Analysis by Kyle A. Lohmeier
There are many provisions of Ohio’s medical marijuana law that make exactly no sense at all unless viewed in the correct light: that the law is intended to make it nearly impossible for Ohioans to use medical marijuana legally while enabling the state to collect as much money in application fees from prospective entrepreneurs as possible before the entire program is killed. All the while, the state’s various law-enforcement agencies are still busily preying upon cannabis users to shore up budget shortfalls.
One of the unique provisions of Ohio’s medical marijuana law – which is technically in effect even though there isn’t a single cannabis seedling growing anywhere in the state legally – is that marijuana would have to be “tested” before it could be sold. Of course, the law also bans private labs from testing marijuana for a full year, leaving the state’s institutions of higher learning the only ones eligible to conduct the testing. But then, only if those institutions want to, and badly. How badly? Enough to spend $2,000 for the application fee and $18,000 for the privilege of running a marijuana testing facility no one needs. As of now, not one of Ohio’s universities has applied. One reason is that public universities may well be justifiably wary of getting involved with a plant the federal government still bans and thereby risk federal funding. Much of the federal government’s interactions with the states come down to that sort of extortion, so, naturally the colleges’ concerns are justified.
“’If there is no testing, then there is no program,’ said Rob Ryan, executive director of the Ohio Patient Network and a Blue Ash councilman. ’We are very concerned,’” Jessie Balmert wrote for the Cincinnati Enquirer before I got up this morning.
The same Enquirer article puts the cost of setting up a testing lab and purchasing the various needed equipment at about $1 million; something else universities might be loath to do with their state, federal and tuition money.
“’There are too many unknowns to rely exclusively on learning institutions,’ said Chris Lindsey, senior legislative counsel for the Marijuana Policy Project, which pursued a ballot initiative to legalize medical marijuana in Ohio in 2016 but dropped the idea after lawmakers passed their plan. ‘Private labs are in better positions to respond,’” the Enquirer reported.
Of course private labs are better able to respond! Why else would the law have specifically prohibited them from doing so for a full year?
The article mentions there are also concerns that universities couldn’t handle the volume of pot being produced and would struggle to secure the cannabis being stored for testing on site against theft. Valid concerns, indeed, but also ones that beg the unasked question: Why the hell does pot need to be tested, particularly when no other state that has legalized cannabis for medical or recreational use has such a requirement?
Because, again, this law intended solely to allow the state to collect money from people whom they will tax and regulate to the brink of bankruptcy while still retaining the ability to lock people up for marijuana and send them to crony-tastic marijuana “diversion programs.”
It’s fairly apparent that my cynical interpretation is the actual intent of the law when its various unique and restrictive features are looked at in total.
First, there’s the tiny number of grow sites that will even be allowed, and the individual sizes of those sites are tightly limited with the largest still being smaller than a football field while the “small” sites have less square-footage than can be found on a regulation basketball court. Application fees and license fees for those grow sites are $200,000 for one of the dozen “large” sites and $20,000 for one of the dozen “small” sites – there will only be 24 total statewide, which was never enough to satisfy demand.
The state will only allow a total of sixty dispensaries for medical marijuana. Permission to operate one of those costs $70,000 and that permission only lasts two years before another $70,000 bribe, er sorry, fee, is required.
Doctors who wish to recommend marijuana to patients have to first enroll in a class. Then, those doctors will have to submit themselves to massive amounts of additional paperwork and scrutiny for each and every patient they recommend marijuana to.
And, that paperwork is never-ending; because patients who wish to use marijuana to treat an illness will have to have their “prescriptions” for it renewed every ninety days.
If, by some miracle an Ohioan gets his or her hands on a recommendation and is able to find a legally-operating dispensary selling products that have been tested and approved by a lab that no one has expressed any interest in operating; he or she still can’t go buy marijuana and smoke it. Instead, they are only allowed to purchase an edible, topical or vaporizable processed form of the plant. Smoking marijuana, even by a patient with a medical marijuana card, is still strictly illegal.
Or, as the millions of people who smoke marijuana regularly in the state of Ohio have done all along, they’ll just continue calling up their weed guy and carry on smoking it with various glass “tobacco” pipes that can be had at those strange little shops that always smell vaguely of sandalwood and often sell golf discs and tie-dye shirts as well.
One would have to be an imbecile to not be aware of the fact that the marijuana black market is a multi-billion dollar industry, and not even the people attracted to politics are that stupid. As dumb as Ohio’s medical pot law looks from the outside, it’s actually quite clever. The state has come up with a way to capture as much of that black market money as it can via license fees and eventual (maybe) taxation, while still being able to enjoy all the benefits of marijuana enforcement – extortion, asset-forfeiture, rationalizations for large local police forces, and the like. As an added benefit, by ramming this bill through the legislature as they did last year, Ohio’s lawmakers stopped the Marijuana Policy Project’s plan to pursue a ballot initiative to pass a law that would have actually legalized marijuana for Ohioans, which in the process would have cut the state and its cronies out of the money loop.
John Kasich and the Ohio legislature has successfully managed to have their cake and eat it too.
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