While bills and amendments wend their way through the legislative process, it’s difficult to say with certainty how the revamped MMJ rules will read exactly, but general tendencies can be spotted.
Patients must have a recommendation from a real medical doctor for a bona fide condition, and patients may grow their own or form small co-ops to do the growing. All players involved must register with the Dept of Health which will maintain a database of authorization cards. People with cards can buy from a retail store without paying taxes and possess much more product than retail users.
While other states keep a database like this, opponents claim that all names and addresses can be turned over to law enforcement whenever they ask. Just getting the cards might be a difficult process, so the number of patients and growers should decline by a large number, and the ability to conduct a black market production operation will be severely curtailed.
For those current patients that will fail to get the authorizations or choose to not pay for the medical exam every year from a real doctor, which will be almost all in my opinion, they will have to be happy paying taxes for lab-tested products with a much greater variety, convenience and attributes than they use now.
We know that WA does not have any way of counting current patients, growers, dispensaries [stores] or anything else pertaining to MMJ, but lawmakers are hearing the number of 1100 state-wide medical dispensaries. Right now there are about 80 retail stores open in WA, with a goal of limiting them to 330. The LCB will be asked to increase this limit to accommodate the medical business (without knowing the size of the market) and quickly grant licenses to those who are currently in the unlicensed businesses. Somebody guessed half (550) will try for a license, and half of those will succeed.
We already see in WA, CO, Alaska, and Oregon that a big hunk of the local jurisdictions are adamant about not having pot businesses, retail or medical. A doubling of the number of stores will not make them happy. And, existing licensed retailers won’t be happy if their communities provide for competition that is exempt from taxes and other onerous regulations.
The strategy seems to be (and this was proposed in CO, too) to make the MMJ operations so difficult to use that patients just use the retail operations. Full implementation will be done by July 1, 2016, and there will be a lot of lawsuits, challenges, raids, and forced shutdowns before then. But this is about the only way to get out of the mess.