By Jon Hiltz
Last night, a whopping 63% of residents in the Peace Garden State showed empathy to patients in need.
“It was a lot of hard work, by a lot of people in North Dakota and we’re very pleased,” said Rilie Ray Morgan, the Chairperson behind the ballot measure in an interview today with Marijuana.com.
Morgan went on to detail what comes next, now that the win has been achieved. “The Department of Health will have 30 days to start working on the measure. They are going to have to get some funding from our legislature.”
Morgan added that the legislature will be meeting about this right after the first of the year. “[They will] appropriate some funds for staffing, new hires, computer systems, etc. It’s going to probably be 90 to 120 days for them to get all of that done.”
After the initial red tape for the new green medicine, the appropriate organizations can apply to become dispensaries or cultivators. Those organizations must be non-profits and they pay for the license if and when approved.
The big question is, of course, when will North Dakotans who need marijuana medicine be able to get it without breaking the law?
“At the very earliest nine months, but I’d say more like a year before it comes full circle.”
Patients will be required to register and get an identification card after receiving a prescription from their doctor. Everything in regards to inventory, dispensing and cultivation of medical marijuana will be enforced by the North Dakota Department of Health.
A patient with a valid prescription can receive up to three ounces of marijuana. Further to this measure, patients who live at least forty miles from the nearest facility are permitted to grow their own. The grow your own option is the big difference that separates North Dakota from the other red states that legalized this November. In Arkansas, proponents removed the grow your own option from their bill because it was reported to have killed a similar bill in a previous attempt.
For a long time, it was predicted that North Dakota would have the wisdom to be open to the world’s most powerful natural medicine and that wisdom was verified at the polls yesterday. Now, North Dakotans will have a whole new dimension of medical care — all it took was a dedicated team and 209,787 yes votes.
Well done.
