“I think Sen. Nelson is in for a dog fight,” John Morgan told reporters at the Leon County Courthouse. “He’s a methodical Eveready bunny — a bald-headed Eveready bunny who just never stops." | AP Photo Morgan says Nelson in U.S. Senate race ‘dog fight’ against Scott

TALLAHASSEE — Orlando lawyer and big Democratic political donor John Morgan said Sen. Bill Nelson should be worried about his reelection campaign opponent, Republican Gov. Rick Scott, but that the governor himself will pay a price at the polls because of his administration’s poor rollout of the state’s popular medical marijuana law.

Morgan said Scott has the financial means, work ethic and message to knock Nelson from the seat he has held since 2001.


“I think Sen. Nelson is in for a dog fight,” Morgan told reporters at the Leon County Courthouse. “He’s a methodical Eveready bunny — a bald-headed Eveready bunny who just never stops."

But Morgan also believes Scott will be held responsible for the months of delays and faulty regulations in the rollout of the expanded medical marijuana law that took effect about a year ago. Implementation was left up to the Florida Department of Health, which Scott’s office oversees.

“You couldn’t f--- up this bad unless it’s intentional,” Morgan said, later adding, “You’ve got tens of thousands of people who are willing to pay out of their own pockets to get this medication but they can't, and you do nothing about it.“

“It’s malicious,” said Morgan, who himself toyed with the possibility of running for governor this year but decided against it.

Morgan was in Tallahassee on Wednesday for the one-day trial of a lawsuit he’s backing that challenges the state’s ban on smoking medical marijuana. He filed the lawsuit in July and bankrolled an amendment overwhelmingly approved by voters that led state lawmakers to expand medical marijuana use last June.

But licenses to cultivate and distribute medical cannabis that should have been issued in October remain open. And a process of issuing medical marijuana user ID cards that should have taken days to complete still takes weeks and even months. Physicians have added roughly 109,000 people into the state's medical marijuana patient registry as of last week. That number is expected to grow to 500,000 people over the next two years.

“This is going to weigh in on Rick Scott’s election,” Morgan said. “Look, the way this has been handled by the state of Florida in the implementation is a tragedy."

Morgan said Scott and major Republican donors like Mel Sembler equate medical marijuana to drugs like LSD and cocaine.

“You’ve got old people like Rick Scott and Mel Sembler, and they have their own process that because it’s marijuana it must be bad,” he said. “These big donors don’t know the difference between marijuana and cocaine and LSD."