OPINION
Maine Medical Cannabis Renaissance BY ERIC BRAKEY
Maine medical cannabis is flourishing. After sweeping, common-sense deregulation of the marketplace, Maine people are opening small business storefronts all across our state, and abundant competition is giving patients unprecedented access to great varieties of high-quality, affordable cannabis products. For the last four years, I’ve overseen medical cannabis policy as Maine Senate Chairman for the Health and Human Services Committee. This has allowed me to meet many Maine people whose lives have been restored by medical cannabis. Knowing their stories and struggles, increasing access for patients became a passion during my time in office. Working with mothers of children with severe epilepsy disorders, we eliminated state laws restricting access to smokeless forms of medical cannabis in Maine hospitals. Working with patients in recovery, we became the first state in the nation to authorize medical cannabis therapy as a treatment for opiate addiction. Despite these positive changes, factional fights within the medical cannabis industry created gridlock anytime we sought to increase patient access by reforming the structure of the industry. The passage of the first Maine medical cannabis referendum in 1999 created the caregiver program, allowing Maine people to grow for up to five patients. When originally conceived, the caregiver program was not intended as a commercial model, but as a legal system for neighbors to help neighbors.
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The need for a more direct commercial system led to the passage of the second Maine medical cannabis referendum in 2009, which directed the state to license a minimum of eight tightly regulated dispensaries across Maine. The state issued the minimum number of licenses, but despite growing market demand over the last decade for a wider commercial market, more licenses have never been issued. As a result of these artificial restrictions on dispensary licenses, Maine entrepreneurs looking to enter the medical cannabis market were forced to register as caregivers. For many, this simply meant making the most of serving five patients. In some cases, however, by pooling resources with other caregivers and using legal gray areas to push beyond the five-patient cap, some caregiver businesses came to rival dispensaries in both size and scale. Under this system, patients were required by state law to designate a single caregiver or dispensary provider, severely limiting their ability to shop around for the highest quality and most affordable products that fit their individual needs. This system clearly wasn’t benefitting patients. Competing for the business of these patients under two different regulatory structures, toxic suspicions developed between dispensary and caregiver factions, and every effort to make change was sabotaged by infighting. Like clockwork, if a legislative measure was proposed to increase access for patients to caregiver businesses, dispensary lobbyists argued it promoted unfair competition on an unequal regulatory playing field. And for every legislative measure that would increase patient access to dispensaries, caregiver lobbyists would argue it was an attempt by dispensaries to monopolize the market. For
