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Who’s To Blame For The Death Of Medical Marijuana In Washington State?
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| Who’s To Blame For The Death Of Medical Marijuana In Washington State? | | |||||||||||||
By: | | Steve Elliott | | ||||||||||||
Date: | | 06/15/2016 | | ||||||||||||
Location: | | Headline Centre: Medical | | ||||||||||||
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The advent of recreational marijuana legalization in 2012, approved by 54 percent of voters at the ballot box through Initiative 502, ended up being, as predicted by a few (ok, including me), the death knell for medicinal cannabis as we’ve known it in this state since 1998. The coup de grace was last year’s passage — by lawmakers convinced not so much by the recreational I-502 merchant lobbyists, as by their “political contributions” — of SB 5052, the ironically titled “Cannabis Patient Protection Act.” That toxic piece of legislation ends all mom-and-pop medical marijuana dispensaries in the state, along with cannabis farmers’ markets, which absolutely have been the best, most affordable source of medicine in the state for years now. It’s funny how quickly medical marijuana in Washington state suddenly became a “crisis” supposedly in need of federal intervention after I-502 was passed, at least if you listened to clueless blowhards (or to the greedy businessmen who really knew what was happening). How did this happen? Who’s to blame? The medical marijuana system had actually been working just fine at providing safe access for patients, with occasional glitches, since voters approved I-692 in 1998. All this safe access was accomplished with — imagine this — very few regulations and no onerous additional cannabis-only taxes, in stark contrast to the bureaucratic nightmares created by the unwieldy language and incompetent implementation of I-502. Continues ... | | | ||||||||||||
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