Medical marijuana is more than a hot topic on the news; it’s become one of Denver’s only growing industries. But with that boom, there’s been an echo of disapproval from citizens, lobbyists, and lawmakers.
Once again, the current laws on the books for caregivers and dispensaries are being gone over with a fine comb. Now a bill is on the table to regulate medical marijuana.
The bill would ban doctors from making money or benefiting from signing medical cards. The bill would require doctors to have no restrictions on their medical licenses in order to sign marijuana cards. The most controversial part of the bill is the limitation of five patients per caregiver. This limitation could put dispensaries out of business entirely.
Since times are tough, it seems extremely dumb to destroy Colorado’s fastest-growing industry. Tax is paid on all products sold in a dispensary, and the state is making money off the sale of medical marijuana. Denver City Councilman Charlie Brown also made a good point recently when he said, “[the five-person limit] could be forcing [patients] back into the parks and back alleys.”
The Denver City Council recently held a public hearing about regulating dispensaries. The result was 1,000-foot buffers between shops, schools, or child-care facilities like a daycare; the banning of marijuana use on-site; restrictions on who can own dispensaries; and ineligibility for felons convicted within the last five years. But these restrictions are just for Denver, not the rest of the state.
Some statewide restrictions should be in place. At least the ones about the distance between dispensaries and schools and such, it’s just a no-brainer. You don’t see liquor stores next to public schools. Requiring shops to be a certain distance from each other is also common sense. It seems overkill to have more dispensaries in Denver than coffee shops. An industry like this should expect some regulation.
Had there been regulation in place from the beginning, in fact, there might not be the backlash toward medical marijuana there is now. Regulation might have curbed the greedy practices of unscrupulous people in the dispensary business who give the business a bad name.
Ads offering big money for doctors to sign cards, for example, wouldn’t exist. Or the recent case in Brighton of a chiropractor who opened up his back door and charged $100 a head to sign the paperwork for anyone who would pay it, and had a caregiver inside selling pot. Cops quickly came and broke up the operation. Maybe that wouldn’t have happened, either.
Cases like these are giving the whole medical marijuana community a bad name, and give lawmakers good reason to try to do what they are doing. Well-considered restrictions on the industry would weed people out that have no business being a patient or a caregiver.
But the limitation of five patients per caregiver needs to disappear from the bill.
That bill would set medical marijuana for Colorado back immeasurably. Instead of just entirely disenfranchising everyone who owns or relies on dispensaries, the writers of the state bill should look at the Denver City Council’s resolution of last week, and adopt sensible regulation that doesn’t shut the whole industry down.
There was a reason Amendment 20 was made, and it was not to make people rich. It was to help the people who depend on medical marijuana go about their days; it was for the truly sick. Putting the sick back into alleys getting pot from a stranger isn’t the right idea.
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