NC’s latest medical marijuana legalization bill gets first vote
A plan to allow marijuana for medical use in North Carolina is making its way through the state Senate.
Senate Bill 3, the “Compassionate Care Act,” would legalize medical marijuana for people who have cancer, ALS, Parkinson’s disease, epilepsy, post-traumatic stress disorder and other ailments. Those do not include chronic pain, and the drug would not be allowed for recreational use.
Republican Sens. Bill Rabon and Michael Lee, as well as Democratic Sen. Paul Lowe, sponsored the bill, which they say will help North Carolinians while also protecting public safety through regulations.
The bill’s goal “is to only make changes to existing state law that are necessary to protect patients and their doctors from criminal and civil penalties and would not intend to change current civil and criminal laws for the use of non medical marijuana,” Rabon said Tuesday.
Lawmakers on the Senate Judiciary Committee passed SB 3 Tuesday with little debate. It will next be heard by the Senate Finance Committee.
Database on marijuana patients, doctors
Changes made to the bill included recommendations from the North Carolina Sheriffs’ Association to increase law enforcement’s real-time access to data, and to clarify what information needs to be shared and presented during interactions between law enforcement and lawful medical cannabis users, Rabon said.
For people to legally purchase medical marijuana under the bill, they would need to obtain a registry identification card from a physician, which they would need to show to law enforcement if requested. The state Department of Health and Human Services will create “a secure, confidential, electronic database containing information about qualified patients, designated caregivers, and physicians,” according to the bill.
DHHS and state and local law enforcement officials, and medical cannabis centers, would be able to “enter a registry identification card number to determine whether the number corresponds with a current, valid registry identification card.”
A change on Tuesday would allow law enforcement agencies to contact DHHS to confirm a a cardholder’s identity if they can’t do so during the verification system.
The bill would create an 11-member advisory board appointed by the governor and the legislature to review which new medical conditions can be added for approved use. A change to the bill allows for a member or former member of the North Carolina Medical Board to have a seat on the board.
North Carolina business
Ahead of the vote Tuesday, the bill had its first public airing last week in front of a newly elected crop of state lawmakers, with debate centering on whether North Carolinians would be able to enter the new industry.
Under the bill, applicants for a license to supply the drug would need to have been a state resident for at least two years and be the majority owner of each medical cannabis center and production facility under their operation. The bill also requires first-year suppliers to pay a $50,000 nonrefundable license fee and $5,000 for each facility. For renewal, suppliers must pay at least $10,000, plus $500 per new production facility and $100 for each existing facility.
An 11-member board, separate from the advisory board, would approve, suspend or revoke licenses for suppliers of marijuana. This board would approve 10 licenses from a list. Each approved license holder would be able to operate a maximum of eight medical cannabis centers, with at least one in an economically distressed county.
Sen. Lisa Grafstein said during last week’s hearing she was concerned about the licensing fee, which requires a “pretty substantial investment. And so presumably it’s going to be some national organizations that have to be involved in some of this work.”
“I’m wondering as we look forward into the future, potentially for there to be more licenses, whether there’s a potential to have an easier or a more viable path for local farmers and local producers to to be involved in their local community so that we can make sure that North Carolina businesses are benefiting as well,” Grafstein, a Wake County Democrat, said.
Rabon answered that this was “going to be a very expensive process for anyone to get into, very expensive.”
He said applicants for licenses should be sure they’re committed for the long haul. “We don’t want to put an idea out there, ‘oh, this is something that I can do part-time,’” he said.
Grafstein also said she was concerned that though a large part of ownership must be in-state, profits may go out of state.
Lee said that “a person has to have skin in the game. They’re here, they live here. They love North Carolina.” He said much would come down to the arrangements that these local individuals make with private parties, who may be national.
“Hopefully, we’ll have the negotiating ability to kind of work through that and make sure that a lot of that funding stays here,” Lee said.
Contention over medical marijuana bill
Last year, a medical marijuana bill passed the Senate with bipartisan support but died in the House.
Speakers in the Senate committee last week and Tuesday made clear that opposition has not entirely faded away.
Social conservatives stressed the potential harms of marijuana.
Jere Royall, director of community impact and counsel for the North Carolina Family Policy Council, spoke against the bill, saying last week Wednesday that “we all want to be compassionate and to help people in need” but “numerous evidence-based studies demonstrate that significant deleterious effects avail” such as “drug abuse and addiction, change in brain function, lung disease, intoxication and impaired driving, developmental interference, impaired cognition, psychological illness, cardiovascular abnormalities, negative social functioning effects,” he said. Royall spoke again Tuesday, citing research stating marijuana was not proven to help PTSD.
Mark Creech, executive director of the Christian Action League of North Carolina, said last week he was “not a physician, but neither are the sponsors of this bill or most senators who might vote for it.”
“There is no consensus by qualified medical expert organizations that marijuana is a medicine,” Creech said.
Creech, who said he was quoting the Journal of the American Medical Association, said that “If marijuana is to be used for medical purposes, it should be subjected to the same evidence-based review and regulatory oversight as other medications prescribed by physicians.”
Activists favoring legalization, though, said the bill doesn’t go far enough.
Chris Suttle said last week that the way the bill was written right now, he would not qualify for medicinal marijuana use, “nor would I have qualified six years ago when I had my brain tumor scare, so I had to become a criminal in the state I love to be here today with a clean bill of health and a passion inside me.”
Suttle also asked lawmakers to stop using the term “chronic pain” and to instead use the term “opioid reduction therapy.”
“If you do not want to continue taking opioids, then you should be allowed to have medicinal cannabis be one of the solutions that you can look at with your physician,” he said.
On Tuesday, Suttle backed the passage of the bill but pushed against some of its language, saying that “compassion is not 10 licenses for a state that has 100 counties,” and that “compassion is not continuing to borrow from broken states’ medicinal programs to create a systematic, arbitrary set of rules and financial obligations that is eliminating any chance for a local operator or local farmer to participate in this program.”
“Compassion is not continuing to ignore all forms of PTSD, not just for our veterans but for all of those that are suffering in North Carolina as a qualifying condition,” Suttle said.
While the bill allows PTSD as a qualifying ailment, it lays out evidence requirements such as proof of military service in an active combat zone, that the person was the victim of a violent or sexual crime, or that the person was a first responder.
The bill also would create new criminal charges for crimes specific to a medical cannabis center or facility. Legislative researchers studied these charges but were unable to make predictions about their use because of a lack of past data on medical marijuana.
The bill would not apply any sales tax on cannabis products sold by medical cannabis centers.
If the bill passes the Senate, prospects in the House are unclear. House Speaker Tim Moore told reporters in late January that there was “some support” for a bill if it involved doctors and tight controls.
“We have polled our caucus,” he said then. “We still have a few members that need to respond to those polls. So what I would say is that there’s some support and we’ll see. I’d say that there’s a chance it may happen.”
This story was originally published February 15, 2023 at 5:47 PM with the headline "NC’s latest medical marijuana legalization bill gets first vote."
