Arkansas made history on Tuesday, becoming the first Southern state to pass a comprehensive medical marijuana measure. The Arkansas Medical Marijuana Amendment of 2016 was voted into law 53-47 and by a margin of 70,000 votes.
The Amendment allows patients with cancer, glaucoma, HIV/AIDS, hepatitis C, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), Tourette’s syndrome, Crohn’s disease, ulcerative colitis, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), severe arthritis, fibromyalgia and Alzheimer’s disease to be prescribed medical cannabis. It also prevents employers from making decisions on hiring and firing of personnel based on their medical marijuana use.
"We won by twice what we lost by last time," says David Couch, a Little Rock based lawyer and main sponsor of the Arkansas Medical Marijuana Amendment. "We carried big, traditional republican counties by nice margins."
“Arkansas voters just brought medical cannabis to the South,” says Tom Angell, chairman of Marijuana Majority, a national pro-cannabis organization. “From here on it will be much easier to get other states on board, particularly Missouri and Oklahoma, both of which are expected to vote on medical marijuana in coming election cycles."
Couch believes that Arkansas passing this medical marijuana measure can set the example for the entire southern region.
"I call it the SEC ... When you compare it to athletics, when Alabama builds a bigger weight room than Auburn and Georgia and Arkansas, they have to follow suit. I think it gives other people in the South the ability to say 'if Arkansas can do it, we can do it.'"
He also believes Arkansas will have deeper implications on the federal level, as he says the state's elected republicans are, for the most part, moderates who understand the value of cannabis as medicine.
The new program will be administrated by a soon-to-be created medical marijuana commission and the Alcoholic Beverage Control Division. The governing bodies have 120 days to establish a system for processing license applications and renewals, create regulations regulating the operations of dispensaries and cultivation businesses, and procedures for inspections, advertising restrictions and all aspects of cultivation and processing of cannabis.
The number of dispensary and cultivation licenses are also set in the measure: regulators must issue at least 20, but no more than 40 dispensary licenses, while hopeful cultivators will fight over a maximum of eight cultivation licenses. Interestingly, the Amendment lets dispensaries grow “50 mature marijuana plants at any one time plus seedlings.”
"I envisioned this as the larger cultivation facilities will grow your bigger, more popular strains and it would give each of the dispensaries to grow a couple of smaller strains," Couch explains. He says this will create a more competitive market.
The constitutional amendment also includes measures to prevent outside forces coming into the state and taking over the market. When applying for a cultivation or dispensary license, applicants need to prove that at least 60 percent of the business’ stakeholders have been current residents of the state over the last seven years.
Groups and individuals will be allowed to submit their applications no later than June 1, 2017. For cultivators, the application fee will be as high as $15,000, while the application fee for dispensaries is capped at $7,500. Applicants will be limited to one cultivation and one dispensary license.
Arkansas’ path this year to medical marijuana reform has been long and arduous. The state witnessed a battle between two distinct medical marijuana measures. On the ballots, the Arkansas Medical Marijuana Amendment was supposed to be followed by Issue 7 – the Arkansas Medical Cannabis Act. That is until the Arkansas Supreme Court tossed out more than 12,000 signatures that were approved by election officials for the Arkansas Medical Cannabis Act proposal two weeks before election day. Justices said the group collecting the signatures failed to comply with state laws regarding registration and paid canvassers, and left the act 2,500 signatures shy of qualifying for the ballot.
To further complicate the matter, both measures appeared on the state’s ballots, but only the votes cast for the Arkansas Medical Marijuana Amendment were counted.
Couch said the court decision “[eliminated] some of the confusion on which one to vote for,” in an interview with the local ABC affiliate.
Issue 7 looked to legalize the home growing of medical marijuana and had a more extensive qualifying condition list (including migraines, anxiety, and Parkinson’s). The Amendment, however, has extra security. As a constitutional amendment, state legislators would not be able to outlaw medical cannabis again. Only voters could overturn this result through another ballot measure.
A recent analysis by New Frontier Data predicts Arkansas’ medical marijuana market to reach over $6 million in sales by 2020.
Read the full ballot measure here
