New medical marijuana law carries stringent rules
Scott Donnelly
Concerns about the impact of New York’s recently passed Compassionate Care bill, which legalizes medical marijuana, are likely to prove overblown in the coming decade.
The way the law is written, it will likely be a year and a half before any New York residents start using marijuana legally. And those who do will have cleared several hurdles in that time.
Many who lobbied for the law have criticized eleventh-hour changes to the bill that established an apparently 18-month speed bump and took away a provision that would have allowed the smoking of cannabis, which many believe is the most effective way to reap the benefits of the plant.
“We work with patients every day for whom they don’t have 18 months,” said Julie Netherland, with Compassionate Care New York and deputy director of the Drug Policy Alliance of New York. “There are people at the end of life right now who would like this to improve their quality of life and alleviate some of their suffering. There are a lot of children with various severe forms of epilepsy who want to get access to medical marijuana right away because the seizures they’re facing, any one of them could end their life. For them, 18 months is an eternity.”
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