The South Dakota Department of Health has issued roughly 11,500 cards since the medical marijuana program launched in 2021––shattering the department’s projections of 6,000 cards issued by 2024. 

“We’ve doubled the amount that we were projecting to see in three years within two years,” said Jennifer Seale, the administrator of South Dakota’s medical cannabis program, as quoted by the local news outlet South Dakota Searchlight.

Seale made the comments in testimony on Monday before the Medical Marijuana Oversight Committee in the state legislature. 

Members of the committee expressed concern at the ease with which patients have gained access to medical marijuana cards. 

One member of the committee, Republican state House Rep. Fred Deutsch, has been outspoken in his opposition to recreational marijuana legalization, while also criticizing what he believes is a lack of safeguards in the state’s medical cannabis program. 

“Doctors can make a hell of a lot of money just opening up their ‘Doc in a Box Shop,’ and that concerns me. That should concern everybody. I mean, come on. If we’re talking about medical marijuana, we should allow people that really need it to have access to it, and we should prevent people that don’t need it from getting access to it as well,” Deutsch said in June.

Earlier this year, Deutsch obtained a medical cannabis card himself to demonstrate the ease of access.

“I support easy access to medical marijuana when doctors and patients follow the law. I now have a medical card because my doctor didn’t follow the law,” Deutsch said on Twitter in June.

At Monday’s hearing, Deutsch recounted the visit to the clinic that resulted in the medical cannabis prescription. Local TV station KELO provided details on Deutsch’s comments:

“[Deutsch] said he could clearly hear the conversations between the nurse practitioner and the people seeking cards. ‘There was no privacy whatsoever. HIPAA was out the door.’ According to Deutsch, the nurse practitioner looked at his medical records, noted that he had been in a traffic accident, asked whether he still felt pain, and certified him for a patient card for a year. Deutsch said he then asked her whether using marijuana could conflict with any of his current medicines, but she said he needed to talk to his primary doctor. She told him he needed to ask other questions of the shops that sell marijuana. After seven or eight minutes, the meeting was done: ‘I left feeling, ‘A hundred seventy bucks – there was no examination.’’”

In the state’s legislative session earlier this year, lawmakers considered a pair of proposals that would have imposed restrictions on so-called “pop-up” medical marijuana clinics, where patients can obtain a card with ease.

The two bills would have “made myriad changes to cannabis law in the state: banning certain advertisements for prescription services; requiring certain actions by doctors and other providers to establish a ‘bona fide’ relationship and allowing prescription to occur only in certain facilities, most of them related to medical care in some manner,” the Forum News Service reported at the time.

But both pieces of legislature were soundly rejected by the state Senate Health and Human Services Committee.

In January, South Dakota lawmakers approved a bill to widen the list of qualifying conditions for medical cannabis treatment in the state. The legislation also shifted the authority to set those qualifying conditions from the South Dakota Department of Health to the state legislature.

Voters in South Dakota approved a measure at the ballot to legalize medical cannabis for eligible patients in 2020.

While the law officially took effect in 2021, the first state-licensed dispensaries opened for business last year. 

The state’s 2020 ballot also included a proposed constitutional amendment that would have legalized recreational cannabis in the state.

Although a majority of voters approved the amendment, it was later overturned by the South Dakota Supreme Court––a ruling that delighted the state’s Republican Gov. Kristi Noem, who spearheaded the lawsuit to get the law struck down.

But after the court’s ruling in 2021, Noem made a point to draw a distinction between the overturned recreational pot measure and the medical cannabis program.

“South Dakota is a place where the rule of law and our Constitution matter, and that’s what today’s decision is about,” Noem said at the time. “We do things right—and how we do things matters just as much as what we are doing. We are still governed by the rule of law. This decision does not affect my Administration’s implementation of the medical cannabis program voters approved in 2020. That program was launched earlier this month, and the first cards have already gone out to eligible South Dakotans.”

The post South Dakota’s Medical Cannabis Program Shatters Projections appeared first on High Times.

The post South Dakota’s Medical Cannabis Program Shatters Projections appeared first on Paradise Found.

Longtime pot opponent South Dakota State Representative Fred Deutsch (R-Florence) repeatedly worked hard to narrow the state’s medical cannabis system as much as possible, and now aims to test the system after getting a card himself. 

Who is this guy? Deutsch urged his fellow representatives to vote against a bill adding several qualifying conditions to the state’s medical cannabis program, including post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and fought against other provisions like popup clinics. Deutsch claimed that studies show cannabis leads to an uptick in suicide.

After a few past attempts to limit the state’s program failed, the representative wants to test the state medical cannabis system to see if he can find any flaws. Deutsch told The Dakota Scout that he obtained a South Dakota medical cannabis card, but not to buy cannabis.

KOTA reports that in an earlier interview, the Tea Party Republican expressed some of his concerns over the details of the state’s medical cannabis system.

“States are called the laboratories of democracy,” Deutsch said. So, each laboratory we can see the kinds of outcomes they’ve attained from the laws they’ve written.”

He continued, “Doctors can make a hell of a lot of money just opening up their ‘Doc in a Box Shop,’ and that concerns me. That should concern everybody. I mean, come on. If we’re talking about medical marijuana, we should allow people that really need it to have access to it, and we should prevent people that don’t need it from getting access to it as well.”

Deustch also said that he aims to eliminate home growing altogether and only allow dispensaries to distribute, where cannabis can be tested and approved, to ensure that the black market is kept under control.

The vast majority of dispensaries—medical and adult-use—are checking patrons for ID. Data published in the journal Addictive Behaviors that adult-use retailers across five U.S. cities were in strict compliance with laws requiring patrons to show identification and proof of legal age.

South Dakota’s Road to Medical Cannabis

South Dakota stands out among other states’ because its adult-use cannabis law was approved and then overturned. South Dakota legalized cannabis for medical use in 2021, but cannabis can only be purchased by patients with medical cannabis cards.

Despite voting to approve a challenged adult-use cannabis bill two years earlier, for the second time, in 2022, voters in South Dakota rejected a measure to legalize adult-use cannabis.

“The voters said yes to establishing a medical marijuana system, and they said no to establishing a recreational marijuana system,” Deutsch said at the time.

In 2020, the South Dakota voters approved Initiated Measure 26 and approved medical cannabis with 69% of voters in favor of the measure. A majority of voters in South Dakota also approved a ballot measure to legalize adult-use cannabis. Constitutional Amendment A was approved with 54% of the vote, according to election records. However, a lawsuit filed last year by Gov. Kristi Noem and two highway patrol officers prevented the bill approved by voters from ever seeing the light of day. The South Dakota Supreme Court ruled on Nov 24, 2021, that the measure couldn’t be implemented because it violated a requirement that constitutional amendments deal with just one subject.

Since then, Deutsch has been working to narrow the scope of the state’s medical cannabis program.

Deutsch was prime sponsor of four medical cannabis bills seeking to add regulations and personally led the fight against popup clinics. But last February, the Senate Health and Human Services Committee rejected HB1129 and HB1172.

The post South Dakota Anti-Pot Lawmaker Gets Medical Weed Card to Test System appeared first on High Times.

The post South Dakota Anti-Pot Lawmaker Gets Medical Weed Card to Test System appeared first on Paradise Found.