ARTICLE: New Jersey patients are still waiting for medical marijuana

Two years later, New Jersey patients are still waiting for their medical marijuana. The Commissioner of the New Jersey Dept of Health and Senior Services (DHSS), the government body commissioned to oversee the Garden State’s long-delayed medicinal cannabis program, told The Wall Street Journal that legal pot won’t be available to patients until the end of 2012 – at the absolute earliest.

DHSS Commissioner Mary O’Dowd said that New Jersey has repeatedly delayed implementation of the medical marijuana program that has been law since January 2010 because they want to create sufficient safeguards to prevent their state from becoming like California's and Colorado's allegedly abused medical marijuana programs, such as reports of healthy individuals obtaining medical cannabis.

The first dispensary expected to operate is the Greenleaf Compassion Center in Montclair, a town mostly situated on a ridge that’s part of northern New Jersey’s Watchung Mountain range. Greenleaf’s opening is still pending approval from the state; their president Joseph Stevens told The Journal he receives an average of 30 calls a day from pot-seeking patients, but for now all he can give them is a frustrating estimate of when they’ll possibly begin providing cannabis.

Another dispensary in Egg Harbor was approved locally and now awaits the green light from the state’s Compassionate Use Medical Marijuana program, part of the DHSS.

New Jersey’s high-profile Governor Chris Christie initially balked at implementing the medical pot program when he took office, but has since come around and now supports it, appointing 26-year State Police vet John O’Brien Jr. the new director of the program.

O'Brien told The Journal that they plan to closely monitor pot production and distribution down to the tenth of a gram by measuring everything that is harvested (buds/flower tops that contain the medicine) as well as everything that is disposed (seeds and stems). Additionally, the state medical marijuana program plans to announce in March the official registry of approved physicians from the applicant list of approximately 100 who will be permitted to recommend cannabis to patients with a “debilitating medical condition."

Meanwhile those same patients in New Jersey will sit on their hands and watch the calendar flip by until a dispensary finally opens its doors.