Today, a four-physician Advisory Board recommending expanding and facilitating the qualifications for medical cannabis. The board, which advises the New Mexico Department of Health on its medical cannabis program, voted to allow patients suffering from behavioral disturbances related to autism, traumatic brain injury, mental retardation or dementia to use medical cannabis and voted unanimously to eliminate the requirement that chronic pain sufferers get a second opinion from a specialist to qualify for medical cannabis.

Today’s hearing also included an update on the medical cannabis program, which according to Program Manager Dominick Zurlo now has 1448 patients (11 of the total cumulative patients enrolled are now deceased) and only five licensed producers. The numbers are impressive, but so is the backlog: 40 would-be producers are waiting for approval, some patients still can’t get legal cannabis and even Zurlo recognizes that the program “ha[s] not yet met patient need.” Details from the meeting and updated figures after the jump. Continue reading »

Dearest Santa Fe:

I’m leaving you. I’m moving west and filling up my border state bingo card. It’s an economy thing, a weather thing, a move-close-to-close-friends thing. Lest you think I’ll forget you, I’ve put together this list of places, people, issues that will always stick with me. And I’ll also tell you what I never got to do, but wish I had and will haunt me until I return.

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 »