Opening dispensaries to provide registered patients with safe and legal access to marijuana was the No. 1 recommendation of the Medical Cannabis Working Group. Our law permits qualifying patients to use this medical herb without providing a legal supply—thus forcing patients to go to the black market to obtain their medicine.
No one is proposing using Southern California as a model for dispensaries. Rather, Hawai‘i has the opportunity to design a program from scratch using the best models available to serve patients’ needs and potentially provide revenue to the state and counties from tightly regulated sales.
