I L L. State Medical Cannabis Monopoly Opens Tomorrow

[solabeirtan]

Another State Run Monopoly system about to open its doors.  

 

Not a lot of compassion in this state it appears. No patient grows allowed.  $150 / yr for reg + Drs recommendation + must register with one of the approved Cannabis Outlets (dips).  

 

3,300 Registered patients (to date) will be looking to get up on some medical herbs.  Hopefully they will have some luck.  

 

Help Wanted

 

 over 12,000,000 people and 8 dips maybe

 

Monday is opening day - ABC news

 

seed to sale by Fla Co... $260,000   + annual maint. fee + .... 

Edited November 8, 2015 by solabeirtan

[Willy]

Just screams for a solid black market continuation... 

[imiubu]

Why certainly Willy... gotta still keep them prisons full somehow.

[trichcycler]

Why certainly Willy... gotta still keep them prisons full somehow.

 

.....to keep their private investors happy

like Bill Gates, and more surprisingly, its likely a 401 investor has holdings in a GEO type complex market.

Their populations have grown more than 80% in ten years, that's 4 x the total prison pop growth rate of 18%.

But with 20% returns......who supports these prisons and their aspirations? just sayin....

Edited November 9, 2015 by grassmatch

[Kingdiamond]

Will likely end up like Minnesota patients go once find swag or outrageous prices and never return and head back to the weed man on the corner.

[solabeirtan]

$20 / Gram !     2 years in the making,    6 Stores open,      and this is the best they could do?   Medical Marijuana minus the Compassionate part.  No wonder they only had 3,300 sign up...

 

Chicago Tribune 

 

...Chicago (n.)    from the Ojibwa tribe:  Shika:konk  "...the place of the bad smell..."

[+Malamute]

They law sunsets like December of 2017 I think?

 

 The governor is against it. Chances are it may just die. Heh.

[+Malamute]

From September:

 

 

The original pilot program extension and decriminalization bills are all but toast. Earlier this spring, the Illinois General Assembly passed three key bills relating to medical cannabis—a decriminalization and DUI bill (HB218), a bill extending the sunset of the pilot program (HB3299), and a bill adding PTSD as a qualifying condition. Governor Rauner issued amendatory vetoes of House Bills 218 and 3299, lowering the possession limits from 15 grams to 10, tightening the per se DUI limit from 15 nanograms to 5, and shortening the sunset extension from 4 years to 4 months.

 

By law, the General Assembly has 15 days from the next session date to override vetoed bills. Typically, legislators hold a special veto session each fall to ensure that the 15-day clock starts at the same time for all vetoed bills. However, the General Assembly has been in continuous session all summer fighting over an historic budget impasse. So, the 15-day clock on these bills started much earlier than usual.  The House could have but did not call the bill this week, essentially guaranteeing it will fail to become law at all.*

 

Senate Bill 33, which would add PTSD to the list of qualifying conditions, still sits on the Governor’s desk awaiting his signature. Some expected him to veto this bill, assuming PTSD would be added through administrative rule, making the legislative change essentially redundant. However, there’s still no word on whether DPH will add any qualifying conditions. The entire industry in Illinois is waiting with bated breath to see whether the Illinois Department of Public Health (IDPH) will expand the list of conditions for medical cannabis patients. In May, the Illinois Medical Cannabis Advisory Board considered petitions to add 15 new conditions. It made a formal recommendation to IDPH Director Nirav Shah to add 11 of those conditions (including PTSD and migraines).

 

The Director is vested with the discretion to add some or all of these conditions through administrative rule. Illinois law provides that IDPH “shall approve or deny a petition within 180 days of its submission, and, upon approval, shall proceed to add that condition by [administrative] rule.” The 180-day clock ran out last week without any indication of whether any of the approved conditions would be added. The Governor’s Office claims the petitions are still “under review.”

 

Many in the industry are growing increasingly fearful that low Illinois patient numbers could spell trouble for the program. Only about 3,000 patients have been approved for the program since last year, and the 11 additional conditions would significantly broaden the number of eligible patients. However, peoples’ frustrations are continuing to grow, especially since IDPH’s petition process is simply not functioning the way lawmakers intended it to. I can tell you that our firm’s Illinois cannabis clients are extremely frustrated with the slow pace here and some of them are doubting their ability to continue much longer. We are hearing the same thing at the various cannabis events we attend here in Chicago as well.

[+Malamute]

Illinois Governor Bruce Rauner and the Department of Public Health gave some bad news yesterday for Illinois medical cannabis patients, announcing that the state will not be adding any of the eleven additional conditions approved by the Medical Cannabis Advisory Board. Governor Rauner also vetoed Senate Bill 33, which would have added PTSD by statute.

The Compassionate Use of Medical Cannabis Pilot Program Act, which legalized the possession and use of medical cannabis in Illinois, also created the Medical Cannabis Advisory Board, a panel of 15 physicians and patient advocates that convene twice a year to consider petitions to add conditions “for which the use of cannabis has been shown to have a therapeutic or palliative effect.” The Board, by majority vote, can recommend to the Director of the Department of Public Health to add these conditions through administrative rule. The Act provides that the health department “shall approve or deny a petition within 180 days of its submission, and, upon approval, shall proceed to add that condition by rule[.]”

The Department of Public Health’s administrative rules further provide that “pon review of the Advisory Board’s recommendations, the Director will render a final decision regarding the acceptance or denial of the proposed debilitating medical conditions or diseases.” Almost two weeks after blowing past the six month statutory deadline, the Rauner Administration entirely rejected the Board’s recommendations, rendering a 56-word final decision that the conditions would “remain unaltered.”

In a separate statement accompanying the veto of SB33, Governor said that:

The pilot program is moving forward, but remains in its early stage. Cultivation centers are just beginning to grow their crops, and the first dispensary was licensed at the end of August. No patients have yet been served, and, consequently, the State has not had the opportunity to evaluate the benefits and costs of the pilot program or determine areas for improvement or even whether to extend the program beyond its pilot period. It is therefore premature to expand the pilot program – before any patient has been served and before we have had the chance to evaluate it.

All of us here in Illinois with connections to its cannabis industry are beside ourselves. Patients, advocates, licensees, and even the Chair of the Advisory Board, are upset with the Governor’s decisions, which will preclude tens of thousands of potential patients from entering an already anemic patient pool. Many are struggling to understand his motivations, especially given his spurious reasoning.

The problem is that all government pilot programs are experimental in nature and necessarily involve tinkering with various policy choices. The Medical Cannabis Advisory Board was created and serves to facilitate exactly that. That board was created to put the consideration of additional medical conditions outside of the legislative process and place it into the hands of expert medical professionals, who can more neutrally and scientifically evaluate the merits of each petition. The Department of Public Health’s administrative rules clearly establish the criteria by which these conditions should be considered: “whether the use of cannabis has been shown to have a therapeutic or palliative effect.” These rules nowhere mention that adding medical conditions should depend on whether or how well the cannabis industry is currently serving the needs of other patients’ conditions. Nor do they contemplate factoring in whether or not to extend the entire pilot program.

Instead, Governor Rauner flat out ignored the recommendations of trained medical professionals who extensively reviewed scientific evidence supporting medical cannabis treatments. A 56-word final decision to deny all these conditions is suspiciously terse; the public (and especially the patients with any of the rejected conditions) are owed a more detailed explanation as to why our Department of Public Health and our Governor rejected the Advisory Board’s recommendations wholesale.

The Advisory Board meets next in October and will reconsider many of the conditions denied yesterday, although yesterday’s news casts doubt on how seriously the state will take its recommendations. There is some hope left as SB33 heads back to the General Assembly, which could override the Governor’s veto by a three-fifths vote in each chamber. Whether this likely happens is unclear since the bill narrowly failed to receive veto-proof majority votes in either chamber, mostly along partisan lines. The Senate has 15 days from the first date it meets next–October 6th–to take up the override vote.

In the meantime, things are not looking good today for patients or the industry here in Illinois.

[Restorium2]

 announcing that the state will not be adding any of the eleven additional conditions approved by the Medical Cannabis Advisory Board. Governor Rauner also vetoed Senate Bill 33, which would have added PTSD by statute.

 

He's one bad politician and that needs to be stated early and often. 

[+Malamute]

I can't believe they voted this Rauner(republican) in there.  He makes people like Scott Walker look like a moderate.  Typical crony capitalist.

 

But yea,... the republicans have enough votes to keep the democrats from getting the votes to override Rauners veto.

 

*shrug*

 

 It is SUCH a useless law, it is better it just dies and try again later for something better.

[beourbud]

$20 / Gram !     2 years in the making,    6 Stores open,      and this is the best they could do?   Medical Marijuana minus the Compassionate part.  No wonder they only had 3,300 sign up...

 

Chicago Tribune 

 

...Chicago (n.)    from the Ojibwa tribe:  Shika:konk  "...the place of the bad smell..."

This is what happens when it's all about the money. 3000. Lol. We The People say SIUYA! Stick it up...

So much money wasted to profit a greedy. few.

This and any monopoly deserves All the ridicule the public conjures.

[+Malamute]

Newshawk: http://www.drugsense.org/donate.htm
Pubdate: Sun, 15 Nov 2015
Source: Los Angeles Times (CA)
Copyright: 2015 Los Angeles Times
Contact: letters@latimes.com
Website: http://www.latimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/248
Author: Robert McCoppin

NEWLY LEGALIZED IN ILLINOIS, MEDICAL POT SELLS BRISKLY

CHICAGO - Patients bought $210,000 of medical marijuana in the first
week it was legal in Illinois, marking what patients and industry
officials said was a welcome, if overdue, start.

"By and large, things have gone well," said Joseph Wright, director
of the Illinois medical marijuana pilot program.

More than 800 patients have bought 13,000 grams of cannabis since the
state's first dispensaries opened Nov. 9. That's about half an ounce
per customer, at an average price of $16 per gram, or about $450 per ounce.

That's higher than the average black-market price for pot in
Illinois, which runs about $350 for an ounce of a high-grade variety
of marijuana, according to the website priceofweed.com.

But advocates of medical marijuana say it's reasonable considering
that the program provides a highquality product that has been tested
to verify its content.

To buy the cannabis, prequalified patients had to designate a
dispensary of choice. A small number of patients were turned away
from the dispensaries because their designations did not show up in
the state database, but regulators were working to correct that, Wright said.

The opening of a few dispensaries amounted to a soft launch of the
industry in Illinois, the 23rd state to legalize medical marijuana,
though the drug is still illegal under federal law.

Only about 3,300 patients are registered statewide, far below what is
needed to sustain the new program but a decent start, industry officials said.

About 500 applicants were denied participation, most because they
didn't submit all documentation or weren't found to have one of
roughly 40 qualifying medical conditions, such as cancer, HIV or
seizures, state officials said.

In the program's first week, seven dispensaries opened, supplied by
four cultivation centers - well below the 60 dispensaries and 22 grow
houses originally authorized. But industry officials said the
incremental launch gave them a chance to work out the kinks of the
medical marijuana program.
__________________________________________________________________________

[solabeirtan]

State swine discover new 'drug' ostensibly, grasping for relevance or just another corn cob? Preying on the newbies naivete?  How about a slice of fear mongering from your 'trusted' officials to go with your over priced, over taxed cannabis.     ....3:04  "...uuhhh huuhhh this towns full of money grabbers...."