After the Alabama Medical Cannabis Commission met on October 14, they announced they wouldn’t push for cultivation and distribution licenses to become available sooner than September 1, 2022. This means that it’s unlikely for cannabis to be grown, harvested, processed, distributed, and sold before 2023.
Earlier this year, Alabama became the 37th state to legalize medical cannabis for qualifying patients in May. This came after long meetings and even a filibuster in an attempt to stop the bill from passing. Now, qualifying medical cannabis patients will have to wait longer to apply for their medicine.
There had been talk amongst the commission members to ask lawmakers to push up the license date to before September 1, 2022. However, after discussing what still needs to be done, like training physicians and creating an online database for patients, members decided to leave the approved bill as is.
“At this point in time, we decided not to ask the Legislature to go back into digging up a legislative bill and opening it back up,” Rex Vaughn said. He is the current vice-chair of the Alabama Medical Cannabis Commission. “We could lose what we’ve got.”
Medical Cannabis
Under the medical cannabis bill in Alabama, there are 16 qualifying conditions, including:
- Anxiety
- Cancer-related nausea or vomiting or chronic pain
- Crohn’s Disease
- Epilepsy
- Fibromyalgia
- HIV/AIDS
- Menopause or premenstrual syndrome
- PTSD
- Sickle Cell Anemia
- ALS
- Tourette’s Syndrome
However, unlike other states, medical cannabis can’t be smoked, vaped, or baked into food. The only way patients can take medical cannabis is through tablets, capsules, gummies, lozenges, topical oils, suppositories, and transdermal patches. This is in order to prevent an underground market. Lawmakers adamantly spoke out against smoking and vaping cannabis – they do not want a recreational program in the state.
Future
Once applications are available on September 1, 2022, the Alabama Medical Cannabis Commission will have 60 days to approve the application. Approvals could begin starting October 31, 2022. Then each medical cannabis patient approved by a physician will pay an annual fee of $65 for a patient registration card. If there are any future changes to the medical cannabis program in Alabama, we will update you with the latest.
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