The Arizona Department of Health Services is creating a regulation, which is now up for public comment, as the state tries to help monitor the distribution of medical marijuana.
“We’ve got some basic labeling requirements,” state health director Will Humble said. “But we haven’t gone that extra step to require an analysis to determine exactly how much THC is in every single piece of inventory. And I doubt that we’re going to go there.”
Arizona will not allow medical cannabis to be smoked in public, but other methods of ingestion are not prohibited.
“The prohibition applies to the smoking of marijuana,” Humble said, along with “other ways to ingest it, such as in a smoothie or brownie or some other mechanism.”
While there is no need to reinvent the wheel, there are certain areas of the law that will be different from other states, such requiring a patient to have had a relationship with their recommending physician – which could result in a backlog of patients seeing only the doctors that are willing to recommend it in the first place.
One patient suggested the law require marijuana not be withheld as a treatment option when discussing such matters. Another patient in Arizona wants to see those that are in jail for breaking a law that is no longer a punishable offense released.
There are several mandates that are being embraced by many of those who will be effected by the changes, and one of the most exciting for the patients is that idea that each location that dispenses would be required to have a director on site to help educate, be educated, and have a dialogue between the patients and the cultivators, lab techs (eventually), bakers, and other researchers.
