James Call
The Department of Health has scheduled a 14-hour workshop Wednesday to negotiate rules implementing the state’s medicinal marijuana law. Wednesday’s marathon will be followed Thursday with a meeting scheduled to last until concluded.
The Office of Compassionate Use entered into a negotiated rule making process with stakeholders after an administrative judge threw out its first proposed regulatory structure for growing a low-thc strain of marijuana and the dispensing of cannabis oil for seizure and cancer patients.
A committee composed of DOH officials, growers and patient advocates will work from a draft of a proposal the OCU released last week. It clarifies that an applicant for one of the five licenses available must be a Florida nursery, specifies certain financial requirements, eliminates a 90-day supply transportation plan and lists duties for a dispensary medical director.
“I think they are asking too much of a medical director, “said Kerry Herndon, a central Florida grower who has been trekking to Tallahassee since July for Charlotte’s Web workshops and hearings.
“A lot of what they are asking is redundant if you are already a U.S.D.A. certified organic nursery and have survived the excruciating level of record keeping that is required,” said Herndon. “They’re asking a medical director to oversee certain manufacturing processes that are more in the wheelhouse of a pharmaceutical than a medical doctor.”
Judge David W. Watkins invalidated DOH’s first set of rules for among other things lacking criteria to evaluate applicants during a licensing process. In its Jan. 27 draft of proposed rules DOH intends to ask applicants about the qualification of its medical director. It list 12 items for an applicant to address including the director’s knowledge of organic chemistry, analytical laboratory methods and experience in clinical trials or observational studies.
Florida lawmakers approved a medicinal marijuana proposal in 2014 that authorized five licenses for Florida nurseries to grow, process and distribute a product from a low-thc/high-cbd strain of the plant as medicine. Growers and patient advocates warned the department last summer if it proceeded with a proposal they would sue in court. DOH did, a challenge was filed and the department lost.
Rather than appeal the ruling the department entered into a rarely used negotiated-rule making procedure and selected a panel of 11 stakeholders and the OCU Director, Patricia Nelson.
On the panel representing growers are George Hackney of Hackney Nursery Company in Quincy, Robert Wallace of Chestnut Hill Nursery ad Orchards in Alachua, Brue Know of Knox Nurseries in Winter Garden, John Tipton of Plants of Ruskin and Pedro Freyre of Miami-based Costa Farms.
Other panelists include Jill Lamoureux of CannLabs, Inc.; botanist Darrin Potter; attorney Donna Blanton, horticulturist Jeffrey Block, Joel Stanly a Colorado-based Charlotte’s Web distributor and Holley Moseley who promoted the Charlotte’s Web law in Florida on behalf of her daughter who suffers from seizures.
The meeting is scheduled to begin at 8:00 a.m. Wednesday at DOH’s headquarters in Tallahassee, the notice is here.
Herndon will attend; he notes there is a fundamental issue that the department failed to address in its proposed rule.
“They seem concern about where you are going to get your stock to start growing. I don’t know if that is roadmap to prosecution,” said Herndon. “They have to make it legal for us to possess it.”
