Decriminalization efforts in Pennsylvania cities

The city government of Wilkes-Barre, PA took a big step towards decriminalizing the possession of marijuana under 30 grams last week. Listing a familiar menu of common sense logic—marijuana is no more dangerous than alcohol, enforcement and prosecution are expensive and they unfairly target minorities and ascribe criminal records to otherwise nonviolent individuals—the city council followed the lead of Philadelphia in 2014 and Pittsburgh in 2015 and passed an ordinance to reduce marijuana offenses essentially to parking tickets.

Mayor Tony George, who sees marijuana as “a lesser evil than alcohol,” has asked his city council to draft a responsible plan in collaboration with the police department. Police chief Marcella Lendacky “said she had never considered marijuana decriminalization until a council meeting last month when a resident presented Philadelphia’s bill for possessing and smoking small amounts of marijuana and urged the city to pass a similar law.”

Earlier this month, Buffalo’s Common Council held a special session on exactly this topic, after years of activists bringing exactly the same message to the council’s attention as was brought to the council in Wilkes-Barre. To this corner’s knowledge, no local elected official has made any kind of statement in opposition to or in support of either the Buffalo Cannabis Movement’s proposal to decriminalize marijuana in Buffalo, or Buffalo Assemblywoman Crystal Peoples-Stokes’s bill to tax and regulate marijuana statewide.

Why do the progressive wheels turn so slowly in local and state government? For our 4/20 marijuana issue, The Public has begun reaching out to all elected officials in Western New York to assess their support of both the state’s fledgling medical pot program and the national decriminalization effort underway. So far we’ve received responses from three elected officials, all in favor of both expanding the medical marijuana program and some kind of decriminalization. One was a Democrat and two were Republicans. 

A good neighbor

The state’s medical marijuana program has struggled to gain its sea legs. It’s far too restrictive and access, cost, and the less-than-transparent cooperation from the state’s Department of Health—has anyone yet seen the promised website listing physicians approved to prescribe marijuana?—has kept its growth in check. Whether it’s Pennsylvanian cities, Vermont’s probable full legalization, or Connecticut’s medical marijuana program, it has become incredibly clear that New York is playing catch up with its neighbors.

A recent report for Marijuana Business Daily marked the growth of Connecticut’s once-restrictive program into something more useful. The original legislation called for too few dispensaries, and the approved medical conditions left too many potential patients in the cold. Sound familiar?

Like New York’s Compassionate Care Act, the Connecticut bill was written with elasticity in mind, for the program to evolve to match the needs of its patients.

Since launching in 2014, the state has increased its approved list to 17 medical conditions—New York stands pat at 10—and that state has opened additional dispensaries to make access to the drug more, what’s the word… compassionate?

The number of registered patients in early 2015 was just over 3,000. By the time the state announced the three new dispensaries earlier this year, that had jumped to 8,228. The count now stands at 9,035.

“By the end of this year, (the state could have) close to 13,000 patients,” said Raj Patel, a partner at Southern CT Wellness & Healing, one of the three new dispensaries that plans to open soon.

Ballot dead in Ohio

In an act of hopeful defiance, last November Ohio attempted to become the first state to open up for medical marijuana AND legalization in one fell swoop in a ballot initiative. It got swamped at the polls by nearly a 2-to-1 margin. Why? Maybe it was because the law proposed only 10 legal growers of cannabis, funneling proceeds to a select few thus effectively establishing an oligopoly than many sympathetic progressives would have eschewed.

Taking a step back, a group called Ohio Medical Cannabis Care LLC has pushed to get medical pot on the ballot and start from square one. But Attorney General Mike DeWine isn’t having it, rejecting the group’s fourth request last week.  

New title

We’re renaming our semi-regular marijuana column to something less specific to a particular day of the week. Our new title was imagined by our social media director Billy Sandora-Nastyn, almost by accident, to play off of the paper’s weekly “Spotlight” feature on a leader in the arts, music, or even business or politics. We’ll still favor Mondays for the online column, but taking “Monday” out of the title lets us stay flexible to news as it comes to our attention any day of the week,