By Declan O’Scanlon

Who knew it would be so hard to get the medical marijuana program expansion legislation passed?

N.J. public support for medical marijuana polls somewhere in the 80 percent to 90 percent range. People know that there is tremendous potential in marijuana to comfort those in pain. They know moving the medical program forward is the moral and compassionate thing to do.

The governor is obviously on board. He did what he could via executive action late last January. This past March, the Department of Health laid out a very reasonable, responsible, and ethical blueprint of what needs to be done. It was practically a spoon fed solution. There is strong bipartisan support. Even those against recreational use will generally concede that patients in need should have access to all forms of available treatment. The ball has been sitting in the legislature’s court for almost a year now.

The administration, through the state Department of Health, greatly expanded the qualifying conditions that permits patients access to the program, but the legislature has not given the industry and the health department the tools they need to grow to appropriately meet that demand, or to provide the full extent of care and resources that are available in other states. As a result, there is a looming crisis of supply shortages.

The patient population is exponentially growing, and the industry cannot keep up. Current alternative treatment centers are not expanding production at a fast enough rate, satellite facilities are not operational, the six new approved Alternative Treatment Centers are nowhere near ready. It will take new facilities months to either be retrofitted or built, and the product they are trying to develop takes several more months to grow. All the time while, the patient population continues to rapidly expand. The legislature’s inaction has created a ticking time bomb that will blow up in already suffering patients’ faces.

Everyone knows that when a person is in pain, time drags on. So while some people spent their time bickering over the possibilities of a recreational marketplace and how to appease their political overlords, others had a lot of very long and very painful moments. We in the legislature had the opportunity to help those in pain. Instead of helping, we chose to sit there and pretend we care. Shame on us.

Those tying the medical program expansion to the passage of recreational legalization are presenting a false choice. We would never tie the approval of effective pharmaceuticals to the reformation of our liquor license laws. Clearly, what’s happening here is that some of the proponents of recreational legalization feel that holding the expansion of the medical program hostage works to their agenda’s advantage. The problem with that strategy is that is screws patients who are in need. Sorry, no agenda makes that O.K.

So much discussion on the adult-use bill has involved the attempt to regulate every facet of a market that does not exist yet. That rarely works out well. And it has nothing to do with the expansion of the medical program. We must now accept that any further delay in passage of medical expansion amounts to a hostage situation rather than an orderly legislative process. I know my colleagues on both sides of the aisle are capable of so much more compassion than that.

We know what the medical marijuana marketplace looks like. It is filled with really sick people. Sometimes dying people. People suffering and in pain and desperately looking for solutions. We all can relate to that market.

Rather than hold hostage our most vulnerable, I propose a more humane solution. A simple solution that the public overwhelmingly supports. It is long past time to set a date to move a medical marijuana expansion bill by itself regardless of any promises of progress on the adult use bill. Any other choice is inhumane.

Declan O’Scanlon, R-Monmouth, is a New Jersey state senator.

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