The new state medical marijuana licensing board met for the first time Monday.
The meeting was mainly for the board to hear public comment about how the new medical marijuana program should operate. It won’t start issuing licenses until next year.
John Kroneck came to the meeting to represent the Michigan Prevention Association. That group is concerned about potential consequences of expanding the medical marijuana system.
“It’s here and we’re gonna work with it,” he said of medical marijuana industry. “I think we need to be considerate though of how it affects our children, how it affects our local businesses, how it affects our communities, and those things need to be considered as they’re developing the rules.”
Kroneck asked the board to consider banning marketing that appeals to children and to favor selling marijuana products that have fewer psycho-active side effects, among other things.
Members of the board recognized they still have a lot to do between now and when the application process is scheduled to open in December.
“We don’t have a step by step today, come on, I mean we just got started,” said board chairman Rick Johnson. “We’ll work on that, we’ll get to that, but right now we don’t have any step by step. You know we've got a lot of things to look at; we've got a lot of things to do, and that’s what we’re going to do.”
One of the things many people asked the board to do was give some guidance to townships and hopeful retailers about what to do while they wait for a license from the board.
Allison Ireton is an attorney in Ann Arbor. She represents some people who hope to open grow shops.
“If you cut off their supply prior to giving out licenses, they are not going to know where to get RSO, they’re not going to know where to get capsules, they’re not going to be able to get different strains to try and medicate their condition,” she told the board.
Before the meeting, the board’s next scheduled open meeting was in October. Now they will meet at least one more time before then.