Health Commissioner Cited Legal Risk of Expedited Medical Marijuana
The state Legislature this week sent a bill to Gov. Andrew Cuomo that would allow emergency access to medical marijuana for certain patients before the full program is up and running next year.
But while the governor’s office has yet to say whether Cuomo will sign it, recent remarks by the state health commissioner suggest the administration is unlikely to embrace the bill.
Asked about the pending legislation in May, Dr. Howard Zucker said he understood the desire to quickly provide treatment to those who can benefit from it. But Zucker, who was confirmed as state health commissioner last month, also raised concerns about the legal risks that could come with expediting access to marijuana.
“The last thing that we would want to have happen is that this program were slowed down because of some challenge that occurred either legally or in any other fashion,” Zucker said at City & State’s On Health Care conference. “And so what we are doing is moving this forward as quickly as possible to implement it, to make sure as many people who could benefit will, and that there’s nothing that slows it down or stops it for some challenge that comes up.”
Zucker emphasized that the state is on track to launch the program in the beginning of 2016, claiming that New York would “implement this program quicker than any other state in the nation has implemented a medical marijuana program.”
State Sen. Diane Savino, who championed the original Compassionate Care Act legislation that established the broader medical marijuana program, raised similar concerns this week. Savino said she had "no idea" where the governor stood on the issue.
“We should not stop and divert all the attention of the Department of Health to come up with a potential applicant that would derail the entire program,” Savino told City & State on Tuesday. “Even if they could get beyond the regulatory hurdles that they would have to get beyond in order to do this emergency license, it would be no sooner than six months to implement it anyway—which is exactly where we’ll be in six months, when we can have access to all the patients, not just cherry-picking sympathetic patients.”
Despite the risk of a potential legal challenge that could undermine the program, majorities in both houses have passed the bill. Assemblyman Richard Gottfried, who teamed with Savino to legalize medical marijuana last year, shepherded the emergency access bill through the Assembly earlier this year.
The state Senate followed suit this week, citing the need to offer immediate help for children with severe epilepsy or adults with life-threatening diseases.
In a statement, a Cuomo spokesman would only say that the administration’s priority “has always been to deliver relief to those in pain” and that it would “review the legislation in the context of implementing the Compassionate Care Act and complying with existing federal statutes."
State Sen. Joe Griffo, the Republican sponsor in the upper house, posted a statement urging Cuomo to sign it.
“I am pleased that my Senate colleagues have chosen to join the Assembly in doing the right thing," he wrote, "and I wholeheartedly urge the Governor to do whatever is in his power to immediately end this wait for medical marijuana in the most severe cases."