There are bad medical-marijuana laws. There are laws that ban cannabis in its most prevalent and useful form, laws that create artificial scarcity and thus inflate value or reduce access, laws that create a de-facto state monopoly or encourage corruption or trigger an unnecessary years-long process before sick people can access regulated cannabis.<\/p>\n
And then there is Georgia.<\/p>\n
Competition for the worst medical cannabis law in the United States is stiff \u2014 and it is debatable whether a bad law that creates a false hope is worse than outright prohibition \u2014 but owing to its unique combination of false hope and Biblical absurdity, Georgia may be the winner.<\/p>\n
Cannabis oil with no more than 5 percent\u00a0THC<\/a>\u00a0is \u201clegal\u201d in Georgia. Has been since 2015. As of now, more than 8,400 patients with 16 medical conditions \u2014 with severe seizures and terminal cancers, mostly \u2014 have physicians\u2019 recommendations to obtain and use cannabis oil,\u00a0as the Atlanta Journal Constitution recently noted.<\/a><\/p>\n But not one of them has any legal marijuana. There are no dispensaries, no manufacturing outfits, and no cultivation centers. All of those are illegal \u2014 meaning access to medical marijuana supposedly legalized under Georgia law is also illegal.<\/p>\n Got it? This \u201cmanna from heaven\u201d situation has forced Georgia patients to either try hemp-derived CBD oil or to continue patronizing the underground market.<\/p>\n This patent absurdity appears to have shamed Georgia lawmakers into taking action.\u00a0As per the AJC<\/a>, on Tuesday, the Georgia House passed a bill that, if signed into law, would permit marijuana cultivation, testing, and distribution plus sales at 60 dispensaries.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was hypocritical to me to pass bills to let this substance be available to the sickest folks that needed it, the worst, and yet we didn\u2019t give them the access to get it,\u201d said state Rep. Alan Powell, according to the newspaper.<\/p>\n The bill will now advance to the state Senate where it will need approval before it can reach the desk of Gov. Brian Kemp, who in the past has said that he is \u201copen\u201d to a \u201cresearch-based expansion\u201d of the state\u2019s marijuana program.<\/p>\n What that means, exactly, is unclear \u2014 as is well known, most research in the United States into marijuana\u2019s efficacy is stymied by federal prohibition, which makes cannabis difficult to obtain and dissuades most research centers from approving projects.<\/p>\n To do this, as per usual, Kemp and state lawmakers will risk alienating law-enforcement groups, who are already claiming (with no research-based evidence, it should be noted) that even a low-THC oil-only law will somehow create chaos.<\/p>\n \u201cThe sheriffs are serious when they say that marijuana is a dangerous, addictive gateway drug,\u201d said Terry Norris, the executive director of the Georgia Sheriffs\u2019 Association, in comments to the newspaper.<\/p>\n \u201cEven though we\u2019re not talking about legalizing for recreational purposes, we believe all the notoriety of this discussion will lead to increased marijuana use by children,\u201d said Norris, who said that improving the country\u2019s silliest marijuana law is \u201ca very treacherous and dangerous path.\u201d<\/p>\n Hyperbole aside, even if the law is approved, Georgia\u2019s law would still be pretty bad. Flower would not be allowed and the oil cannot legally be vaped or smoked, meaning patients would not be allowed to consume cannabis in the fashion in which relief is most quickly obtained.<\/p>\n TELL US<\/strong>, do you have access to medical marijuana?<\/p>\n The post The Nation\u2019s Worst Medical Marijuana Law May Finally Improve<\/a> appeared first on Cannabis Now<\/a>.<\/p>\n
There are bad medical-marijuana laws. There are laws that ban cannabis in its most prevalent and useful form, laws that create artificial scarcity and thus inflate value or reduce access, laws that create a de-facto state monopoly or encourage corruption or trigger an unnecessary years-long process before sick people canContinue Reading<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"false","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[50,136,734,4968,687,4846,53,139,420],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33397"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33397"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33397\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33398,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33397\/revisions\/33398"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33397"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33397"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33397"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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\nRead More: The Nation\u2019s Worst Medical Marijuana Law May Finally Improve<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"