Undermining again..

So now the Oregon Senate has sent a bill giving localities the ability to delay the opening of legal cannabis dispensaries until May 2015 to Governor Kitzhaber’s desk for signature. Why did they wait until applications were being accepted? Cynicism suggests that it was intentional to derail new dispensaries from opening..maybe for good. The cost to business owners should the Governor sign this nonsense bill will be huge. It instructs the Oregon Health Authority to refund the $4000 license fee, but that’s only the tip of the iceberg for these places. The security measures alone that have to be implemented are extremely costly. To not be able to recoup their expenses may put some out of business before they even start. How is that fair?

I suppose it can be argued that any dispensaries that existed before they were legalized shouldn’t have existed anyway because the voters in Oregon voted against them. Yet, they sprung up everywhere. Truth is an interesting motivator. Cannabis will be legal here at some point, and it looks like that just might happen in November. Why not embrace the spirit of the green rush that’s coming? Oregon could lead the nation on this. Washington isn’t turning out to be a patient friendly state anymore. Why does Oregon have to follow suit? Oregon could show far more compassion and let the dispensaries go forward without any further restriction. Not everyone wants to grow their own medicine. Some simply are too ill to do it and legalizing dispensaries is a godsend for these folks.

And what will happen to the dispensaries that now exist? If a city decides to invoke the moratorium, it must do so by May 1, 2014. Do existing businesses need to then close until May 2015? How many people will lose their jobs in the process? And how can a city that has so far looked the other way suddenly become concerned and impose a moratorium? And will they?

Instead of giving in to fear, why not educate the localities that have concerns over dispensaries? The knee-jerk reaction to cannabis is based upon lies anyway. Isn’t time we started living in truth? Delaying the opening of dispensaries won’t fix the problem. Only truth will do that. People might as well get accustomed to hearing facts about cannabis given that legalization is likely soon. 

There’s a trend developing in this country. When one party doesn’t like a law, they do everything to circumvent it by enacting new laws to get around it. Face it. We don’t always get what we want and sometimes the majority wins. It doesn’t help the situation when the Oregon Senate disrupts prospective new business this way. Even if you remove patients from the equation, dispensaries bring jobs and revenue to whatever city they’re in. Preventing that from happening at a time when so many are still unemployed makes no sense at all.

We have to start somewhere. Maybe vetoing this bill is the beginning of reason and sanity returning to the conversation. Please, Governor Kitzhaber..protect patients. Veto this bill.