After a public hearing in December, the Medical Advisory Board for New Mexico’s medical cannabis program recommended adding three new qualifying conditions: migraine headaches, ankylosing spondylitis (a joint inflammation disease) and bipolar disorder. But today, the state Health Department announced that only ankylosing spondylitis will qualify patients for medical cannabis.

“There is insufficient evidence in the medical literature that medical cannabis is clinically effective for these conditions,” Health Secretary Alfredo Vigil said today in a statement. “[T]he Department will not approve conditions without such evidence.” Great, but then what’s the Medical Advisory Board’s role? It’s not exactly a bunch of dilettantes; state epidemiologist DOH physician Steve Jenison is its leader. 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.

One of the prime online resources for the medical marijuana community, Ajnag.com (yes, that’s ganja backwards) has developed an iPhone “app” to help patients find the nearest legal pot dispensary wherever their travels take them.

Neat, huh? And completely useless in New Mexico, where the name, location and contact details for the state’s only licensed medical cannabis growhouse and dispensary have not been made public by the state Department of Health, which administrates the program. The DOH is currently reviewing 14 more applications from nonprofits that would like to distribute cannabis, and those names, too, are kept confidential. Previously, SFR was able to identify many of them (see “Pot Plans”) due to cross-referencing company filings and because of redaction errors on the DOH’s behalf.

DOH just released six more applications to us. This time DOH staff was not only more diligent in their redaction, but more aggressive as well, blanking out PRC filing dates, county emblems and other indicators. SFR has filed a complaint with the Attorney General’s office as we believe this is a violation of the Inspection of Public Records Act. In the meantime, here are the latest redacted documents.

New Producer App 1

New Producer App 2

New Producer App 3

New Producer App 4

New Producer App 5

New Producer App 6

Click here for earlier applications.

Ever since SFR released the names and relative locations of one state-licensed medical marijuana producer at nine license applicants, we’ve been taking heat from those who claim we’ve put the growers in danger of prosecution.

Margaret Schulze, spokesowman for Santa Fe Institute For Natural Medicine, the state’s only licensed grower, warned SFR that it would cease production if the story went to print. She claimed that even though US Attorney General Eric Holder stated that his Department of Justice would not prosecute medical marijuana growers legally formed under state law, such a story would irk the Drug Enforcement Agency into investigating anyway.

New Mexico Independent’s Trip Jennings reports today that Holder addressed the issued during his visit to Albuquerque on Friday:

“For those organizations that are doing so sanctioned by state law, and doing it in a way that is consistent with state law, and given the limited resources that we have, that will not be an emphasis for this administration,” Holder said.

Nevertheless, SFR has received several calls and emails (ranging from “shame on you” to “fuck you!”) from  patients and caregivers claiming that SFINM informed them that it will indeed shut down operations.

Under the rules for New Mexico’s Medical Cannabis Program only non-profit organizations can apply to become large-scale growers and distributors. The application process is intense and so far only one organization has completed it and has reportedly gone into production.

Here are pdfs of the applications, heavily redacted by the New Mexico Department of Health in an attempt to protect the organizations’ operations. Some of the pdfs are very large; e-mail davem@sfreporter.com with any problems opening or reading the files.

Santa Fe Institute for Natural Medicine (approved)

NEW Grassroots RX (pending)

NEW Organtica (pending)

NEW Medzen Services Inc (pending)

New Mexico Medical Cannabis (pending)

Veggies Inc (pending)

Unknown (pending)

Unknown (pending)