I am selling front row seats to watch the worst state health department in the nation attempt to implement legalized medicinal marijuana.
Voters of the state of Massachusetts, in their boundless stupidity, this week decided to legalize medicinal marijuana as the state Department of Health and Human services deals with 2 major mismanagement scandals.
First, nearly 30 people have died and almost 400 sickened from fungal meningitis when a compounding pharmacy in the state was allowed to produce and ship large batches of fungus tainted injectable steroids without prescriptions. Against state and federal laws. From a lab that had failed repeated health inspections going back to 1999. Did I mention the labs owner has been appointed to the State Board of Pharmacies, responsible for pharmacy over sight, for decades?
Second, at least one lab technician at the state run crime lab, and possibly up to a dozen, falsified reports, tampered with tests and contaminated the samples from thousands of criminal cases.
Thousands of criminals, many of them violent repeat offence felons, are appealing there jail sentences and will likely be freed in the next few months. This comes just 5 years after the department took direct control over the crime lab following a similar scandal in 2007 when the lab was run by the State Police and monitored by the Department of Health and Human Services.
The legal bills from all of the appeals are expected to cost the state over $20 million. Civil suits for wrongful imprisonment are expected to push the total legal cost over $50 million. You also have the cities and towns begging for aid to help police deal with the expected crime wave to result from thousands of hardened criminals being put back on the street in such a short period of time. Expected price tag, $100 million in 2013.
And people expect this agency to properly manage legalized marijuana. Ha.
Get your programs here. You cannot tell one incompetent political appointment from another without a program.
Big government supporters get front row seats.
On Tuesday, voters in Colorado and Washington approved marijuana for recreational use.
You read that right — while 18 states have approved medical marijuana, these two states go further than that policy, in the hope that sales of marijuana will help raise much needed tax revenue. In Colorado, for instance, the first $40 million of tax money raised from the sale of marijuana will fund education.
So, should we expect to see a boom in the pot industry? No, according to Quartz, for two reasons.
First, pot is still illegal on the federal level. “The federal government agreed in 2009 not to prosecute medical-marijuana growers and dispensaries in states where it was legal, but prosecutors began to act after the stuff began to be smuggled across state lines,” says Quartz.
The illegality creates a second problem for growers: sellers of marijuana cannot safely store their money anywhere. Because the drug is illegal on the federal level, banks can’t take profits from the sale of marijuana. That means weed growers and retailers will have to conduct all their business in cash. And that, of course, would make it pretty hard for them to create large pot companies.
Second, the recreational industry could set back the medical marijuana industry, according to Robert Kane, the head of investor relations for one medical research company, Cannabis Science, which looks into medical applications for organic cannabinoids, which are derivatives of the cannabis plant. Potential uses for cannabinoids include dealing with chronic pain, treating post-traumatic stress disorder, multiple sclerosis and more.
But most of the companies making headway on such research are outside the U.S. American companies wanting to do such research still can’t get approval from the federal government to conduct a clinical trial.
So why would recreational use hurt the medical marijuana industry? Partially, it would create an image problem: “The $100 million you need to get through the Federal Drug Administration [drug tests] is never going to come from the government if you’re out there selling hemp t-shirts,” Kane tells Quartz.
The second reason is that medical marijuana growers already struggle to make a profit under a number of regulations, and now growers in Colorado and Washington will have even more competition.
So, while the fact that two states have newly legalized recreational marijuana use seems like an expansion of the industry, it’s probably not going to do much for pot growers.
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via: Quartz
photo: Rotational/Wikimedia
