The state Senate passed a bill on party lines Tuesday that will allow the medical marijuana dispensary system to run in tangent with the recreational pot dispensaries, preserving access for patients to untaxed marijuana with a prescription card, while allow the state to collect a 25 percent tax for all other pot sold at these dispensaries.
“They won’t have to choose between their cardholders and entering the recreational market,” said Senate Majority Leader Ginny Burdick, D-Portland, who has worked long and hard on crafting marijuana regulations since voters legalized the plant for adult consumption in 2014.
Oregon has the second-oldest medical marijuana program in the country, dating to 1998, but that program had been called into question after pot was opened up to everybody over 21.
Under Senate Bill 1511, dispensaries that wish to serve both markets will have to register with two separate agencies, the Oregon Liquor Control Commission for recreational and the Oregon Health Authority for medical, continuing much of the existing regulatory structure.
Burdick said 80 percent of medical dispensaries wish to enter the recreational market but 98 percent would co-locate medical and recreational pot if able.
Oregon’s policy runs directly counter to Washington state, which chose to close down all of its “green-cross” medical marijuana pharmacies and allow only heavily taxed recreational stores operating under very strict location rules.
Senate Minority Leader Ted Ferrioli, R-John Day, who helped sponsor and craft the bill, said the new bill also opens up dispensaries to sell marijuana-infused foods and marijuana for vaping, rather than just leaves, flower buds and rolled joints. “Those products would be allowed if they passed consumer safety tests,” Ferrioli said of the new products.
Anthony Taylor, a medical marijuana advocate with Compassionate Oregon, said the 22-page bill goes into much greater detail than the highlights addressed by Burdick and Ferrioli.
“We are pleased that growers and producers will be exempted from land use compatibility requirements and that local jurisdictions have tighter controls on what and how they may regulate,” Taylor told The Lund Report.
“In addition we are glad the committee clarified that medical growers of 12 plants and under are exempted from inspection by OHA. … [But] We are disappointed that the amendment to [lower] fees commensurate with administering the program [was] not adopted. This would have had an immediate benefit for patients.”
The bill should not have attracted as much controversy as it did -- but despite being a chief architect of the bill, Ferrioli and the rest of the Republicans lined up against the bill because of an obscure constitutional provision about the effective date of the bill, not because of anything substantive.
Sen. Jeff Kruse, R-Roseburg, another sponsor, tried to send the bill back to a committee to be amended, but that would have meant that Senate clerks would have to spend another hour or two reading the bill on the floor, and further tied up Senate business.
Republicans, fed up with Democrats’ election-year agenda, including a hike in the minimum wage, have taken the unusual move of requiring that the clerks read all bills aloud, most likely to stall and annoy Democrats into dropping parts of their agenda.
Ferrioli asked that the House amend the bill, while Burdick said she had another bill in the hopper to address Republicans’ concern.
The Republicans’ stalling tactics may have worked to some degree -- later on Tuesday, Sen. Laurie Monnes Anderson, D-Gresham, killed a bill from the House Democrats that would have required the manufacturers of genetically modified fish to label their products.
Monnes Anderson told The Lund Report that she and the other two Democrats on the Senate Health Committee -- Sen. Chip Shields, D-Portland, and Sen. Elizabeth Steiner Hayward, D-Beaverton -- all supported GMO labeling for fish, but Senate leadership wanted House Bill 4122 dead because of the limited time left to pass legislation in this short session.
The bill passed the House on a 32-27 vote, with rural, moderate Democrats Rep. Caddy McKeown of Coos Bay and Rep. Brad Witt of Clatskanie joining all Republicans in opposition.
Despite limited evidence of the health hazard posed by genetically modified organisms, consumer advocates have argued that Americans should still have the right to know through labeling -- a practice widely adopted in Europe and soon coming to Canada under its new Liberal government.
Because of the potential for laboratory fish to escape and outcompete native fish or turn off consumers from buying any fish, many in the state fishery sector also called for the listing, which could also make non-GMO, wild-caught fish more attractive to consumers by comparison.
Monnes Anderson said she hoped the issue would resurface in the 2017 session. A ballot measure that would have required all GMO foods be labeled, not just fish, failed by 812 votes out of 1.5 million in 2014 after opponents, including biotechnology companies such as Monsanto and DuPont, spent $21 million to advertise against the transparency measure.
