Efforts to persuade the Michigan legislature to rectify a growing list of serious problems plaguing medical marijuana users and caregivers in our state are going nowhere:
- An Appeals Court decision leaves adults and children with seizures and other life-threatening conditions unable to use cannabis oil instead of the often less effective smokable form of the drug, yet HB5104 is not slated to come to the floor.
- A bill to re-introduce dispensaries (HB4271) appears stalled.
- An effort to decriminalize small amounts of recreational marijuana (HB4623) languishes.
At the same time, Republican senators have fast-tracked a bill that gives a Canadian corporation preferential treatment to industrialize Michigan’s cannabis production. In less than two weeks, the bill was passed by the Michigan Senate on Nov. 13 by a vote of 22-16.
The proposed law would entitle Prairie Plant Systems Inc. the right to set up 16 1,000-plant grow facilities around the state, when or if the federal government ever changes the designation for marijuana from a Schedule 1 to Schedule 2 drug. The feds appear to be in no hurry to do this, but the Michigan GOP appear poised to rush the bill through the state House of Representatives by the holidays.
Meanwhile, the state’s homegrown caregivers – the folks who have literally put their freedom if not their lives on the line for medical marijuana – would still be limited to growing a maximum of 72 plants each.
Why the special treatment for a foreign corporation? The key appears to be knowing people in high places (pun intended).
According to Senate Majority Leader Randy Richardville, the co-sponsor of the bill and chair of the only Senate hearing held on the bill, he has been meeting with Prairie Plant for three years about the company’s desire to become the biggest player in Michigan’s medical marijuana industry. No doubt many of those meetings were with his former colleague Chuck Perricone, who was the GOP’s Speaker of the Michigan House of Representatives in 1999-2000 and who now lobbies for the Canadian firm.
With friends like these . . .
The argument for why Prairie Plant deserves special dispensation is ostensibly because of concerns about safety. Richardville and bill co-sponsor Sen. Roger Kahn engaged in public hand-wringing about how patients should worry about being sold contaminated poison pot that could end up making them sicker or even kill them. Who knows what’s in that stuff?
Enter Prairie Plant, which once had the exclusive contract to provide medical marijuana in Canada. The bill’s sponsors tout it as the perfect company to provide “pharmaceutical grade” cannabis to patients in our state.
The reality, however is that patients in Michigan are not reporting any problems with homegrown medical marijuana from local caregivers. But, according to Cannabis Culture magazine, Prairie Plant racked up a dreadful record in Canada.
At the hearing, Perricone admitted the company only produced one strain of the drug for patients in Canada. Michigan caregivers reported experimenting with hundreds of possible strains as they try to tailor the drug to the individual patient.
Perricone also said that the Canadian strain which averaged 7 percent THC, compared to up to 30 percent THC in some strains grown in Michigan. Perricone never mentioned the product’s level of CBDs, the factor many people claim is far more effective than THC for conditions like seizures.
Of greatest concern,however, is Prairie Plant’s past record on contamination. According to Canadians for Safe Access, the company’s grow operation in Flin Flon, Manitoba, is located deep in an abandoned zinc and copper mine. A report issued by MiningWatch Canada in 2001 called Financial Options for the Remediation of Mine Sites (download the PDF here) said that the talings at Flin FLon (love the name) are a permanent threat:
The sheer size of the contaminated area in Flin Flon makes it impossible to remediate.
Cannabis Culture also reported that Canadians for Safe Access commissioned tests on Prairie Plant’s product from that underground operation and found high levels of arsenic and lead. Freedom of Information Act requests uncovered internal company communications showing company testing showed the product had high levels of manganese and phosphorous (though their tests showed lower levels of arsenic and lead).
So this is the company we should trust to deliver a safe and effective product to patients in Michigan?
Whom do you trust?
When you compare the corporate, profit-driven model of a company like Prairie Plant to the community of caregivers in Michigan who often provide cannabis for free to cancer patients, it is hard to see how anyone could argue that SB660 will do a better job of helping suffering people in our state.
I was personally disturbed by the seeming willful ignorance of many Republican lawmakers. Couldn’t Richardville or his staffers have taken the time to use the Google machine to check Prairie Plant’s record? Or don’t they care?
If GOP legislators had time to enjoy junkets to visit Prairie Plant facilities, as Rick Thompson of The Compassion Chronicles talked about on my LCC Radio talk show, couldn’t they have spared a few minutes to learn about the struggle that parents like Jim Powers are facing because important bills aren’t moving?
Powers and his wife and child used the Prairie Plant hearing to try to educate Richardville about the life-threatening problem his son faces now that the Michigan Appeals Court has banned cannabis oil, the only drug that controls his son’s debilitating kidney disease.
Richardville expressed compassion for the child’s plight, but he frequently chastised others who testified for not staying on point. But what other venues do desperate patients and caregivers have to get Richardville’s attention about the urgent problems the legislature could easily rectify?
As Democratic Senator Gretchen Whitmer noted during the hearing, there is no guarantee that the federal government will ever re-classify marijuana, so why is the legislature wasting time on paving the way for Prairie Plant to someday come to Michigan instead of solving real problems in the state now?
Many patients and caregivers also worry that this is just the first step in a plan to corporatize and industrialize medical marijuana in Michigan, no matter the assurances that the current caregiver system won’t be threatened.
What really infuriated Richardville, however, was the suggestion that money talks when it comes to setting legislative priorities. Sick kids can’t get their medicine in the form they need, but an old pal’s company goes to the head of the line. Did that assessment cut too close to the bone?
If Richardville, Kahn et al want to prove the they don’t put the interests of foreign companies ahead of the needs of sick kids in Michigan, then let them prove that by urging their peers in the House to pass the bills that would solve real problems today.
The bottom line is that if this isn’t an example of the worst of corporate crony capitalism, what is?
