Looking for medical marijuana in NM? Get in line
July 16, 2010
ALBUQUERQUE, NM – AP — Len Goodman grow marijuana can not be sufficient to meet demand.
It is one of only 11 approved by New Mexico producers to produce marijuana for all the 2,000 registered in the state of medical marijuana patients, and their customers clean out their delivery. Once a strain of marijuana is harvested, dried and cured, it sends a notice that patients can order, and the boat is usually gone within 24 hours.
New Mexico has been so cautious in licensing and regulation of producers under its law on marijuana from three years of age, a physician that the small number of suppliers can not grow enough, creating a shortage that has forced some patients to the streets to buy illegal drugs.
The dilemma in New Mexico could have ramifications in other places, because the state program has been presented as a national model, other states seeking to replicate its strong regulatory structure to avoid the chaos that has prevailed in places like California.
potential producers pot undergo a thorough selection process before being granted a license. Once this happens, are limited to 95 plants and plants and an inventory “to reflect the current needs of qualified patients.”
The identity of suppliers and locations are kept secret to avoid the kind of store clinics that have sprung up in Colorado and California.
State Health Secretary Dr. Alfredo Vigil says it must balance the needs of preventing patients from both cultivated marijuana legal to ending the illegal market. He said the program is being expanded methodically to ensure adequate supervision and to meet producers and how they operate.
He is also opposed to hundreds of producers and many thousands of patients, which he said “absolutely out of the sand used for patients within the state and in the arena of de facto legalization.”
Medical marijuana patient Larry Love sees New Mexico as an example of what not to do. He claims the department approves new producers too slowly.
Love, who has a radio blog and has been highly critical of Vigil, earned his medical marijuana card in June 2009, but said it was November before he could get a supply from an authorized producer. He said that led him to other patients and to the illegal market, despite the risks.
Santa Fe County Business Goodman, NewMexicann, has 650 registered patients – five times the number of patients who said they can supply. Other producers are in a similar manner, he said.
As a result, he has to pot meals to patients with chronic diseases.
“Sometimes we do not have enough to use it when it is really bad, not good,” he said. “It’s like cutting the elderly in their medicines because they can not afford it.”
The situation in New Mexico is being watched closely by other states such as medical marijuana is becoming more popular throughout the country.
New Jersey, Iowa, Maine, Rhode Island, Hawaii, Colorado, Washington, DC, and some municipalities in California have called on the law of New Mexico Health Department spokeswoman Deborah Busemeyer said. They have been asking how the state manages the producers and how to maintain some control over legal pot and avoid problems with federal agencies, and that marijuana remains illegal under federal law.
New Jersey and Rhode Island have laws that are closer to the system in New Mexico that much of a freer California.
New Mexico passed its medical marijuana law in 2007, with an innovative provision of production and distribution license.
The Health Department spent more than a year drawing up legislation, the choice of going with a state licensing system nonprofits strict restrictions imposed on the amount of marijuana that can grow.
Patients can get licenses to grow their own, but most of his time producers in the state-sanctioned. The first producer was not approved until March 2009. The Health Department OK’d four more in November, six more than last week. It takes five or six months by a producer to ramp up production.
Meanwhile, the patient rolls have grown to about 2,000. New Mexico passed 200 patients in the first year of the program, now is the approval of about 200 a month.
While love praised the passage of new producers, said New Mexico still has only about half the supply it needs for current patients. He claims that the state needs at least 10 producers at the end of the year to keep up.