Health Department defends pot rules
NORMAN — The state Health Department warned a judge Tuesday that the public will be harmed if it is blocked from implementing key rules on medical marijuana.
In a legal brief, the agency listed eight potential dangers to the public interest if the rules aren’t enforced.
Those dangers included the sale of “food and drug products that are diseased, contaminated, filthy, putrid or decomposed,” according to the brief.
The Health Department made the warning in response to a legal petition challenging 21 medical pot rules.
“These harms to the public and the mission of the Health Department outweigh any speculative, nominal harm the petitioners may suffer during this suit,” attorneys representing the Health Department wrote.
The eight petitioners are asking Cleveland County District Judge Michael Tupper for an emergency injunction against the implementation of rules they call another attempt to subvert the will of the people.
They describe themselves in the lawsuit as patients having an immediate need of medical marijuana and business owners and investors in the new industry in Oklahoma.
Voters in June overwhelmingly approved a state question legalizing medical marijuana in Oklahoma.
The state Board of Health first adopted medical marijuana rules July 10. It redid the rules Aug. 1 after a public outcry and after being advised by the attorney general that it had overstepped its authority.
It specifically eliminated Aug. 1 a ban on the sale of smokable marijuana and a requirement dispensaries hire pharmacists.
In a legal case first filed July 13, the eight petitioners complain the Board of Health has still exceeded its authority.
“The Department of Health’s attempt to rectify the mess created by the July 10 amended rules has resulted in an even bigger regulatory dumpster fire than its predecessor,” their attorney, Rachel Bussett, argued in their application for an emergency injunction.
“The latest unworkable amendments
and the mechanism by which they were installed were a concerted, clearly orchestrated effort to again undermine rather than honor the will of the citizens of Oklahoma,” she wrote in the Aug. 7 filing.
One of the biggest complaints from medical
marijuana advocates about the Aug. 1 rules is that growers are regulated like restaurants. Bussett complained the Health Department “has potentially made any outdoor commercial cultivation an impossibility” because growers would have to adhere to the hygiene and cleanliness standards applied to food handling in a restaurant.
Responding on behalf of the Health Department
were two of Attorney General Mike Hunter’s top assistants.
The AG’s assistants were sharply critical of many of the complaints and arguments made by the petitioners.
They called the complaint about hygiene standards not “even plausible, since other purveyors of food and drugs ... do not appear to have trouble with complying with the Public
Health Code.”
They called other petitioners’ points misplaced, bizarre, puzzling and mystical.
About one of the complaints, the attorneys wrote “it is unclear how they could possibly read the Rule this way — unless one imagines Oklahoma as a Dickensian world where soot-covered children are employed as repairmen for marijuana ovens.”