In this July 24, 2017 photo, Noel Sola, a cultivation worker at Natural Ventures inspects germinated marijuana plants in Caguas, Puerto Rico.
Prior to the storm, patients with a medical marijuana cards could only pick up their prescriptions from the single dispensaries that they were assigned to, but that rule has undergone a temporary change.
In an Oct. 6 determination, the Puerto Rican Department of Cannabis’ board approved allowing patients to go to any open clinic, regardless of the dispensary they had been assigned. The new rule lasts until two weeks after the state of emergency has ended or until the board decides to terminate it.
“It’s not only about the industry,” said Alexis Derrios, the dispensary manager of San Juan-based Caribbean Green. “It’s about people that need their medicine. Especially now that people depend on this medicine rather than pharmaceuticals. We don’t want to let them down.”
Medical marijuana is legally used in Puerto Rico to address more than a dozen conditions, including Alzheimer’s, cancer, Lou Gehrig’s disease, Parkinson’s, rheumatoid arthritis, Crohn’s disease, epilepsy and more.
The Puerto Rico Medical Cannabis Association plans to host a fundraiser on Monday that would provide a voucher to fill a patient’s one-month prescription if she or he is struggling to make ends meet after the storm.
Yet the industry, still in its infancy, will still have to overcome some formidable challenges.
Namely, keeping shops, grow centers and manufacturing sites operational when only 17 percent of the island has electricity and many islanders are still struggling to find clean drinking water — let alone enough water to irrigate thousands of plants.
According to the Department of Defense, 36 percent of the island still don’t have access to water.
The dispensaries and manufacturing sites that are operational have become dependent on generators, and so they require a huge amount of diesel to stay afloat — which they say triples their monthly electricity bill. Nevertheless, industry leaders on the island agree that acquiring diesel has become less of an issue in the past week, but clean water, particularly enough to irrigate plants, is still a huge issue.
“Of course this is medicine and having potable water is still a challenge on the island,” Schmidt said. “Every player in the industry has been trying to mitigate the problem in order to satisfy that area, but it’s still hard to get water at those amounts.”
And those in the industry are careful to make sure that they follow all the rules and deliver a quality product, as they worry this could be a sink-or-swim moment in Puerto Rico’s medical marijuana history.
“We want to be very cautious in what we do,” Aldarondo said. “We want to think only about the benefit of the patient, and we want to be the example in the future. We don’t want to set back the industry in Puerto Rico.”
credit:420intel.com
