The Portland City Council is looking to ensure that a medical marijuana festival scheduled to take place in a public park is not some half-baked scheme to get high and listen to live music.

City Hall spokeswoman Jessica Grondin said the council will revisit the permit request on Monday because a preliminary application approved by the council last month was not consistent with the final application submitted to city staff.

The original application said the Aug. 9 event would be free, but now organizers are planning to charge a $10 admission fee. City staff is also concerned about event advertising that suggests that marijuana products will be available for sale and consumption, Grondin said.

“It seems like their advertising was different from what they told us,” she said.

The New England Cannabis Farmers Market would run from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. in Deering Oaks. It’s designed to connect medical marijuana caregivers and patients, but will also include food, vendors and live music.

A poster advertising the event says that there will be “hundreds of strains, buds, tinctures, ointments, concentrates, edibles, clones, live glass blowing, music, cannabis testing and more!”

Justin Olsen, co-owner of the Belfast-based New World Organics, which is sponsoring the event, said that no marijuana products will be sold or consumed on site. He said the cannabis testing referred to in the flier is a lab test – not a taste test – to determine safety and potency of marijuana.

“We’re not trying to put together a place for people to smoke and party,” Olsen, 32, said. “It’s more informational.”

While a radio ad celebrates the fact that doctors will be available for consultations at the event, Olsen said he doubts they will be issuing recommendations, though it’s possible someone could show up with medical records looking for one. Doctors will primarily be there to answer questions, he said.

“The only thing we’re really changing is the admission,” said Olsen, who added that 10 percent of the proceeds would be given to the city to help the homeless.

Nancy Shaw, a marijuana cultivator with New World Organics, said it can be intimidating for new medical marijuana patients – particularly older patients – to find a caregiver. Oftentimes, people have to drive long distances to meet a stranger who could be working out of his or her home, she said.

“It can be a sketchy, weird situation if you’re new to cannabis,” the 37-year-old said.

The goal of the event is to give patients a safe, public place to meet caregivers so they find a medical marijuana supplier they are comfortable with. It also increases transparency, she said, by allowing non-patients and skeptics to learn more about the industry by talking to providers, patients and doctors.

“We want to show people we’re farmers and small-business owners,” Shaw said. “It’s important for the community to see that.”

The event, if approved by the council, would be the second pro-marijuana rally in Deering Oaks in recent years, but the first since residents passed the city ordinance in 2013, making Portland the first East Coast city to vote in support of legalizing marijuana.

In 2012, the city park hosted the Atlantic CannaFEST, which drew about 200 people and was meant to promote medical marijuana and protest the prices being charged at state-sanctioned dispensaries. During that four-hour event, marijuana was given away to low-income patients. Police reported no problems with that event.

Maine voters first legalized marijuana for medical use in 1999, and significantly expanded the law a decade later by adding a system of drug dispensaries and medical marijuana caregivers.

Maine now has a two-tiered system for supplying marijuana. There are eight state-sanctioned dispensaries that can grow for an unlimited number of patients, and an estimated 1,700 caregivers who can each grow for five patients at a time. They supply an estimated 70 percent of Maine’s medical marijuana.

There is also a push to legalize marijuana for recreational use. Although Maine lawmakers voted against bills to legalize marijuana in committee, two groups are collecting signatures for a statewide referendum seeking to make Maine the fifth state to legalize marijuana.

Both medical and recreational marijuana are still illegal under federal law.

 

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