Voters in Missouri approved a ballot measure which legalized medical marijuana in 2018. In March this year, the Department of Health and Senior Services released draft rules for the medical marijuana program and invited public comment on those rules. Last week, the department completed making changes to the draft rules based on the feedback received and they published the revised draft rules on the department’s website on Friday.
The rules cover 11 broad aspects of the medical cannabis program. These include rules covering patients and caregivers participating in the program, cultivation facility license procedures and requirements, testing facilities, seed to sale marijuana tracking and the rules governing medical marijuana manufacturing facilities.
The Department of Health and Senior Services (DHSS) will start receiving patient applications based on these rules on July 4 while applications from businesses which want licenses will be received starting August 3. The application forms are now available on the website and all interested parties can access and fill those forms.
DHSS will then start scoring the business applications and complete this exercise on December 31 this year, after which business licenses will be issued to the successful applicants in 2020.
The medical marijuana program has attracted a lot of interest from the business community, and the state expects to generate millions of dollars in taxes and fees from the industry.
However, the actual earnings are likely to fall short of what has been predicted. Economics professors at Missouri University crunched the numbers and concluded that the number of eligible patients in the state would be less than initially expected. The professors estimated that in 2022, the medical marijuana program is likely to raise about $3.4 million in taxes and fees, a figure which is much lower than the $24 million predicted by the people behind the initiative which saw the approval of the ballot measure legalizing medical marijuana.
In the meantime, 510 applications have been pre-filled and are due to be submitted. Those applications have generated more than $3.67 million in application fees. From these applications, 60 cultivation facilities, 86 manufacturing facilities and 192 medical marijuana dispensaries will be selected. The state will license 24 dispensaries for each of the eight congressional districts.
These draft rules will also be subject to public comment and a public hearing will be organized in July. TransCanna Holdings Inc. (CSE: TCAN) and Therma Bright Inc. (TSX.V: THRM) (OTC: THRBF) applaud the authorities in Missouri for systematically implementing the roadmap to the commercialization of the medical marijuana program.
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