Melissa Ross
Just months after failing to pass a ballot amendment, advocates of legalizing medical marijuana in Florida are regrouping to try again.
A new bill was filed Tuesday in the Florida House that wouldn’t allow smokable medical marijuana. At the same time, Republican State Sen. Jeff Brandes of St. Petersburg is behind a measure that would allow sick Floridians access to medical-grade cannabis.
And after the advocacy group United for Care failed to meet the 60 percent threshold of voter approval to pass Amendment 2 in November, it’s expected the amendment to legalize will be redrafted to go before voters again on the 2016 ballot.
That’s good news for BioTrackTHC, a Fort Lauderdale company which bills itself as setting the industry standard for the creation and implementation of marijuana tracking software and regulatory compliance. (Side note: These are the people who created the National Cannabis Chamber of Commerce. Yes, that exists.)
“Our company won the contract for and deployed a marijuana state monitoring system for the state of Washington,” Biotrack CEO Steven Siegel says. “So all of the recreational cannabis movement in Washington is tracked by our system from seed to sale.”
Washington and Colorado became the first states to legalize cannabis for recreational use in November of 2012.
Siegel says the system BiotrackTHC designed for Washington is the industry’s first official government application programming interface, or API, for legalized cannabis.
“For every sale of cannabis in that state, the dollar amount associated with that sale is also recorded by the state monitoring system. It generates tax reports for licensed facilities. Our system gives them real-time data with respect to not only inventory, but how much revenue has been made,” Siegel says.
Cannabis in Washington is regulated by that state’s Liquor Control Board. According to that agency’s published information, total sales of the drug since it was legalized are now at nearly $90 million, with taxable revenue at $22 million.
“What we provided isn’t just a data analysis tool, it’s also a system of control,” says Patrick Vo, the company’s Traceability Project Manager.
“In Washington, a grower can’t place on the state’s official manifest any cannabis product that has not passed rigorous lab testing. They now have the data consistency and quality that law enforcement needs for public safety, and that the state needs for tax collections.”
Meanwhile, Siegel says his company will join United for Care during the upcoming legislative session to explain their product to state lawmakers. The goal, Siegel says, is to convince them that medical marijuana can be safely monitored, taxed, and regulated.
“Since we have a product that works, our challenge now is to bring awareness to the public and to legislators,” says Siegel. “Our roots are actually here in Florida because originally we set out to design and deploy tracking software for pharmaceuticals. We designed software to combat the prescription drug problem since Florida was the place most impacted by oxycontin and other prescription meds. We think if more Florida voters had known this technology was available, the Amendment 2 vote would have been a landslide.”
So what are the lessons learned from Amendment 2’s failure?
“Next time, they shouldn’t use a trial lawyer for the face of their campaign,” says UNF political science professor Mike Binder. Binder also runs the university’s Public Opinion Research Lab polling operation. Orlando lawyer John Morgan was the driving force behind Amendment 2’s passage and spent millions of his own money on the effort.
Says Binder, “Assuming they can get the resources, next time for the commercials, put kids with terrible diseases and middle-aged women with cancer as patients front and center. Have them say how they have tried all the other options and can only find relief with this ‘natural’ plant. Then for the second batch of commercials, show senior citizens who are caring for their spouse suffering with cancer or another malady, saying how this is the only medicine that gives their husband or wife any kind of relief. And get this on the ballot in a presidential election when the electorate is younger. There are huge differences in support for this measure across the age categories.”
Siegel agrees. “United for Care raised $5½ million and $4 million of that went to petition signatures. That was not enough money to market the bill,” he says. “It’s my feeling that they should do it differently this time, because Florida is very personal to me. I’m not going to sit back and be quiet. I was born and raised here, and I want the public to know about this technology. I’m ready to dive in.”
