Robin Goist, cleveland.com
The site on Corporate Drive where Parma Wellness plans to build a $10 million medical marijuana cultivation facility.
COLUMBUS, Ohio -- Nine months ago, Parma officials celebrated the news that the city would host one of the state's first medical marijuana cultivation facilities.
Parma Wellness LLC planned to build a $10 million indoor marijuana grow facility on vacant land in the city's industrial park and pledged to generate $1 million to $2 million in new payroll, more with expansion. The company received a provisional cultivator license to grow up to 25,000 square feet of marijuana, with the expectation the facility would be up and running within nine months.
But today, the only weed growing here is the garden-variety kind. The vacant lot is marked by a "for sale" sign, although the land was sold in January.
Saturday marks the deadline set in Ohio law for the medical marijuana program to be "fully operational," but not one patient has been registered, nor have any retail dispensary stores opened. Product likely won't be available until early next year.
This failure was predicted more than a year ago. Meanwhile, people who think marijuana could help their epilepsy, chronic pain, colitis and other ills are still waiting.
Senate Minority Leader Kenny Yuko, one of the leading legislators on Ohio's medical marijuana law, said missing the deadline is unacceptable.
"It's like telling a little three-year-old boy -- 'you're not going to get your presents on Christmas,'" Yuko said. "'Instead, Santa's going to start making them on Christmas Day and you're going to get them on June 17.' Is that OK? No, it's not OK."
Cleveland.com talked with more than a dozen state regulators, lawmakers, medical marijuana business owners, physicians and patients to find out how we got here and what happens next.
Ohio takes the first step
Jackie Borchardt, cleveland.com
Ohio lawmakers passed a medical marijuana law in May 2016.
Lawmakers passed House Bill 523 to fight off a looming ballot measure sponsored by national cannabis advocacy heavyweight Marijuana Policy Project. Gov. John Kasich signed the bill in June 2016, and it took effect Sept. 8, 2016.
The law established a loose framework for a highly regulated program -- 21 qualifying conditions, no home grow, no smoking, requirements for doctors, protections for patients. And it tasked three state agencies with deciding the details: the Ohio Department of Commerce, State Board of Pharmacy and State Medical Board.
Ohio was the 26th state to legalize medical marijuana, and lawmakers thought two years was more than enough time to start the program.
Application process causes first delay
Jackie Borchardt, cleveland.com
Clones grow at a PharmaCann cultivation facility in Illinois. PharmaCann was granted a cultivator license in Ohio after a scoring error was discovered.
The agencies started the rulemaking process soon after the law took effect Sept. 8, 2016, and hit the law's 2017 deadlines for drafting rules and regulations.
The time line was tight, and aggressive, but as applications to grow medical marijuana poured in during June, it looked like Ohio was on track to have a functioning market by September 2018.
And then the delays began.
Applicants and industry observers expected the state to spend about three months reviewing applications; it had taken Pennsylvania about that amount of time to get through nearly as many applications.
But in August, commerce officials announced a November target date to award grow licenses to 24 of 185 applicants.
On Nov. 3, 12 small-scale grower licenses were issued. But the 12 large-scale license winners weren't announced until Nov. 30.
Chris Lindsey, legislative counsel at Marijuana Policy Project, said the application process may have been too intensive.
"There's this temptation by government and regulators to set the bar as high as possible, which sounds great, but then you end up with incredibly complicated applications that go on for hundreds and hundreds of pages," Lindsey said.
Domino effect
Ohio Medical Marijuana Control Program
A time line presented to the Ohio Medical Marijuana Advisory Committee in April.
Ohio's program relies on a multi-step supply chain -- cultivators grow marijuana, processors extract compounds from the plant and make edibles and other products, testing labs check every batch for potency and purity, and dispensaries sell marijuana flower and products to patients.
Cultivators had to break ground in the middle of an Ohio winter, and many faced local zoning issues and typical construction problems. Large cultivator Buckeye Relief LLC was the first to break ground, but only because it leveled its Eastlake site in September. Buckeye Relief CEO Andy Rayburn said doing that work in December would have cost about 50 percent more.
Several lawsuits were filed challenging the cultivator license awards. Scoring errors were identified, and it was revealed that a program consultant had a felony marijuana conviction on his record.
Licenses for processors were expected to be awarded in spring 2018. The first licenses -- a mere 13 of an available 40 licenses -- were announced in August.
The pharmacy board received 376 applications to dispense medical marijuana in December -- far more than it expected. The board awarded provisional licenses in June for 56 initial storefronts -- more than two months after initially expected.
Eighteen of the 24 initially licensed cultivators requested extensions for their provisional licenses, including Parma Wellness. The company says it hasn't started building because of a pending lawsuit challenging the decision to award licenses to Parma Wellness and another minority-owned business ahead of higher-scoring applicants to meet the law's minority set-aside requirement.
Kasich was not a fan
Tony Dejak, Associated Press
Kasich was never a fan of Ohio's medical marijuana law, and he's said very little about it publicly. The Department of Commerce is a governor's cabinet agency, and Kasich appoints its director.
In March 2017, Kasich said he didn't see any role for medical marijuana in mitigating Ohio's opioid crisis. A growing body of research has shown cannabis could replace some opiates prescribed for pain or even aid in addiction recovery.
"I don't like the whole thing -- medical marijuana," Kasich said at the time. "It got passed because somebody was going to have a broader law."
By contrast, Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf championed the bipartisan law passed there, just six weeks before Ohio, and announced each new development with fanfare. Pennsylvania's law is similar to Ohio's in the types of conditions allowed and limited number of licenses available.
The law went into effect just one month later, unlike the 90-day period required in the Ohio Constitution. Pennsylvania regulators quickly drafted an emergency set of rules a few months after its law passed.
Today, Pennsylvania has registered more than 65,000 patients and approved nearly 800 doctors to recommend medical marijuana. The state's first dispensaries opened in February. Ohio's patient registry is on hold until a date closer to when dispensaries open, and 222 physicians have been certified to recommend medical marijuana by the state medical board.
Mark Hamlin, a longtime Kasich administration staffer, was appointed to lead the Commerce Department's work on the program in early March. Hamlin said Kasich's office has been very supportive of the program.
"Every message I've gotten is 'we want this program to work, we want it to be successful and we want it to be done right,'" Hamlin said.
Patients run into legal problems
Jackie Borchardt, cleveland.com
The slow start has left patients in legal limbo or forced them out of the state to get care.
Medical marijuana use has been sanctioned under an "affirmative defense" against prosecution in Ohio law for two years, but without a functioning program, patients say they have been treated as criminals instead of protected by the law.
Tyler Donoho is appealing a Geauga County judge's decision to prohibit his medical marijuana use while on probation for first-time misdemeanor offenses. The 26-year-old from Stow was also on probation for the same incident in Portage County. But the judge there recognized a letter from an Ohio doctor recommending Donoho consume medical marijuana and allowed him to test positive for THC on court-mandated drug tests.
Donoho has shown symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, a qualifying condition in Ohio, and said marijuana has balanced his mood in a way that dozens of other drugs he'd tried over the years couldn't and without harmful side effects.
He and his family and friends are struggling to understand why the law isn't protecting him.
"As long as a physician is registered, I shouldn't be going through these problems," Donoho said.
Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine's office has not offered any guidance to prosecutors about the affirmative defense or other pieces of the law. DeWine spokesman Dan Tierney said none have requested an opinion from the state's chief law enforcement official.
The state medical board has provided little guidance to doctors about the affirmative defense except to recommend they consult an attorney.
Frustrated patients leave Ohio
Scarlett Lewis decided to move her daughter Savannah to Colorado after an April incident at Cincinnati Children's Hospital. Staff members threatened to call child protective services over Lewis' desire to give the three-year-old cannabis oil instead of pharmaceutical drugs to treat her rare form of epilepsy.
"Who wants to worry about taking their child to the hospital and then them taking her from you? They weren't looking at cannabis oil as medicine," Lewis said.
Her experience in Colorado has been the opposite. The hospital allows her to administer oil to Savannah. The products she needs are readily available and cheap compared to the drugs the Ohio doctors wanted Savannah to take.
"I wasn't going to sit around and wait for them to approve it," Lewis said. "She would be completely different developmentally now if we hadn't started her oil when we did."
What's next?
Jackie Borchardt, cleveland.com
File photo of a mature marijuana plant at Terrapin Station in Denver, Colorado.
State regulators have not set a new estimated start date. But the first cultivators to pass inspection and begin growing expect initial harvests in October or near the end of the year. Add a few weeks to cure and process the marijuana, and some dispensaries could open in January with a limited supply of products.
Based on the experiences of other states, including Pennsylvania, Ohio can expect initial product shortages and a slow ramp up to meet patient demand. Industry experts estimate as many as 200,000 Ohio patients could sign up because chronic pain is a qualifying condition. But state regulators have estimated a far lower number for the first two years -- 4,600 to 51,000 patients.
Patients and physicians are calling on the pharmacy board to issue official patient ID cards. But the affirmative defense expires 60 days after the registry opens, according to state law. Pharmacy board officials are concerned that without any dispensaries open, there would be several weeks where patients could not legally buy marijuana and would not have legal cover from the affirmative defense.
Dr. Solomon Zaraa, a psychiatrist at Northeast Ohio medical marijuana practice Compassionate Cleveland, said the registry would tell the state and doctors who plans to use medical cannabis in Ohio, in which parts of the state and for what conditions.
"You're dealing with lives, and we're thinking medical cannabis can potentially be an exit drug from opiates. I hope that's true, but I need the data, patients need the data, we all need the data, and they're delaying the data."
The commerce department has scheduled six cultivator inspections for this month and another two in October. Hamlin expects the facilities will begin growing plants as soon as possible and could catch up to companies already growing.
Medical marijuana business owners said they're eager to move past the program's missteps and do what they pledged to do in their applications.
"As much heat as the regulators and legislators have taken, with the way they've structured it, Ohio's going to have a really great, effective market to get top quality medicine to patients," Rayburn said.
Will a new administration make any difference?
Associated Press
Democrat Richard Cordray and Republican Mike DeWine
Kasich is term-limited at the end of this year. Ohio could have a new governor, with a new staff and ideas, before any marijuana is available to patients.
Both DeWine and Democrat Richard Cordray have said they want to fix any problems with Ohio's nascent program.
Hamlin said he's focused now on setting up a program that will serve patients' interests in a few months and for the long term.
"We understand that this is, in their eyes, a potentially life-changing development to have access to this product and if you step back and look at the big picture, it's pretty exciting where we are," Hamlin said.
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