Medical Marijuana: Maine’s Proposed Prescription Pot Rules Criticized by Many

As Maine tries to come up with ways to manage its medical marijuana program, one of the state’s lawmakers is speaking out against some proposed restrictions.

 

As detailed by the Portland Daily Sun, Rep. Deb Sanderson worries that the state will implement rules that “are more restrictive and divergent from the intent of the citizen’s initiative legalizing medical marijuana passed in 2009.”

Some of those measures?

For starters, prescription pot participants wouldn’t be able to grow plants within 25 feet “of any property boundary.”

Also, plants would have to “be enclosed by an 8 foot privacy fence, with motion sensitive lighting. The site would have to be at residence where the grower is living, and the department could require unspecified ‘other security measures’ at any time.”

Obviously, these kinds of measures put a burden on poorer curative cannabis users, as well as those who are disabled or homeless.

They have made a lot of Maine’s medical marijuana community upset, too: over 175 filled the state House of Representatives on Monday, when lawmakers and the Department of Health and Human Services and its Division of Licensing and Regulatory Services held a public hearing on the issue.

The Department will accept public comments on the program until Aug. 23.

And lawmakers plan on holding meetings with stakeholders while deciding the issue.

One concern that keeps coming up?

Some worry that the 8 foot fence mandate would actually increase medical marijuana-oriented crime.

Most fences are 6 feet, so they worry that the barriers could make growers a target.