It pains me to make this prediction — because if I am right it means sick children won’t get the help they need and have been promised — but there will be full-scale medical marijuana in Florida before there is Charlotte’s Web, the extract low in THC used to treat patients suffering from conditions that include epilepsy.
That’s because some politicians in Tallahassee are playing election-year politics with this issue — and with the children who need Charlotte’s Web.
As Mary Ellen Klas of the Miami Herald reports:
“The Florida Department of Health has rejected requests to find an alternative to a lottery system for selecting the companies that will grow and dispense low-THC marijuana for medical purposes in its proposed final rule released today.
“… Patients, growers, investors and marijuana entrepreneurs all appealed to the department during two public hearings this summer asking the agencyto reconsider choosing the five dispensaries by lottery.”
The rule is being developed to implement a law passed by the Legislature this spring, authorizing one nursery in five regions of the state to be licensed to cultivate and distribute Charlotte’s Web, but…
“Absent from the rule, however, are any detailed standards that impose requirements on the quality of the cultivation, the experience of the growers or the technological skill of the company to obtain a low-THC abstract.”
