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- The Florida Legislature has done a terrible job providing people with serious illnesses access to medical marijuana, so it’s no wonder that a new poll suggests voters might take the issue out of lawmakers' hands.
A poll released this week by St. Leo University found 68.1 percent of respondents support legalizing medical marijuana for the use of Florida residents. A constitutional amendment on the November ballot that would do just that, Amendment 2, needs 60 percent support for passage.
A similar ballot initiative in 2014 fell short of the required threshold with nearly 58 percent of the vote. This time around, Floridians will have the chance to vote on an improved initiative — and the knowledge that state officials badly bungled the matter when left to address it on their own over the past two years.
Back in 2014, state lawmakers legalized a non-euphoric strain of marijuana known as Charlotte’s Web, which been effective in helping children with epilepsy. But problems with writing the required state regulations and legal challenges delayed its implementation, leading lawmakers to pass another bill this year to address some of those issues.
This week, state health officials finally authorized Alachua County-based San Felasco Nurseries to join five other organizational approved to grow medical marijuana. An administrative law judge ruled in February that the nursery's application was wrongly rejected due to an employee’s decades-old misdemeanor drug crime.
- In addition to the Charlotte’s Web fix, the Legislature this session expanded the state’s “Right to Try Act” to include medical marijuana. The law now allows the use of regular-strength medical marijuana, but only for terminally ill patients who get opinions from two doctors saying they have less than a year to live.
"It seems like a lot of hoops for someone who has 12 months to live to go through ... It's not going to result in a lot of people getting relief through medical marijuana," Ben Pollara, director for the United for Care group backing Amendment 2, told The Sun.
The ballot initiative would go further. It would ensure patients suffering chronic pain, nausea and other conditions associated with serious diseases would have the option of using medical marijuana rather than prescription painkillers that carry risks of overdose and addiction.
This year's version of the measure makes it clear that marijuana could only be prescribed for debilitating conditions such as cancer, AIDS and Parkinson's disease. The new language also clarifies that doctors couldn’t order medical marijuana for children without their parents' approval. That is already banned under state law, but opponents suggested otherwise to scare voters the last time around.
- But to date since the cbd bill passed not a single person has received anything from the current 5 growers aloud to grow in the state of Florida.
