The Department accepted applications for medical marijuana dispensary registry certificates during the last two weeks in July. In an impressive effort, the team processed 750 applications within a five-day timeframe. We anticipate issuing 31 dispensary licenses after evaluating the complete and compliant applications. The Medical Marijuana Program staff completed the work efficiently and with great [...]
Our Vital Health Statistics team along with our partners at the UA College of Public Health completed our Medical Marijuana Program’s 3rd Annual Report this week. You’ll find a wide range of information in the report including data about the demographics and kinds and qualifying conditions of our cardholders, geographic distribution and rates as well [...]
Last Wednesday we held a Medical Marijuana Dispensary Collaborative. It was modeled after last year’s successful ADVICE Collaborative, which brought dialysis facilities together to share best practices and engage in a dialog to reduce infection control violations and improve patient care. The goal of the meeting was to avoid future deficiencies by ensuring that dispensaries understand our expectations and to help us [...]
Last summer a Superior Court judge decided that a portion of our medical marijuana regulations are unreasonable because our regulations didn’t have a process for dispensary registration certificate holders to renew their dispensary registration certificate if they didn't earn their approval to operate within 1 year. This week we posted new draft rules (and an Online Survey to get [...]
We published our mid-year update of the medical marijuana annual report this week. It contains different data than our standard annual report in that we’re reporting aggregate dispensary transaction data. In the report you’ll see that there were about 422,000 transactions made at dispensaries in ‘13 among the 40,000 patients (about 10 transactions/patient/year). Dispensaries sold [...]
A Complaint was filed against the ADHS and others last week. It’s called a “Request for Declaratory Judgment and Permanent and Preliminary Injunction”. It basically asks the Court to declare that: 1) extracts and resins from the marijuana plant are protected in the definition of “Useable Marijuana” under the Arizona Medical Marijuana Act; and 2) dispensaries, patients, caregivers, [...]
Our Vital Health Statistics team along with our partners at the UA College of Public Health completed our Year 2 Annual Report for the Arizona Medical Marijuana Program last week. You’ll find a wide range of information in the report including data about the demographics and kinds and qualifying conditions of our cardholders, geographic distribution [...]
A few weeks ago a Superior Court judge decided that a portion of our medical marijuana regulations are unreasonable because they lack a formal appeal process for dispensary registration certificate holders who don’t earn their approval to operate within 1 year. Because of the ruling, we approved renewal requests for all the current dispensaries (open [...]
Last week I posted a blog that points out that the words "Marijuana" in the Arizona Medical Marijuana Act and "Cannabis" in the Arizona Criminal Code have different definitions... and that the distinction may be an important one for Qualifying Patients. The major difference is that the definition of "Useable Marijuana" in AMMA includes “… dried flowers [...]
Are Marijuana and Cannabis the same thing when it comes to Arizona Law? The short answer is no- and the distinction may be an important one for Qualified Patients. The Arizona Medical Marijuana Act provides registry identification card holders and dispensaries a number of legal protections for their medical use of Marijuana pursuant to the [...]
