With the recent ruling in Maricopa Superior Court, ADHS is analyzing the best way to responsibly begin accepting applications for medical marijuana dispensaries. Last week, the Governor instructed ADHS to proceed with the dispensary portion of the AMMA. One of the stumbling blocks was the pending Compassion First vs. Arizona case, which challenged some [...]
The Arizona Medical Marijuana Act (36-2801.01) directs us to accept and review applications to add new debilitating medical conditions that qualify folks to hold patient registration cards. We outlined the requirements and review procedures in the Rules we adopted (R9-17-106)- which say that we’ll accept applications every January and July. We’re planning to accept applications during the last [...]
Last May (after receiving a threatening letter from the Arizona U.S Attorney’s Office) the Governor suspended the dispensary portion of the Arizona Medical Marijuana Act with a genuine concern that state employees would be federally prosecuted. Last year, we asked the federal court to provide us with guidance regarding the obvious conflicts between the Arizona [...]
Next month, the U of A College of Medicine Phoenix is going to host a lecture about marijuana and whether it is medicine. Dr. Sue Sisley, St. Joseph’s Hospital, will be giving the presentation at the Phoenix Theatre on October 11th at 5:30. In an earlier blog, Dr. Laura Nelson, ADHS’s Chief Medical Officer, and [...]
One of the criteria on our official medical marijuana Physician Certification Form includes an attestation by a physician that they’ve reviewed their patient’s profile on the Arizona Board of Pharmacy’s Controlled Substances Prescription Monitoring Program database before signing the certification. We included this requirement to ensure that physicians are acting in their patient’s best interest- [...]
The Arizona Department of Health Services has serious concerns about the legality of so-called cannabis clubs. The information that we have regarding these "clubs" suggests that they are distributing marijuana to customers in a way that is inconsistent with the provisions of the Arizona Medical Marijuana Act, and the persons involved could be conducting illegal marijuana transactions. For this [...]
The U.S. Department issued new guidance for federal prosecutors last week. We had been anticipating a new memo from Justice for some time- hoping that it would clarify whether the dispensary portions of the Arizona Medical Marijuana Act are legal under federal law (the Controlled Substances Act). We were also hoping it would help us figure out how [...]
There’ve been 3 lawsuits filed against the Department in the last few days. On June 10th, the Arizona Biomedical Research Commission filed suit against the state (including me) to stop the enactment of the portion of SB1615, which transfers the Commission to ADHS next month. We have someone from the Attorney General’s office working on [...]
Today I was served with a lawsuit that challenges the State (and the Department) for not implementing the dispensary portion of the Arizona Medical Marijuana Act. The case, filed in the AZ Court of Appeals, asks a judge to order us to follow the rules that we published on April 14 and begin accepting dispensary [...]
A prospective dispensary applicant came to our offices this morning in an effort to submit an application for a dispensary registration certificate. We declined to accept the application because, as I wrote on Friday, we won’t be accepting dispensary registration certificate applications until the outcome of legal action filed last week. There were several members [...]
