihood of teens trying marijuana as well as a 9% decrease in the odds of frequent marijuana use. Medical marijuana laws, however, had no noticeable impact on teen use. The authors of the study speculate the decrease may be due to it being more difficult to acquire marijuana on the street as drug dealers are replaced by licensed dispensaries that require proof of age.
Bipartisan Bill Seeks to Expand Federal Cannabis Research Policy
On July 17 U.S. Representatives Andy Harris, M.D. (R-MD), Earl Blumenauer (D-OR), Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) H. Morgan Griffith (R-VA), Debbie Dingell (D-MI), and Rob Bishop (R-UT) introduced the Medical Marijuana Research Act of 2019. The bipartisan effort looks to change the processes that currently hinder legitimate medical research on cannabis by amending the Controlled Substances Act. “As a physician who has conducted NIH-sponsored research, I cannot stress enough how critical this legislation is to the scientific community. Our drug policy was never intended to act as an impediment to conducting legitimate medical research. If we are going to label marijuana as medicine, we need to conduct the same rigorous scientific research on efficacy and safety that every other FDA-approved treatment undergoes. This legislation will facilitate that research by removing the unnecessary administrative barriers that deter qualified researchers from thoroughly studying medical marijuana,” said Dr. Harris.
The proposed legislation addresses two major factors preventing researchers from learning more about marijuana, a Schedule I drug. First, by creating a new streamlined registration process specifically for marijuana, wait times for approval will be reduced, costly security measures lightened, and additional unnecessary layers of protocol removed. Second, it alters production and distribution regulations so that researchers, once approved, can more easily access cannabis. At current the only legally available federal research marijuana is grown under contract between the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the University of Mississippi.
