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To many they’re already interchangeable. But for Washington medical marijuana patients there’s a world of difference.
At this point 24 states and the District of Columbia have allowed some form of legal marijuana, and there are 20 more places considering ballot measures this year to further ease restrictions. Decriminalized markets like Colorado are seeing big returns from their systems. And now that California’s medical marijuana market hit $2.7 billion last year (that’s right, accounting for nearly half of legal marijuana sales in the whole country) recreational marijuana is poised to take another state in November.
As for Washington, they’re taking steps to roll up their medical and recreational marijuana markets all up into one. It’s tempting to think that in states where recreational marijuana use is legalized that medical marijuana markets are flourishing. Turns out it’s not as much of an afterthought as advocates might have originally thought; medical users may have increased access to pot products, but it’s not always in an effective way. And some are saying it’s just another way that Washington’s decriminalized cannabis program falls short of proper precedent.
It’s all thanks to the state’s Cannabis Patient Protection Act (CPPA), which mandates that Washington’s Liquor Control Board regulate medical marijuana in addition to recreational. Which means starting July 1, medical marijuana will be sold in recreational stores. Additionally, it limits the quantity and potency of medical marijuana that patients can possess. And that second quality is one of the biggest issues with lumping medical and recreational shops together.
As you may know, there’s different strains of cannabis with varying levels of different cannabinoids. Thereare at least 85 different types, but the two big ones are tetrahydrocannabinol and cannabidiol; the former will get you high, while the latter is what medical strains tend to be rich in. Varieties like this are typically used as medicine because—no matter how much you ingest—your body won’t get high from the only small amounts of THC. That makes it a popular treatment for PTSD, schizophrenia, or seizures, especially in children where the standard “high” wouldn’t fly
Which makes it a bit of an outlier in the recreational market. Some advocates say the limits on potency could mean a patient would go from eating one highly-concentrated pot brownie to force feeding themselves a dozen low-concentration ones every time they need to dose. And stores aren’t jumping to help. When most customers at a recreational shop are jonesing for the psychoactive effects of weed, there’s not much market incentive to create something that will only sell to medical users, who no longer make up the bulk of the legal market in states where cannabis is decriminalized.
Of course it’s not like medical cannabis patients are packing what they once were. CPPA drops the limit for medical users possession from 24 ounces to three. And that hold limit drops to one if they are unregistered.
“For you or me, three ounces seems like a lot,” Joe Mascaro, a cancer patient who grows marijuana, told Weed Rush. “For a cancer patient, they can go through it like that, easily.”
Additionally, medical cannabis users are now, likely, paying higher prices than they were initially. With the dissolution of Washington’s 17-year-old medical marijuana program, patients will start paying the 37 percent tax on their purchases. That’s the highest medical marijuana tax in the nation.
There’s arguments to be made in favor of such a model: It reduces duplication at the administrative level, and keeps oversight simple with just one supply chain to monitor. But medical marijuana users are already fighting the fight on all sides: Though decriminalized cannabis is sweeping the nation, it’s consistently unclear what protections they have. Sure, recreational marijuana might not be supported by employers either, but at least non-medical users aren’t being choosing between employment and medicating.
As California moves forward with recreational marijuana, it’s likely tempting to look at the revenue generated in Washington or Colorado, and think about reducing redundancies the way Washington has (and Colorado is tempted by). But over the next few months as Washington dispensaries shutter their doors before the July 1 deadline, medical marijuana users may be hazy on the advantages.
