Peter Schorsch
John Morgan was at his Trumpiest earlier this month when he took to social media to savage his longtime aide-de-camp, Ben Pollara, over the failure of legislation implementing medical marijuana this Session.
Labeling him “Fredo,” (from the Godfather trilogy) and telling FloridaPolitics.com that Ben “f**ked the patients,” Morgan accused Pollara of putting the interests of wannabe medical marijuana businesses over the larger cause.
Pollara emphatically denied those charges, but admitted in an email to supporters that issues of patient access, “tended to align with businesses that wanted entry into the Florida market, and were kept from doing so …”
The ugly, public split between what POLITICO Florida called the “Batman and Robin of … Florida medical marijuana” has left many observers asking what the real story was behind the breakup. Some of the details that have been reported have led to further questions about what, exactly, Morgan’s interests and motivations were in this fight.
Morgan called Pollara a “sellout,” but was that actually a Trump-style red herring? Was it, in fact, John Morgan who had the financial conflict on implementation?
I don’t know.
When asked directly, John acknowledged a business plan to acquire an existing grower, but when FloridaPolitics.com asked for more details he demurred, with a cryptic, barely-denial denial.
The ownership structure of existing medical marijuana license holders is shrouded in secrecy — so public records won’t answer the question.
But here’s what we do know about John Morgan’s connections to Florida’s authorized marijuana distributors:
— Numerous session post-mortems had reported that the Morgan-Pollara rift began on the Tuesday night of the last week of session, when Morgan called Pollara on three-way with Jake Bergmann, CEO of Surterra, one of the seven license holders. Representing Surterra is Michael Corcoran, the Speaker’s brother, who Morgan has described as a friend. Their other lobbyist is Billy Rubin, someone who Morgan has known since college.
— The Morgan-Bergmann-Pollara call concerned the very issue that doomed medical marijuana this Session: retail caps. This issue divided medical marijuana interests into two camps: the “cartels,” i.e., existing licensees; and the “Have Not’s,” those that wanted access to the Florida market. Pollara had been viewed throughout the Session as the leader of the Have Not’s (with Sen. Jeff Brandes as their patron saint); Morgan’s position tended to line up squarely with the cartels. The positions also ended up dividing between the House (cartel position) and Senate (Have Not position). Before the call, Morgan had been noticeably absent throughout the Session, while Pollara had been a near constant presence in Tallahassee, testifying at every committee, including speaking for retail caps in Senate HHS Appropriations.
— After implementing legislation failed, and during his social media rampage against Pollara, Morgan and Speaker Corcoran had a veritable love fest on Twitter. They thanked each other, Corcoran threw shade at Pollara, and Morgan went after Negron.
— In April, from Anguilla, Morgan posted a photo on his Facebook page of medical marijuana products produced by Knox Medical, another of the seven licensed Florida marijuana growers. The post has subsequently been deleted.
— John hinted to FloridaPolitics.com — but stopped short of outright saying — that he was looking at potentially investing in or purchasing one of the current license holders. Other sources have heard that Morgan recently hosted an investor pitch at his office for that very same licensee. According to the sources, Morgan was very much present at the meeting, but it was less than clear what his involvement with the business was (if any).
Now all the above is highly circumstantial … but certainly suggestive.
Consider this final point:
John is a capitalist. His bread and butter might be the law business, but this guy owns an advertising firm, billboards, hotels, amusement parks and has all sorts of other entrepreneurial ventures. Think about the pitches that come across his desk daily.
Now, consider how many of those over the past few years must have been marijuana related.
The opportunity was certainly there, should Morgan have decided to take it. Only he can answer that, although he is under no obligation to do so publicly.
But John Morgan is not exactly a shrinking violet. He’s still very much contemplating a run for Governor. And he’s said if there’s a special session on medical marijuana, he’ll be coming to Tallahassee this time.
John’s put himself in a position where, sooner or later, he’s going to have to answer this question. Without doing so effectively, his credibility on medical marijuana could go up in smoke.
2 comments
Inacity Media
May 22, 2017 at 11:21 am
These articles are TERRIBLE just like our state legislators, department of health, and Gov. Rick Scott. No blame goes to anyone else for screwing Amendment 2 up but these three. Florida Politics is one of the worst media/news sites on the web. All their writers are extremely uneducated about Cannabis laws and most of the time the stories only reflect the writers position. The owner of the company is the WORST. Beware of his stories filled with lies and false propaganda. John Morgan and Ben Pollara have been working at this for years, DO NOT put the blame on either of them. Blessings to all. We will win, Florida will legalize 2018!
Christopher Kennard
May 23, 2017 at 3:59 pm
I must agree with the underlying vibe of the above remark, with respect to identifying the “good” that has arisen from the fact that medicinal cannabis use actually “pried opened” the eyes of American citizens across the country, not just in Florida.
But here, in Florida, it was in part and parcel due to the work performed by Ben Pollara and John Morgan, along with his investment money, that opened the eyes up of Floridian citizens, by and large. Remaining unsung are the true heroines and heroes of legalizing cannabis in Florida, including numerous individuals and the people within groups like the Florida Cannabis Action Network; but I promise you, their story too, will be told.
For a period of approximately four years, I was a volunteer coordinator in North Central Florida, collecting petitions, holding public meetings, connecting groups and people together, beginning at the time when John Morgan first surfaced, in 2012, along with what became known as a state constitutional amendment ballot initiative, MEDICAL MARIJUANA AMENDMENT II.
I do not know John Morgan, and responded to the issue of legalizing cannabis in Florida, rather than to the messenger, even knowing it would only help a relatively few hundred thousand of the millions of people who could benefit from cannabis use.
If John Morgan had hopes of cashing in and making back more money than he “donated” to pay the costs for bringing medicinal cannabis to the conscious awareness of the general public, ought I be at all surprised? Some how, I am not. More to the point, in the larger scheme of things, I frankly do not care!
What truly matters far more are the people in Florida . . . patients who suffer in great pain and distress; many of whom are dying while trying to live on the dubious benefits derived at great cost from toxic, highly addictive opiates and other pharmaceutical drugs that deplete the body, even while such “medicinal” drugs deadens or reduces a patients ability to feel some of the pain and suffering they live with every day. Both disease and such medications work together to kill.
Then let’s throw in the millions of people who are been arrested, convicted and imprisoned as criminal felons; those who are so bad, dangerous and useless so as to be declared, in essence, as “non-citizens” of the United States of America; people so bad that certain civil rights were forever stripped in many jurisdictions throughout the country, particularly here in Florida.
Within the State of Florida as well as other locales in the U.S., we have a permanent class of second class citizens who were convicted for violations of law for possessing and using cannabis, with few avenues for many of these targeted citizens to recover their lives and move forward after being branded as worthless, not to be trusted felons.
Again, millions of people have been negatively impacted by the prohibition of so-called “marijuana;” itself a racist term used to defame Mexicans when the proper, Latin botanical name, “cannabis” was replaced by government officials to hide that cannabis, hemp and “marijuana” a slang term few ever had heard of before, were from one and the same plant “family”. Thus, the vast majority of Americans did not realize cannabis was made illegal in 1937, or that one of the largest crops grown in America, hemp, was to be eradicated —ripped entirely out of the ground and collective memory of the American people in one fell swoop in the 1930’s.
In their place, were new toxic, addictive pharmaceutical drugs to be used for medicine instead of widely known, long reliable, safe and effective cannabis products; and new petroleum based products were to be used instead of hemp [Henry Ford sold the patent and process of converting hemp into automotive fuel, motor oil, petroleum based plastics etc. to Rockefeller’s Standard Oil company and other interested partners in crime, such as Hearst who had recently purchased vast tracts of virgin forests to cut down for paper products and lumber, along with Du Pont and Andrew Mellon, the U. S. Secretary of the Treasury, both of whom respectfully had invented and invested great sums of money in plastics derived from petroleum and paper from trees.
Few knew of these details of the murky history underlying the greed filled, racist origins of the prohibition of cannabis, or who and why this conspiracy flourished and grew to pollute the world with oil rigs, leaking oil drilling sites, pipelines, and non-biodegradable petroleum based products.
Few knew how many U. S. citizens would be imprisonment and set aside as second class “felon” citizens as well as literally sentencing millions of patients to pain and suffering and needlessly dying for the lack of being “allowed” to cure themselves from cancer and many other afflictions with the use of the medicinal qualities of the cannabis plant. Few realized the extent of “control” over the U. S. populace and working class people that random “drug” tests were have
Later down this trail of treason to country and the developing desolation of the American people, we find our civil rights of freedom and privacy being shredded by “Tricky Dicky” Nixon’s storm trooper DEA agents breaking into people’s homes, on numerous occasions killing innocent people by mistake; seizing personal assets and property and cash of people who are never even charged with a crime, but these new “War on Drugs” DEA agents and others on the local level are rarely to never charged with crimes against the American people, even when innocent bystanders are willfully killed in error or by carelessness.
“Collateral” damage, they call it, in Love and War. Millions died in Southeast Asia while CIA deliveries of heroin were being made to kill even more people at home in the USA; all the while covering up the crimes against people under the guise of the War on Drugs against cannabis. I recall how, even then, the nut-cases were running around alarming people with “Reefer Madness” stories of how cannabis was more or as dangerous then was the CIA’s “ghetto” heroin.
Returning from the sordid journey of yesteryears “Reefer Madness” hysteria, and going back to
this period of time, from 2012 through today, it has been amazing to witness; observing the break-through in the mind-set of millions of voters, both here in Florida and all across the country on the subject of “marijuana”. After nearly a century of the “brain washed” American people being told by government officials, followed a short period of time later to be joined by the newly emerging pharmaceutical industry and their paid medical co-conspirators, as to just how very dangerous, damnable and disreputable that wild weed from Mexico, “marihuana” truly was — to now see the dawning understanding within voters that the government had been lying to them all of these years — was and remains amazing to me to see.
The first attempt to approve MEDICAL MARIJUANA AMENDMENT II came close with 57.8 % support by voters, yet failed to surmount the 60 % voter approval requirement in 2014 to become law. However, on the second swing around, with an unusual strong surge of Florida voters drawn to the polls in 2016, (many of whom do not regularly vote), and despite or perhaps because of the devastating events and results arising from the corrupted Democratic and Republican presidential primary elections, medical marijuana, or to use the proper terminology, medicinal cannabis, then passed with a resounding 71.3% approval by all the votes cast in the 2016 election use.
Six months later, the Florida Legislators battle to see which of their friends and colleagues will become “marijuana millionaires” overnight, or in the near future as Florida patients continue to needlessly suffer in pain and agony, many to needlessly die as friends and family wring their hands and wail; people continue to be arrested, jailed, convicted and thrown away as unwanted chattel, while the vast multitudes of American workers continue to labor as underpaid serfs, held in physical bondage to random “drug” tests that can spell financial ruination and disarray within the near future of thousands of families, if they but dare to possess, use or grow their own cannabis, for medicinal purposes, or to simply relax and enjoy within the sanctity and privacy on their own homes, on private property.
Enter the heroes who do not attempt to gather power or wealth or even a moment’s “15 seconds” of fame . . . These are the folks who day in and day out are passing out petitions to registered Florida voters to sign to herald the day when Floridians themselves can cast their individual vote to collectively decide whether or not to legalize cannabis; to permit adults in Florida who are twenty-one years or older in age, to possess, use and grow their own cannabis at home, in their own backyard garden. Freedom is the RIGHT OF ADULTS TO CANNABIS [Serial # 15-20].
Join us! Go to FloridiansForFreedom.com Print out your petition to read and sign and return to our non-partisan citizens’ advocacy movement to approve ending the prohibition of cannabis in Florida by making cannabis legal once again, as it was for many, many years, and restoring the personal right of freedom and right to privacy we once held so dear, but we seemed to lose.
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