Medical marijuana at a Los Angeles dispensary. (Photo via Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times) (November 22, 2013)
When state Sen. Jeff Clemens first introduced a medical marijuana bill in the Florida Legislature in 2011, it was greeted with snickers and jokes. He brushed the derision of his colleagues from his shoulders and reintroduced the bill every year afterward, getting nowhere every time.
In 2015, when Clemens introduces the bill for the fifth time, he’s hopeful it will be the last. “The constitutional amendment drive has changed the game this past year,” Clemens said. “People aren’t laughing anymore.”
The proposed amendment, which will be on the ballot as Amendment 2, would legalize full-scale medical marijuana. But the amendment leaves the details of regulation to the Legislature and the Florida Department of Health.
For the Legislature’s part, Clemens’ 157-page bill regulates the cultivation, manufacturing, distribution, prescribing, and retail sale of marijuana for medical purposes. It also explains what conditions qualify for medical marijuana and what a patient needs to do to be eligible.
Clemens, a Democrat whose district includes eastern Palm Beach County from West Palm Beach to Boynton Beach, has kept up his quixotic campaign through both houses of the Legislature. He first proposed a medical marijuana bill back when he was a state representative. When he became a state senator in 2013, he kept it up in that house. But by 2013, there weren’t as many laughs, and behind closed doors, a few people even said they’d vote for the bill if they ever got the chance. But they never did.
In the 2014 legislative session, Clemens proposed the legislation for a fourth time. And for the fourth time, the bill never even got a vote in committee, much less make it out onto the floor for a vote from the full Senate. Ignoring Clemens’ legislation, the Legislature instead passed a bill legalizing Charlotte’s Web, a strain of cannabis that is extremely low in THC, the plant’s psychoactive element. Converted into an oil, the strain could help children with severe epilepsy, but few others.
Because the amendment lists the health department as having regulatory duty, many pro-medical marijuana advocates haven’t been paying close attention to Clemens and his legislation. “I’m really not familiar with the bill at all,” said Ben Pollara, the director of United for Care, the group primarily responsible for getting the amendment on the ballot. “Sen. Clemens went into that session knowing the bill wouldn’t pass, so we didn’t spend a lot of time with it.”
But to Robert Platshorn, a medical marijuana advocate who sits on the board of the Florida chapter of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, the Legislature has an opportunity to get involved in regulating medical marijuana in the state. “You think they’re going to reinvent the wheel?” he asked. “They have this bill ready to go.”
Clemens himself wants the Legislature to get involved, but he also recognizes that his colleagues may want to pass off those responsibilities to the health department. Legislators from heavily Republican districts may face opposition from social conservatives. And, if a Democrat wins the governorship and the Republican-controlled Legislature sees regulation as too much of a headache, it may elect to punt and give the governor control of a potentially volatile situation.
“I think it was brilliant of the people who drafted the constitutional amendment to include language that doesn’t rely on the Legislature,” Clemens said. “But I still believe it’s the Legislature’s responsibility to do this in a responsible fashion. I hope they don’t abdicate that responsibility.”
While ceding regulation to the health department, the amendment includes a six-month deadline to set regulations and a nine-month deadline to start issuing marijuana-patient ID cards.
Rather than waiting to see if the Florida Department of Health will follow the deadlines, Clemens intends to have a legislative solution ready to go if the amendment passes. “I’ll be refiling [the bill] this summer,” he said. “We’re going to spend a little time refining it, spend a little more time defining the security measures and how the dispensaries would be required to operate and hopefully getting a hearing on it this year. The Legislature could let the Department of Health do it, but I think it’s incumbent on us to try and implement the will of the people.”
And the will of the people appears to be in favor of medical marijuana. In the most recent poll on the subject, released in early May by Quinnipiac University, 88 percent of Floridians supported medical marijuana, with a margin of error of 2.6 percent.
“Every year for the past four years, we’ve seen the polling continue to surge in favor of the issue,” Clemens said. “Everyone knows someone who smoked marijuana and didn’t go on to become a crack addict. The reefer madness era where we were worried about this being a gateway drug? That attitude is waning. I think people realize that they can get a much more dangerous drug at their local pharmacy or local pub.”
The federal government continues to classify marijuana as a Schedule I controlled substance, meaning that the government maintains it has no medicinal use. But Clemens sees the vote for Charlotte’s Web as a tacit acknowledgment among Florida lawmakers that the opposite is the case.
“The Charlotte’s Web bill at least gave us an admission from the vast majority of the Legislature that cannabis has medical value,” he said. “So, why would you want to help some people and not others?”
The campaign against Amendment 2 is still in its infancy. The Florida Sheriff’s Association and its partners in the Don’t Let Florida Go To Pot campaign just released a video, “The Devil Is in the Details,” suggesting that medical marijuana shops will pop up like pill mills.
“There are countless good examples of how you regulate and control distribution properly,” Clemens said. “When you’re the guinea pig, you make mistakes. Florida and the rest of the states are able to learn from those mistakes and implement stronger laws.”
Right now, advocates are more concerned with getting the amendment passed, not what comes after. “Implementation primarily rests with the department of health not on the Legislature,” Pollara said. “We’re starting to think more seriously about what implementation would look like, but we’re not at a point yet where we can say it looks like A, B, and C, not X, Y, and Z.”
If Medical Marijuana Amendment Passes, Roadmap to Implementation Already Written
Article by Dan Sweeney for Sun Sentinel