Alfredo Vigil, DOH Secretary

State employees can work on New Year’s Eve, according to a press release just in from the Governor’s office; the Dec. 31 furlough day will be shifted to Friday, March 5, 2010. The furloughs, which apply to 17,000 state employees, “will save another $8.1 million – on top of the $8.3 million that will be saved by the elimination of several state exempt positions,” the release states.

The 4,100 employees exempt from furloughs include direct patient care in hospitals and health facilities—and while I’m not saying hospitals work better without receptionists, another exciting chapter of the DOH hiring-during-hiring-freeze story has unfolded.

Last week, I posted a legislative complaint sent to Gary Chabot, an analyst with the Legislative Finance Committee, alleging practices of nepotism and the moving of DOH funds “in a questionable manner.” Today, Chabot sent along DOH Secretary Alfredo Vigil’s response, sent to Vigil on Wednesday, Nov 25—one day after Chabot alerted Vigil to the complaint. (The e-mail’s after the jump.) Continue reading »

State Senator Sue Wilson Beffort, R-Bernalillo

Senator Sue Wilson Beffort, R-Bernalillo, is on the fiscal warpath, and she wants the New Mexico Department of Health to own up to nepotist practices in hiring—during a hiring freeze.

The Department of Health, Beffort says, hired approximately 91 new employees after Gov. Richardson declared a hiring freeze. It’s not the first time—at least 62 people were hired during the 2008 hiring freeze—but this time, Beffort’s righteously mad.

“I have been called by people in the Health Department that are demoralized by the nepotism that has been going on in hiring non-emergency people,” Beffort says. “After the hiring freeze, the Health Department hired, I think, 91 people. They said they were all critical people, so I backed down.”

She’s done backing down. Continue reading »

For the second time, the Santa Fe Institute for Natural Medicine is running low on cannabis, proving once again that there is no way for a single non-profit producer to meet the statewide medicinal demand.

This time, however, SFINM says the Department of Health is doing something about it.

“The Department of Health is aware of this urgent situation and is working to issue a second producer license,” SFINM’s site tells its clients.

SFR received a screen capture of SFINM’s password-protected site from an anonymous client late Thursday evening. We have not yet received confirmation of this information from the health department. (Update, Oct 2: Acting program coordinator is out until Oct 6, so we probably won’t see movement *that* soon.)

In August, SFINM was completely out of stock and told clients it would resume distribution (with a new strain, “Big Buddha’s Cheese,” no less) in October. Now October’s here and some Santa Fe patients will wait until November.

Citing “overwhelming demand,” SFINM has stopped accepting orders and canceled most of its October delivery schedule:

The Albuquerque delivery scheduled for October 17 has been pushed back to October 31.

The Santa Fe delivery scheduled for October 24 has been pushed back to November 7.

The Alamogordo delivery also scheduled for October 24 is “expected” to arrive on schedule.

Here’s SFINM’s big caveat and finger-point: “Unfortunately there may be many times that all items are out of stock. We are sorry for the inconvenience, but the law limits the amount we can produce.”

In 2007, the New Mexico Legislature passed a law allowing the DOH to set up a medical cannabis program. For the dispensary aspect, DOH decided to go with a non-profit licensing system, limiting each producer to 95 plants.

So far, the DOH has only approved one producer of the 21 producer applications it has received. There are more than 540 card-carrying medical cannabis patients in New Mexico, only a fraction of which are permitted to grow for themselves.

Coming soon: Big Buddha’s Cheese. But in the meantime, New Mexico’s sole licensed nonprofit medical cannabis producer is all out of product.

Marjorie Childress at the New Mexico Independent is reporting that the Santa Fe Institute for Natural Medicine has already sold out. Childress cites an unnamed medical cannabis patient who provided an alert from the SFINM Web site:

8/28/09 PRODUCT UPDATE

We are currently sold out of our inventory. Not knowing what members would like, our first crop was 50/50 indica dominant/sativa dominant. And although we are so sorry to run out, we now know that members prefer sativa dominant. We will try and adjust our proportions accordingly so this does not happen again. Also, please keep in mind that it takes 12-18 months for a smooth running ongoing production. This is especially tricky when it is a pilot project and mother nature is involved. We very much appreciate your patience.

Come October, we hope to introduce Big Buddha’s Cheese, Chocolope, and Kandy Kush to the menu. More details will come in September.

Everyone from Tennessee-grower Bernie Ellis to former state medical cannabis program coordinator Melissa Milam have complained that the 95-plant limit the DOH has imposed on nonprofit growers is far too small to handle the statewide patient demand. What compounds the problem is DOH Secretary Dr. Alfredo Vigil could not tell SFR when he thinks a second nonprofit grower/distributor will be granted a license.

To date there are 20 outstanding applications filed by nonprofit entities wishing to offer legal medical cannabis to patients. There are 540 patients registered with the program, only about a fifth are licensed to grow for themselves.

NMI’s glimpse into the private SFINM web site confirms that New Mexico patients are paying street prices for cannabis: “The top grade is $378 an ounce, the middle grade is $336, and the bottom grade…is $182 an ounce.”

Four years ago, Dr. Eve Elting was approached to take part in a medical cannabis company not unlike Canntechs (which SFR reported on last week) in California. She was a skeptic at first, but did her due diligence and found that, yes, it can help patients with a long list of conditions. Now, Elting has expanded her practice to Truth or Consequences and is evaluating patients from all over the state as one of the few self-identified medical cannabis specialists. She is also a member of the state advisory board for the Department of Health’s medical marijuana program–and would like to see marijuana just plain legalized.

Q&A after the jump.

Continue reading »