Last spring, three advocates for the state’s medical marijuana program received a call from Democratic State Representative Lou Lang, the architect of Illinois’s medical cannabis pilot program.
Lang told the group, which included Leslie Mendoza Temple, Jim Champion, and Michael Fine—all members of the state’s now-defunct Medical Cannabis Advisory Board—that the governor had offered him a deal. In exchange for extending the program another three years and allowing two new conditions (post-traumatic stress disorder and terminal illness) to qualify patients for a medical marijuana card, the board must disband.
STATE BY STATE: Illinois Cannabis News
“We were sold out. We were the tradeoff—but a good tradeoff,” says Fine, one of the medical marijuana patients on the board and the husband of state representative Laura Fine. “We raised no stink [about it at the time] because the program was much more important than our positions on the board." But now he, Temple, Champion, and Lang are speaking out in hopes to expose what they see as the overly political way that medical cannabis matters have been handled in Illinois.
A spokesperson for Bruce Rauner did not comment on the group’s assertions that Rauner requested that the board be dissolved as a condition of signing the bill.
