Don’t expect a sudden influx of out-of-state cash to fix what’s ailing the company that aspires to be Maine’s biggest dispenser of medical marijuana.
Augusta-based Northeast Patients group has lost two of its board members, including state representative and former Cumberland County Sheriff Mark Dion. State officials and patients are expressing doubts about whether they can trust the company that came forward last year looking like the most professional outfit around, but now is looking a little fly-by-night, needing 11th-hour financing from a hastily created Delaware corporation.
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And it is the subject of a lawsuit from its original funding source, the California-based Berkeley Patients Group, which alleges that Northeast’s top executive used insider information to attract outside backers.
But the biggest problem comes from the unsettled legal status of cannabis, which makes the state’s vision of an orderly system for delivering medicine to the people who need it something of a pipe dream.
Under certain circumstances, marijuana is legal in Maine. Two times, a majority of voters have approved referendums, one to decriminalize it for people with certain medical conditions and another to create a system to make it accessible for them.
But the problem is that under federal law, marijuana is illegal under any circumstance. People who grow, sell or use it are violating federal statutes.
Marijuana dispensaries may look like legitimate businesses when you see their storefronts and advertisements, but in the eyes of federal law enforcement they are criminal enterprises and subject to prosecution.
That uncertain legal status has already cost Northeast the participation of Dion, who had a law enforcement background that gave the business a sense of legitimacy. It also makes financing these operations difficult.
In order to fully honor the will of Maine voters, our congressional delegation should be working to get marijuana reclassified — not legalized, but made legal as part of medical treatment, like prescription drugs.
Until then, the medical marijuana business will struggle to meet the needs of the people it is intended to help.
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