D.C. residents will no longer need to involve a doctor before they obtain medical marijuana.
The D.C. Council unanimously passed an emergency bill Tuesday night that allows residents 21 years old and older to “self-certify” their need for medical marijuana.
That means that residents don’t need to get one of the District’s authorized practitioners — 620 of the city’s thousands of medical professionals — to provide a recommendation when registering for a medical marijuana patient card.
Mayor Muriel Bowser is expected to sign the bill into law, which would be in effect for no longer than 90 days.
The resolution drafted by Democratic council members Kenyan McDuffie (Ward 5) and Mary Cheh (Ward 3) says the emergency legislation is intended to protect medical marijuana businesses against the city’s much more accessible “gray market.”
“Due to the aforementioned lower barriers to access in the gray market, a significant number of medical marijuana patients have shifted from purchasing their medical marijuana from legal medical dispensaries to the illicit gray market, creating a significant risk to the long-term viability of the District’s legal medical marijuana industry,” the legislation states.
The resolution says that purchases from medical dispensaries have been on the decline since December.
Mr. McDuffie and Ms. Cheh’s emergency bill would essentially create a recreational marijuana market for all D.C. residents, according to Marijuana Moment, a website dedicated to covering the politics, science and culture of cannabis.
If the bill is signed into law, it would be a workaround to Congress’ years-long blockade on legalizing sales for recreational marijuana use that the District is subject to since it’s not a state.
DCist reported that Rep. Andy Harris, Maryland Republican, put a rider in the congressional spending bill in 2015 that prohibits the federal government from moving forward on legalizing marijuana sales.
That rider has yet to be removed in subsequent spending bills. DCist said it was added after D.C. voters approved Initiative 71, which legalized personal use, possession, home cultivation and gifting of small amounts of marijuana.
A similar bill that would have allowed residents to self-certify was brought before the council in April, but Marijuana Moment said that it was defeated because council Chairman Phil Mendelson’s measure would have shut down shops that “gift” marijuana to those who buy unrelated products.
“It’s not an equal playing field and will never be as long as there are illegal cannabis gifting shops,” Mr. Mendelson, at-large Democrat, said Tuesday, as reported by DCist. “As long as there are these businesses, the legal industry won’t be there to step in [when legalization happens].”
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