Colorado Governor Signs Bill Adding New Restrictions to Medical Marijuana

Governor Jared Polis has signed an expansive invoice that may add restrictions to Colorado’s medical marijuana program and fund research to analysis marijuana’s impression on psychological well being.

House Bill 1317 has sparked controversy since its introduction, however that did not cease the measure from moving quickly through the Colorado Legislature with little opposition from lawmakers. The proposal, launched by Home Speaker Alec Garnett, was billed as an try and curb youth use of extracted marijuana merchandise, however medical marijuana advocates consider the brand new restrictions add pointless obstacles to sufferers and physicians.

Beneath the brand new regulation, medical marijuana physicians might be topic to necessities that embrace offering a THC dosage quantity and including medical and psychological well being critiques for sufferers. The invoice additionally limits medical marijuana focus purchases, and all MMJ transactions might be entered into a brand new state monitoring system.

Though opponents of the invoice had been pressuring Polis for a veto, the governor declined to tip his hand when asked about it at a press convention two weeks in the past. However Polis, flanked by HB 1317’s important sponsors on the Governor’s Residence, put ink to paper on the regulation mid-day June 24.

“The fact is that it’s too straightforward for Colorado’s youth to entry high-potency marijuana after they shouldn’t be capable of, and we don’t have the complete image of how these merchandise impression the creating mind,” Garnett stated on the invoice signing. “This regulation will assist educate customers about high-potency hashish, and it’ll advance crucial analysis that may give us a greater understanding of how high-potency merchandise impression creating brains.”

Day by day medical marijuana focus gross sales limits will now be decreased from 40 grams to eight, whereas new medical sufferers between the ages of eighteen and twenty might want to get extra physician approval earlier than receiving a marijuana suggestion; the identical age group may also have a every day focus buying restrict of two grams as a substitute of 8.

The Colorado School of Public Health will obtain $3 million in state funds to create an academic marketing campaign about youth use and extracted THC, with one other $1 million obtainable yearly via fiscal 12 months 2023-’24 funding a CSPH evaluate of current analysis and additional examine of the mental-health results of marijuana. In one other $1.7 million venture, coroners will now yearly report the outcomes of THC toxicology screens for suicide, overdose and unintentional deaths for individuals underneath the age of 26 to the Colorado Violent Loss of life Reporting System.

And beginning in 2023, all marijuana focus merchandise, each medical and leisure, will fall underneath new packaging or labeling guidelines created by the state Marijuana Enforcement Division.

Stronger guardrails for medical marijuana entry and concentrated THC merchandise had been pushed by lobbies representing mother and father, health-care organizations and anti-legalization teams, which fear that the rising efficiency of authorized marijuana merchandise poses a risk to the creating brains of younger individuals. Colorado well being professionals declared a state of emergency in youth mental health in May, with marijuana use listed as one in every of a number of contributing components. Colorado Division of Well being and Atmosphere information exhibits that using extracted marijuana merchandise greater than doubled amongst youngsters from 2015 to 2019, however that survey did not ask college students whether or not the merchandise they have been utilizing have been initially obtained by a medical marijuana affected person.

“We’re proud to have performed a job from conception to passage and are thrilled to see it signed into regulation in the present day,” Kevin Sabet, president of anti-marijuana legalization group Sensible Approaches to Marijuana, says in a press release. “At present’s end result wouldn’t have been potential with out the diligent work of many teams, all of whom are united underneath the banner of pushing again towards the pot trade’s relentless quest for revenue at any worth. However this isn’t over. Reasonably, this invoice is just the start of what might be carried out to place well being and security above the pursuits of the addiction-for-profit marijuana trade.”

The leisure marijuana trade has stayed largely impartial or silent on the invoice, whereas the medical marijuana group has voiced the loudest resistance. Over 100 medical marijuana medical doctors despatched a letter to Polis asking him to veto the invoice, in accordance with Hashish Clinicians Colorado director Martha Montemayor, who says the regulation “will successfully kill medical marijuana in Colorado.”

Montemayor directs a community of medical marijuana health-care professionals and sufferers via academic conferences and doctor-patient connections. She believes that requiring medical doctors to incorporate dosage and consumption guidelines with a medical marijuana suggestion makes that a prescription, and medical doctors with prescription energy should register with the Drug Enforcement Administration, which does not permit prescribing Schedule I medicine.

Even with out potential DEA interference, she worries that medical marijuana medical doctors and sufferers are nonetheless going to be phased out.

“We weren’t given a seat on the desk. It requires continued hashish education just for hashish medical doctors, and never conventional medical doctors who know nothing about it,” Montemayor says. “It additionally requires the physician to evaluate data from earlier medical doctors, which successfully strips the hashish medical doctors of their diagnosing privileges.”

Requiring additional physician visits can be a social fairness situation, she argues, as another physician go to can convey untenable prices for some her shoppers.

“It doubles the price for all sufferers by forcing a second prognosis. Historically, hashish has been a poor particular person’s drugs, as a result of they do not have medical health insurance,” she says.

The vast majority of the brand new restrictions might be efficient instantly, in accordance with HB 1317’s language.