Growing marijuana is not easy. Anyone who has tried it can tell you that. People that haven’t grown marijuana always throw out lines like ‘it is just a weed, just put it in dirt and it will grow.’ Will it technically grow? Sure. But will it grow well? Only if you give it quality food, quality light, quality air, a lot of love, and protect it from bugs, heat, and disease. And even then nothing is guaranteed. It takes a true green thumb to grow quality marijuana.
So if someone is a medical marijuana patient, and they don’t have the skills or resources to grow marijuana, then it makes sense for them to designate someone else to do it for them. An expert. Unfortunately that is a concept that the Denver City Council doesn’t all the way grasp, as they voted to limit the amount of plants a caretaker can grow for other patients to just 36. The plant limit is an attempt to disrupt unlicensed medical marijuana gardens within city limits. The new rule has resulted in a lawsuit being filed. Per The Cannabist:
A lawsuit filed Wednesday takes aim at a fresh Denver ordinance that could shut down dozens of unlicensed nonresidential marijuana-growing collectives by limiting them to growing 36 plants.
The Denver City Council passed the measure 11-0 Monday night. It was proposed by Mayor Michael Hancock’s marijuana office, which says it’s attempting to address unsafe conditions in the unlicensed growing facilities and an “exponential increase” in the cultivation of untracked marijuana.
Hancock signed the bill into law on Tuesday.
But the new limit — which doesn’t apply to licensed commercial grow houses — has drawn protests, in part because of the potential impact on caregivers who grow a large number of plants.
To me, this isn’t an attempt as much to curb unlicensed grows, as much as it is an attempt to strong arm growers into paying for licenses. Not everyone wants to make a business out of their garden. There are truly people out there that just love to grow marijuana, and are really good at it, and they use their skills to help suffering patients. What’s wrong with that? Why should they be forced to buy a license to keep doing what they have been doing for quite some time? This new rule hurts patients, who will be forced to either go to the black market, or pay high prices at dispensaries and stores, or even worse, go without their medicine altogether.
