By Duke London
Maryland legalized medical marijuana all the way back in April of 2014, albeit with a glaring issue in the legislation.
Detractors of the Bill complained that the initiative didn’t pave a path for patients to access the newly legalized medical cannabis, further fueling the state’s thriving black market. More than two years later, the Mid-Atlantic state is still grappling with the issue on a number of fronts. While the decriminalization of marijuana in the state has undoubtedly kept many from getting handcuffed for possession, Maryland’s medical patients still don’t have a clear directive on how to access their medicine.
Weedmaps shows five operational MMJ Doctors in Maryland, but once you have your recommendation there really isn’t anywhere to turn if you want to purchase meds. Marijuana.com reached out to MetroXMD, one of the listed facilities offering doctor’s recommendation services, to see what options patients may have once they’re obtained their medical card. A representative from MetroXMD confirmed that there is no place for patients to legally purchase medicine in the state of Maryland. The rep explained to us that they have been told there will be dispensaries by the end of the year, but none of the information seemed concrete. MetroXMD is offering their services at a reduced rate during this state of limbo where patients can’t fully utilize their medical card.
Nevada and Maine currently offer reciprocity for out-of-state patients (Hawaii will begin extending the same hospitality in 2018), which would technically be the only way for Maryland patients to access legal marijuana, as they also aren’t permitted to cultivate any plants in their home state at this juncture.
Since the 2014 legalization of medical marijuana in the state, lawmakers have intended on introducing dispensaries to the marketplace. Hopeful business owners have been eager to apply for their coveted Maryland dispensary licenses, but the state’s admittedly slow review process has held things up tremendously.
“Had we known there were 1,100 applications, we would have gone about this differently,” admitted Daraius Irani to The Baltimore Sun. Irani is the chief economist at Towson University’s Regional Economic Studies Institute. The state of Maryland contracted RESI as the independent analytics firm who would conduct their double-blind, anonymous, politically unbiased reviews of dispensary applications.
Maryland’s medical cannabis commission forecast predicted that roughly 300 applicants would put their name in the proverbial hat, never expecting 1,080 potential dispensaries to apply for legal standing. The actual applications contain more than 120 parts to complete, and each part is reviewed by one specific analyst assigned to only those sections. While the state expected the entire process to be completed by this past January, RESI had only completed uploading the applications to their servers at that point. Next, the analysts had to make sure all 120-150 questions were filled out on each application so as to avoid further delays down the road. From there, the painstaking process of reviewing the applications could begin.
A large number of the nearly 1,100 submissions flooded in after RESI had been appointed, so the firm had to multiply the workload of its twelve analysts exponentially. While the firm was able to renegotiate terms with the analytics team in a way that maintained the per-review expenditure of the state, the total cost ballooned from an estimated $464,607 to $2.26 million.
Irani added, “We wanted to make sure there was credibility to the review. We didn’t want anyone to say we rushed through it … We had learned from other states this is a critical part of the process. People want to know they were treated fairly.”
The RESI team can process between 1 and 1.5 applications per day, and there are roughly 800 remaining unreviewed applications.
“Hindsight is always 20/20,” Irani said.
