There are still many questions about the status of medical pot in Florida. What exactly is legal and do all patients who need it have access to it?
We sat down with Dr. Jay Wolfson, a health policy expert at USF Health and got the answers.
How can you get medical marijuana in Florida?
"You have to have a physician who's already certified as being a prescriber for medical marijuana, you have to be diagnosed as being in one of those 12 or so categories that the statute says you must be in, in order to get medical marijuana. Then you have to find a place nearby to take your prescription, with your card and receive and get the medical marijuana."
"While medical marijuana is legal, you are still not allowed to smoke any form of it. And even though voters overwhelmingly approved the legalization in November of 2016, it is still taking quite of bit of time for patients to get what they need."
So why has it been such a slow process to implement the law?
"The politicians in Tallahassee do not like the idea and never have of legalizing any form of marijuana, so the law that they wrote is very rigid and very limited and it has been subject to lots and lots and lots of lawsuits."
"So it's a combination of the lawsuits and the regular slowness of the administrative process that has made it difficult."
This week, Florida's largest medical marijuana dispensary, Trulieve, filed a lawsuit to remove the limits on the number of dispensaries allowed in the state. Trulieve's CEO says this limits their ability to provide safe medical marijuana to customers throughout Florida and it also forces higher prices.
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