Senate President Stanley C. Rosenberg today described the medical marijuana process in the Bay State as a “total mess,” responding to questions about bureaucratic delays that have prevented the opening of dispensaries.

“The ballot question had a lot of problems in it, it’s been very difficult to implement and doing 30 or so licenses across the commonwealth, it has been very, very hard and it is not good that it has taken this long,” Rosenberg said this morning during an appearance on Boston Herald Radio’s “Morning Meeting” program.

Noting that some medical marijuana dispensaries in Massachusetts are “about ready to open,” Rosenberg slammed the medical marijuana ballot question that was approved by voters in 2012 as an “awkwardly written law.”

“It’s taken too long but we’re about to have some openings and they just have to keep working at it,” Rosenberg told hosts Jaclyn Cashman and Hillary Chabot. “This is very awkwardly written law, which ended up with conflicts in it and contradictions — so it ended up being a real problem to implement.”

The hurdles that medical marijuana dispensary license holders have had to clear just to open, Rosenberg said, should motivate lawmakers to make sure a 2016 public policy question aimed at legalizing marijuana for recreational use is more carefully worded.

“If we’re going to do that, we better be in better shape on that one,” Rosenberg said of the way the ballot question is crafted. “We need to drill down so we know more and do a better job on that one than we did on medical marijuana … We should be more like the casino effort than the medical marijuana effort, because we really understood what we were doing with the casinos.”