Analysis by Kyle A. Lohmeier
Details are still emerging about how the state of Ohio will enact the worst medical marijuana law ever written by human beings, and as one should expect they are not good. The latest detail to emerge from the state’s Medical Marijuana Advisory Committee – that’s a real good clue that your state has the worst medical marijuana law ever written, it has something called a Medical Marijuana Advisory Committee – is that the state will limit grow sites to a crony-tastic 18 total. To keep the riff-raff out and make sure only the sort of people who donate to political campaigns qualify, the license fee to run a “large” cannabis farm is $180,000 plus a $20,000 application fee, according to an article in the Columbus Dispatch. For a fifth of a million dollars, a well-heeled and even-better-connected Ohioan can grow pot on as many as 15,000 square feet of land, or not quite double the amount of land within the base paths of a big league ballpark. The state will allow up to 12 of these operations as well as six smaller ones that grow on up to 1,600 feet of land (just over one-third the square footage of a regulation basketball court); application fee being $2,000 and the license costing $18,000 for the “small” operation.
For those capable of rudimentary arithmetic, it doesn’t sound possible that an amount of land totaling less than four football fields can possibly grow enough cannabis to meet demand.
“’We have said we think about 188,000 patients would qualify for medical marijuana. If that is even in the ballpark, you would have to double the amount of land the rules are considering,’” Aaron Marshall of Ohioans for Medical Marijuana told the Dispatch.
Ohioans for Medical Marijuana dropped their efforts to put an initiative on next week’s ballot to legalize marijuana after the worst medical marijuana law ever written was rammed through the state’s legislature and signed by Governor John Kasich expressly to create a government controlled monopoly. Ironically, the state passed a law barring the writing of monopolies into the state constitution via ballot initiative to prevent a similar medical marijuana law – though without government controls – from being enacted if it had been approved by voters in 2015.
In addition to only allowing the most wealthy and connected Ohioans to grow not nearly enough marijuana to meet demand, the committee announced a few other rules, all of them idiotic. One rule forbids any cultivation operation from being created within 500 feet of a school, park, library, playground or church; because reasons. Also, applicants will be required to demonstrate they have “adequate capital” and can meet quality and security requirements – requirements that likely haven’t even been established yet.
Of course, why have just one bureaucratic government body be involved in the process of deciding how to have human beings within the borders of a thing called Ohio interact with a plant that humans have had a symbiotic relationship with for millennia? So, the rules created by the state’s Medical Marijuana Advisory Committee will next have to be approved by the state’s Common Sense Initiative – I shit you not, that’s actually a thing – before going on to the Joint Committee on Agency Rule Review. In short, this is why we can’t have nice things.
Of course, this raft of proposed rules that will go through three different bureaucracies before becoming part of the worst medical marijuana law ever written, only cover growing the cannabis. The rules for testing (yes, the law requires the pot to be “tested”), dispensing and possessing marijuana will still need to be developed. Given the number of absurdities written into the law itself – even legal possessors/users of cannabis cannot smoke it – and the number of bureaucratic hurdles in place, the state is optimistic in hoping to have patients in Ohio legally accessing a plant that grows wild on six continents within two years of yesterday’s meeting. The law went into “effect” on September 8 of this year.
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