Delays remain in medical marijuana

It is no longer a question whether Ohio will have medical marijuana available by Sept. 8, the time set in state law when the program must be “fully operational.” That ship has sailed, officials say, as delays continue.

Now the question is when exactly the program will be up and running for patients to receive the product they have long awaited.

Additional delays were outlined Thursday as the Medical Marijuana Control Program met with a state advisory board.

Cultivators, testing labs and physicians to recommend medical marijuana are all in place. Processors, or those who will turn cannabis plant into edibles, oils, creams and tinctures, have yet to be selected. The 104 applicants were supposed to learn the outcome in the spring, then in June. Now Mark Hamlin, senior policy adviser for the Department of Commerce, said processor licenses will be awarded in the coming weeks.

He said the delay came because the program wanted to learn from mistakes made when scoring applicants and awarding licenses for cultivators. He said of the 104 applicants, fewer than 40 met the minimum requirement, meaning all who did will receive a license. The rejected applicants will then have an opportunity to fix their applications and apply for one of the remaining processor licenses.

“Our understanding of the industry and our expectation is that there will be opportunity for some of those processors to be up and running at the point when plant material is ready,” Hamlin said.

While much of the focus has been on delays in awarding licenses, to date only two cultivators have been given the green light to grow marijuana, officials said. Those who have not received certificates of operation will now have to seek extensions before they can be inspected and approved.

Meanwhile, the patient registration portal has not yet come on line, and that drew the ire of advisory board members, particularly Bob Bridges, the patient representative on the committee.

The portal was supposed to be ready this month but will not because of the state law, which gives patients the ability to get a note from certified doctors that can be used as an affirmative defense for possessing marijuana and paraphernalia while the state gets the medical marijuana program operational. Those letters expire 60 days after the patient registry opens.

Bridges questioned why the registry could not be operational well in advance of the product-ready date, saying those protections have been difficult for patients to obtain.

Erin Reed, senior legal counsel for the state pharmacy board, said the portal is ready to go live but will be turned on closer to when product is ready so patients remain protected under the law.

“We are trying to time it right to make sure we don’t do it more than 60 days before products are available on dispensary shelves,” Reed said.

The patient registry will give doctor-recommended patients an e-card, not a plastic laminated one, where doctors can input patients’ information.

The patients’ online registration can be scanned electronically or printed, and the patient must have a photo ID associated with them in the portal. That same ID will allow patients into medical marijuana dispensaries.

So far, 185 doctors are certified to recommend medical marijuana, and more are being added each month. The doctors tend to cluster in population centers, though the distribution is starting to spread more across the state.