by Dan Sullivan
Parents desperate to relieve their children’s suffering or abate the symptoms of autism and epilepsy have cried for the decriminalization of cannabis for years. Entrepreneurs, small businesses, could have developed innovative remedies and competed for market share. But Virginians have been handed another sellout to Big Pharma. Who benefits?
The Greater Augusta Prevention Partners (GAPP), a local coalition that addresses topics related to area youth invited PharmaCann, the cannabis/hemp pharmaceutical manufacturing and distribution company soon to set up shop in Staunton and across that region of Virginia to educate the community about the business model and products. A representative pitched Cannabis 101 this week.
Let’s cut to the chase, here:
- You are still vulnerable to employer drug testing even with a “certificate”
- It will not be in your health insurance formulary; it’s an out of pocket remedy
“I don’t like to call it getting high. I like to call it the negative side effect of impairment.”
What Virginia has accepted accedes to corporate interests rather than investing in the health and welfare or economic interests of its citizens. For all the free market slobbering heard from state legislators, this is a state facilitated, monopoly drug dealer, well dressed as a compassionate purveyor of pain relief. Seed to consumer, it is both a vertical and horizontal monopoly. There will be third-party products in its dispensaries. Virginia has aided and abetted federal crimes and there can only be one reason: “the Benjamins.”
Big Pharma by any other name is Big Pharma just the same
To a large measure, Big Pharma has been responsible for keeping these products off the market. Now it has cornered it. There is simply no justification for this obtuse method of making these remedies available and rewarding the economic power that frustrated so many families and harmed so many patients for decades.
This is a slick presentation from a company with an allegedly altruistic “passion” for its “safe, effective, tested products.” These will be purveyed through a call center in Illinois that will provide application assistance and “physician and patient outreach.” That it seems constitutes one of the three pillars: customer service. Education for impact is another. “We teach people to fish.” There are really a couple of interpretations, but the one the company would likely prefer is that it assists the consumers selecting the proper remedy of oil and THC; what is labeled “the entourage effect.” Finally: patient advocacy; “remove the outdated perceptions associated with cannabis.”
“… something isolated and synthetic (as opposed to) something from a natural plant.”
The cummerbund on this slick silk suit is security. PharmaCann promises a vault with doors eight to ten inches thick and emergency buttons throughout the facility “that contact police.” That will be what makes us all feel safe that our children will not have access. Combine that with a state limit on possession, the requirement for a written patient certification, and a statewide system for tracking patients and the type and number of medical conditions.
These stipulations and others, we are supposed to believe, will remedy the unregulated free market. Virginia holds these truths to be self-evident:
- No consumer will acquire any cannabis product for resale
- No consumer will share acquired cannabis products
- No consumer will use a certificate to shield possession of a cannabis product acquired through “other means”
- No consumer will transport cannabis products across the Virginia state line
- All consumers will dispose properly of any unused cannabis product
- All physicians will dutifully issue consumers certificates
Q and A did follow and that will be provided in a post tomorrow.
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