Medical marijuana is now legal in Connecticut, since Friday, June 1st, when Governmor Dannel Malloy signed the enabling legislation into law, making Connecticut the 17th state to legalize marijuana in some fashion. There’s one big catch about Connecticut’s new law, though: you can’t grow your own. There will be 3 to 10 legal producers of marijuana, and it will be made available to patients at regular pharmacies instead of the “dispensaries” used in some other states.
Another complaint about the law is that there is a short list of ailments for which marijuana may be prescribed, and chronic pain isn’t one of them, nor is depression. The qualifying conditions are cancer, glaucoma, AIDS or HIV, Parkinson’s disease and multiple sclerosis. In short, the new law still represents the opinion of state legislators that they know better than the state’s doctors what medicine those doctors should and shouldn’t prescribe to their patients. Connecticut’s law was drafted with the stated aim of avoiding problems that other states have had. It remains to be seen whether this law will really allow all the patients in need of marijuana to benefit from it. Still, thaving more and more states with some form of legal medical marijuana makes it much less possible for the federal government to be everywhere at once, stamping it all out.
