Industry sign banking missouri memorandum of understanding myself
[Music] thank you everyone for inviting me I really enjoyed doing this so really appreciate being here this morning with you Joseph Hollander and craft that's the legal side of what I do you might see that sometime branded as jhc cannabis it's the same thing we're just a cannabis legal services division of Joseph Hollin craft which is law firm mostly in Kansas but now venturing into Missouri so for all of your cannabis legal needs please email me the other thing that I do I have two jobs the other thing that I do or I'm starting to do is I'm the by default because no one else is in the grip one to do it CEO of vertical Enterprise vertical Enterprise is a cultivation manufacturing and dispensary company up in Saint Joe that has licenses for medical marijuana and all three of those business units and is planning right now in designing a about 55,000 square foot facility up there to grow and process marijuana medical marijuana for the market should be operational we think by late fourth quarter of this year what I really like to do I have about 20 slides and I'll go through them it's really a general overview because it's really all I can do with a with a presentation general overview of the medical marijuana framework in Missouri to give you guys an idea of how it works or how it's supposed to work and what point we're in right now in the process we're fairly advanced but as you probably noticed there aren't any dispensaries around you can't go to a dispensary even if you had your medical card right now to get medical marijuana so we're about halfway through and it's real interesting time I don't really like to I like doing this I really love doing this but I don't like to just stand up here and talk and I have a hunch that at least some of you have an opinion about some of this stuff or questions or have something you're interested in that I'm not touching on please ask me because I just think it's much better to interact with you let me move that rather than just kind of get up here and talk so I think the raising hand method is tried-and-true if you guys just stick your hand up in if I don't see you yell at me and all answer questions and take comments and let's let's kind of do it that way okay so the goals I have for this presentation answer some major questions why should you care how can one get medical marijuana not that you would be interested in that but maybe you know someone who might be and this friend of yours is very interested in understanding that by the way I do have my medical card so it is legal for me I don't have any marijuana on me but it would be legal for me in the state of Missouri to carry up to eight ounces of marijuana which is a pretty large gallon ziplock bag about half full when is adult use coming why in the hell the DHS s do it this way as the Department of Health and then the probably the one that you guys are fairly interested in what about work and how does this interact with someone's employment and that inevitable HR scenario where someone is in the HR office and they have tested positive or admitted to medical marijuana use and they show you their card and say but this and it's for my medical condition some basics before we start so we all are kind of on the same page the difference between marijuana and hims a very important legal difference if you saw a hip plant and I was just last week I was at a convention in st. Louis a medical marijuana convention there were hemp plants sitting out just in the open they look like marijuana plants they smell like marijuana plants I cannot tell the difference between a hemp plant and a marijuana plant if a police officer and this has happened many times opens up the back of a cargo van full of hemp plants he's gonna he or she is gonna freak out why because it's gonna look and smell like a lot of marijuana but legally there is a big difference and chemically there is a big difference and the federal government really drives this in the state of Missouri just follows along but the federal government defines him as a cannabis plant essentially a cannabis plant that has less than 0.3% of THC tetrahydrocannabinol which is the one of the cannabinoids that is a psychoactive more psychoactive chemical in humans than then CBD for example which would be more of a pain reliever or makes you a little bit more relaxed sleepy that kind of thing doesn't give you a high based on dry weight so there's the difference you may have heard of farmers growing hemp in in Kansas or in Missouri and having a problem with their crops going hot what that means is that they've got too much THC in them and they have to destroy the crop so the process is if you're trying to grow hemp for whatever CBD or rope plastics or whatever fiber food product whatever you want to grow it for you've got to keep it below 0.3 percent THC if you don't it becomes a Schedule one drug and you have to destroy it unless you're in a state like Colorado that allows you to convert that crop into a THC product a Schedule one drug by the way means under the federal under federal law according to federal government marijuana has no currently accepted medical use in the country and is highly addictive in highly dangerous for reference most opioids and cocaine are scheduled to alright so why do I care I don't want medical marijuana do you do which you want to do I'll do what I want to do what difference does it make to me well I think this chart goes a long way to explaining that the top chart the blue is Oklahoma Oklahoma about a year ago a little bit more than a year ago opened up its state to medical marijuana in a big way and Oklahoma did it a little bit differently than you've seen in other states including Missouri Oklahoma just said go for it it's legal do it and everybody got in the market it was a very you know everyone for themselves we're not going to put caps on licenses anybody can have a license if you can compete great if you can't you'll fall out of the market we're not going to test anything at the state level kind of a free-for-all and it's actual we worked okay for them but what it did result in is kind of a gauge that we can use they're ahead of us again they've done it differently but they're ahead of Missouri a gauge we can sort of use for patient count so that nineteen represents a hundred and ninety thousand patients at the time this was done which is twelve months out they're more at about two hundred and forty thousand patients right now in that state it is a similar process in Missouri to get certified qualified conditions are similar I would say legally the ease of how you can do it is pretty similar so the barriers to entry for a patient in Oklahoma are similar to Missouri if you take the percentage of population in Oklahoma that has adopted medical marijuana and gone to get their medical card and you transfer that and you make some adjustments that we think are appropriate you can kind of predict where we're going to be at a certain time and so we're about right here forty thousand patients and I I am pretty confident that in six to nine months might take a little bit longer because it's taking a little bit longer for the dispensaries to stand up and for the cultivation centers to stand up but we'll we will be very quickly within six nine months at one hundred and forty thousand patients so that's a real good reason to care because you're going to be interacting with people who have medical carts just a little this is a chart timeline from the Department of Health on where we've been and what we've done up to date so the November 2018 is when amendment two passed it was a constitutional amendment so your right to medical marijuana is in the Missouri State Constitution now and cannot be legislatively taken away December that became effective started taking application pre application fees in 2019 state immediately raised three million dollars just by taking application fees for people who wanted to have the chance to file an application for a marijuana facility made their rules actually they beat that they had emergency rules ready at before June began accepting right at the end of June actually they beat this date to right at the end of June began accepting patient applications and then soon after began issuing patient cards and then in August was the facility licensing the facility licensing process began that ended here in January all facility licenses have been awarded now there are about 350 among the different types we'll talk about that here in a second yeah yeah there are 60 cultivation 60 cultivators in the state kind of so a cultivation license gives you the ability to grow up to 30,000 square feet of flowering canopy the way marijuana is grown and the way THC is developed is the marijuana plant is cloned so you take a cutting you route the cutting and then you very soon once that's rooted you do what's called vegging it out so you take it you put it under a very high-powered lamp you put as much energy in it as you can to get it to grow as big as you can as fast as you can that's called vegging the plant out and then you take it into a room where it goes from maybe eighteen to twenty-four hours of light to 11 to 12 hours of light you cool it down a little bit change the humidity a little bit that's called a flowering room why because you're making the plant think that it's fall and when it's fall that plant is going to get a little stressed out it's gonna think it needs to reproduce and it's going to start flowering and that's what creates all the cannabinoids that you then can harvest and process yourself eighty-six manufacturers manufacturers do two things primarily they extract oil and isolates and distillates from the plant so you can this has been done for thousands of years a little more advanced now but you've heard of hashish or hash oil same kind of thing same kind of idea you're using different solvents or processes to get the liquid part out of the plant take the solid part get rid of that because you really don't want it anyway doesn't do any good and then that's just a more concentrated product with more of what people are looking for which is cannabinoids you can then take that what's called a a concentrate and you can you can sell that you can use that or you can go further and you can do what's called an isolate or distillate which is just isolating those cannabinoids more and more you guys have heard about CBD it's done all the time with CBD that they can isolate CBD until you have a 95 plus percent just CBD substance and you can then do whatever you want that's kind of the next part of manufacturing you then take those substances you can't take those substances and apply them to gummies other food products chocolate brownies cookies chocolate bars beverages or you can put them in pretty much anything tinctures lotions there's anybody have a guess on and we'll go over this a little bit later but guess on what you cannot sell from a medical marijuana perspective the the products that a dispensary is not allowed to sell in Missouri the state the Department of Health doesn't say you can't do that but the alcohol beverage control probably you know says you can't do that they don't they have a problem with that but the answer is pretty much anything that's actually I never had that one before that's pretty good that's pretty right yeah well in some states Ohio for example you can't sell flour for the purposes of smoking because the state of Ohio thinks that's a bad thing they don't want people smoking marijuana they think it will cause health issues that's a big problem for dispensaries and facilities in Ohio because people really like to smoke marijuana it's a preferred way of imbibing consuming marijuana 40 percent of sales nationally are raw flower or cured and dried flower why people like that there's kind of different theories the the main one is that trying to take the active ingredient out of a plant that has developed over thousands of years to serve humankind and be as beneficial to humans as possible because that's how the plant survives because it wants to be cultivated because that's how it kind of keeps going is dumb because the plant itself knows what it can do for humans and how it can be most beneficial and it's called the entourage effect those flavonoids and terpenes and cannabinoids and chemicals in the plant all coming together are better for you either give you a better high or give you more pain relief or whatever you're looking for then trying to isolate and rip out certain ones and concentrate them and then put it into a medicine that's so so you can you can make the argument that someone goes in and they want to they're looking for a certain type of feeling or high from from a certain strain you can't really recreate that by taking out what we think is the active ingredient THC and putting that in a certain concentrate and putting that in a lotion or something or a gummy or something else just recently there was an article a couple weeks ago about THC P which is a new cannabinoid that we've discovered that is supposed to be 30 times more effective than THC just to show and the point being that we don't really understand how marijuana works completely we probably don't understand most of what we need to understand whether you like it whether you hate it the plant probably does a better job of giving people what they want then then we can alright enough about that dispensary is 192 those are located across the state there are 24 per congressional district eight congressional districts I think there's a map you can find online that's pretty good that'll show you where all the dispensary licenses are currently I think the Kansas City area has about forty maybe a little bit more okay any questions so far no question yeah I do so on my legal and my my foot in the legal services world most of what I'm doing right now is handling those a for people who applied for licenses and didn't get them it's tricky it's sensitive I had a settlement conference with the Department of Health in Jeff City yesterday on one of these cases they're not happy they have as of yesterday 845 appeals to the administrative hearing commission that is more than triple what the administrative hearing Commission would get for an entire year for Appeals so the ahc we call them they're not happy they're overworked they're grumpy nobody knows what to do it's a real mess what the only other thing I think I can say in this setting just because it you start to get in the weeds real quick but I filed a bunch of these and I am one of the department's biggest critics I've I have pointed out every time I think they made a mistake in rolling this program out I've pointed that out I've written him a letter I've written articles on it and the mistakes I think they made and Lynn Fraker who's the director of the marijuana divisions probably not super happy with me and the criticism I've given him but I will say this and I think it's important to say this in public because Lynn Fraker has been grilled over the last three weeks at the legislature on the rollout of this program and he's been called a bunch of names and he has been told he's incompetent and they have completely screwed this up and that's just not true the rollout of the medical program in Missouri has been the smoothest rollout of any medical program medical marijuana program in the country it is seen in the industry as a shining beacon of hope on how to do this the other states have been so disastrous Missouri did it the best way you could possibly do it as far as we know right now so however you feel about medical marijuana Missouri can be proud about the out of its program it really was done well it was done right and if you're not gonna do it like Oklahoma did it which is just everybody do whatever you want to do we're not gonna look which I think is it probably a bad way to do it then Missouri really is the only other way to do it that's in any way effective and organized so that's coming from a big critic of the department so the Constitution now gives minimums for the state on how many licenses they have to issue they had to issue 60 cultivation they had to issue 86 manufacturing and they had to issue 192 those are the minimums for each lic
nse type the department is allowed to issue as many as they want as they feel are necessary to serve the public and to give ultimate and best access to the public for medical marijuana the whole program is designed around access to medical marijuana easy access really so if the department thought that 120 cultivators would be better they could have done that they decided to go with the minimums because they thought that that was the best thing to do that was the best way to serve the public and allow the greatest access to medical marijuana there's a lot that goes into this you would think well if you want access why don't just give everybody a license then you just have a flood of medical marijuana well then we have some black-market problems we've seen in other states that that marijuana goes somewhere it doesn't just get trashed it gets sold to somebody and it's usually on the black market so that becomes a real problem nobody wants that you also have to it's it's a little anti-capitalistic I guess but in standing up in industry you really have to try and make sure that these guys can succeed and so 60 cultivators that are each growing thirty thousand square feet of flowering canopy that is a lot of medical marijuana and if you if you bumped that up to 120 or 240 you're gonna have a lot of failures and that's really probably not good for anybody on standing at the industry so they're trying to strike a balance here I think they did a pretty good job I passed over this and I shouldn't have there's actually only about 25 cultivators not 60 because you could have multiple licenses so there are some cultivators out there that have nine teeth out are entitled to grow ninety thousand square feet of flowering canopy that is a huge massive indoor grow or a greenhouse grove there's really two ways to do it in Missouri that in my opinion is pretty big too big a little problematic there are all these rumors going around of these guys who won three licenses for cultivation and now they don't quite know what to do because they were incentivized to go out in Central Missouri maybe in a very low population very rural area because the state thought that would be good for the economy they won their licenses and now they have the right to build a huge cultivation facility in the middle of nowhere but for example about 1% of the power in this country is used to grow indoor marijuana it's very it's it's a it's a energy ravenous process and I don't know if any of you ever had the opportunity to see a grow facility but regardless of how you feel about it you should go if you get the opportunity because they are fascinating it is normally large warehouses that are full of marijuana that had these 30-foot tall ceilings because modern warehouse design you want to maximize that ability to to stack up inventory they have these really hot lights called HP s high pressure sodium lights hanging from the ceiling they have to kind of hang in the middle of space because they're so hot high pressure sodium lights are like street lights they're super hot very bright that's why we use them hang in the middle of space they don't burn the plants so they're heating up this room and in the summer the room gets way way too hot for the plants that plants start to die they don't thrive so what do you have to do you have to have these giant double-decker city bus sized air conditioning units three of them in there blowing and going the whole time to counteract those lights well these plants need a certain humidity level and what are those air conditioners doing they're pulling water out of the air constantly so then you got to put humidifiers in there and all of these take electricity right and they're all fighting each other so to put 90,000 square feet of flowering canopy in the middle of nowhere you've got to have a ton of power and there's all these stories about guys dragging one megawatt diesel generators out in the middle of nowhere so they could run this thing because there's no power grid out there okay that's this is just my little trying to be clever up here but there is a possession issue here right now that police law enforcement are struggling with it's not that difficult legally but it's difficult for people to get their heads around so right now if you have a medical marijuana card from Missouri if you have a medical marijuana card from another state or if you just have a patient qualifying condition physicians certification which is just a piece of paper from your physician saying yes this person would qualify for a card if they wanted one in Missouri you just have that piece of paper you can possess eight ounces of marijuana that is very hard for law enforcement to understand because the stop someone with that's a that's a very good amount of marijuana they'll stop someone who has that and let's say it's in PIN form it's a it's a cartridge we call it a cart clearly they got that on the black market right there are no dispensaries in Missouri you can't buy that product here so that product was obtained illegally and the instinct of the law enforcement officer is to arrest the person for breaking the law based on decades of training that's what you do right well under the Constitution they cannot do that you have a constitutional right in Missouri to possess black-market marijuana and that's not going to change it won't change when the dispensaries come up so even when the dispensaries come up you still have a constitutional right to possess up to eight ounces or the concentrate equivalent of black-market marijuana under the law doesn't mean you can bring it to work but you have the right to possess it in that you cannot be charged or arrested for that so what's happened in in the last six months well the black market has done very very well in Kansas City why because people aren't scared anymore okay how would one get it no one in here wants to know that but you're gonna be forced to learn this had to be a Missouri resident you do not need a prescription as I mentioned before all you need is for a doctor to sign a physician certification saying you have a qualifying condition what's a qualifying condition we'll go over that a little bit more in detail a little bit later but it's pretty much any medical condition doesn't really need to be more specific than that you have to get your once you get that certification you have 30 days to get your medical card if you want to pay an extra 75 bucks you can have a home grow where you can have up to six clones six vegetative plants and six flowering plants at a time which is a pretty good garden and will produce a good amount of marijuana you can you can purchase when you can purchase what you can't yet when you when you can't you can purchase it before ounces a month or its equivalent there's an equivalency formula but I think it's something like 900 gummies a month or something like that the equivalency really doesn't work well I think they mixed up the math it's a lot of marijuana you can have if you need more you can have two physicians sign off that you can get more and you get a special card and you can buy more and then the six flowering plants and then in every year you have to do it again oh that $25 fee will go up next year so there there's kind of just a very very medical official you know certification so that's what it looks like the top part anyway it's got a back on it but you know all medical all good right see there's a picture of a doctor medical yes sorry so I haven't heard that if you do get your medical card you have to give up your right to bear arms so that's a great question that is technically not true okay so if you have your medical card so I let's go use me for an example okay I can say this on tape I I have my medical card and I also have I have a pistol at home and gun safe that's perfectly legal there's nothing wrong with that you're safe you're okay you're in that situation now if I go to a gun store and I want to buy another pistol I'm gonna have to fill out my background check right and on that ATF form it asks me if I use marijuana and if I lie on that form it's a it's a federal offense it's a felony okay so I cannot go buy another gun under federal law we're working on ways to figure that out and quite frankly I'm guessing that people right now are just lying on that form but that's the problem is you you really are in a catch-22 if you have a medical card you cannot legally through a gun store fill out that form and buy another weapon you you're just kind of stuck with what you've got that answer your question now you don't have to surrender it and if you went to the police and said I'm here to surrender my weapon because I'm a medical patient they would say you're in the wrong place okay when will Missouri have adult use Wow some would argue and have argued that we've got a pretty robust medical program that is so robust and so focused on patient access that essentially it's an adult use program that the medical veneer is so thin that and the patient population will be so high that in essence we need to admit that people are using this for recreational purposes not for medical purposes on whole I'm not sure we're there yet but I reckon eyes the argument it's a valid argument and here's what it's based on two things qualifying condition there's a list of conditions in the Constitution but they use an old lawyers trick and at the end they give a catch-all which is what could be any of these things or any other medical condition well living is a medical condition you know walking around is a medical condition in my book so it's it's a little tough there to defend there are some limitations if you have anxiety or a mental condition some of those you're going to have your certification form filled out by a psychiatrist or an MD that has some some training beyond just a family practitioner some training in mental illness but other than that it's pretty it's to be honest it's pretty easy to get your medical card I went in to a doctor I was honest I said I had back pains chronic he said no problem he didn't look at any medical records he just certified me and they can do that the Constitution gives them the ability to do that and frankly the Constitution gives me the right to get that certification the second leg of that stool and that argument that we already have adult use or recreational use is that as I mentioned before dispensaries aren't limited in what they can sell so in some states you can't sell certain products in Europe for example you actually do get a prescription on medical marijuana and you get a prescription for a certain strain of marijuana so you can't go in and buy anything you want you have to go in and buy the thing that you are prescribed just like you know if you're prescribed I don't know oxy cotton you can't go in and get morphine like you got to go in and get the thing that you're prescribed is you don't get a choice it makes a lot of sense well here in Missouri the way the law works the way the Constitution works you could buy anything and the dispensaries can sell anything so there's the definition of medical marijuana products in the Constitution capsules teas oils infused products vape products smoking products joint mints bombs transdermal patches suppository you have a constitution right suppositories and infuse food and anything else recommended by your physician I don't know what else there is like humans have spent a lot of years figuring out how to imbibe marijuana we pretty much covered it there okay so there's criticism yes No so what I tell people is it's the potency different in medical than recreational thank you and for posterity no and what I tell people is there's really no such thing as medical marijuana as a product particularly in Missouri the medical marijuana really is a framework for a way to administrate a program it's a process you go through you get your medical card you have to go to a doctor you have to go through these steps but there's no such thing as you don't go to the medical department in a dispensary like no one asked for yeah I want some I'll give me you know two ounces in your medical marijuana it doesn't exist you you're buying the same thing that someone would buy in Colorado which is a recreational fully recreational market it's just there's a little bit more of an overlay or maybe you could call it hoops to jump through in order to get into the store but once you're there you are and the difference is really taxes and how much you can buy but it's not in the product okay so there is criticism of DHS s as we've talked about so why did DHS s do it the way they did it why did they roll it out the way they they rolled it out I think they did a good job a lot of people disagree with me the the fact is they didn't really have much of a choice the constitutional amendment is 13 pages long it's not you know like we're used to the First Amendment of the Second Amendment it's a paragraph maybe two people think of a constitutional amendment as a very short thing recitation of kind of general rights this is the 13 page single spaced typed amendment that goes through in detail how this program should work so by the time this got to the Department of Health it was really dictated to them on what they could do the only thing they can really do is pass emergency regulations and I won't go into it because it's boring we don't need to talk about it but emergency regulations can only go so far I mean they're for emergencies you don't go through the typical regulatory process where you have common it takes two years to get these things passed these are emergency well so you can only do that for certain situations they really couldn't go outside the bounds of their their constitutional mandate they they kind of did what they had to do they didn't have a lot of discretion and the mandate was from 67% of the populace people in Missouri really like marijuana there's a I should have mentioned this in our last slide there's a ballot initiative it's called 2020 128 it's gathering signatures right now it almost certainly will be on the ballot in November of the presidential election for recreational marijuana its polling at about 80% in Missouri right now and at that point when it passes and I'm pretty sure it will we will have official adult use in the state of Missouri as of December of this year that's prediction okay so there are founding fathers of marijuana you don't think they used marijuana I think they might have okay and and all of this kind of comes to a head when you start talking about what's recreational what's adult use what's medical what's a medical marijuana product what's of medical marijuana framework what you end up coming to is what what do you mean when you say medical use as opposed to recreational use is there a bright line there and the way that we've tried to deal with this in the industry side not the legal side is to ask people what what do you use this for do you use marijuana and if so do you use it for medical purposes or do use it for recreational purposes and what we found out is people say both so you'll see these surveys where 50 percent of people will say they use it for medical purposes and 75 percent of people will say they use it for recreational purposes which is more than a hundred percent it overlaps so people use it for both and it is if you think about it for a little bit it is sort of hard especially with with mental challenges some people have or emotional challenges it's sort of hard to distinguish and I can give you an example if you have a stage five cancer patient who needs to just escape for a little bit I could make a case for a 95 plus percent THC concentrate for that person even though that doesn't seem like a medical product I could argue that it is now is there some recreation there too sure but it it's not always as easy as it might initially seem to distinguish the two and certainly people don't make those distinguish those distinctions that they don't really categorize it that way there is a section that I want to bring to your attention in the in amendment to the constitutional amendment for medical marijuana that talks it's the very beginning it's the intro and it talks a lot about that the this is goin
to be for medical purposes only for people with serious illnesses that and the treatment is going to be under the supervision of us of a physician and you can't use it for non-medical purposes this is very strong language in my opinion and it really there's no follow-through that's the point I want to make to you guys is this is not how amendment 2 works they put this preamble in I guess for as a head-fake or something but there is no physician supervision for treatment physicians don't recommend a treatment plan this is very confusing yeah medical purposes okay but serious illness is nowhere to be found that's not its medical condition it's not serious illness which is different so just be aware if someone comes to you and says we'll look this is pretty strong language in amendment 2 and they're not doing it right that's where this is there's two paragraphs and then this ends and then the rest of the whole 13 pages is completely different and it's really again focused on access for patients easy access okay I already talked about that so what about use at work and people really love to come up with and we can do this here too they love to come up with these scenarios about what we don't know or understand about what if this guy you know wrecks his forklift and then he's on multiple medications and one of them's THC and we've got this policy and oh no where we gonna do and I'm in this meeting and it's just terrible and yeah I mean all of that could happen but all I can do as an attorney is tell you what we do know there's lots we don't know but here's what we do now this this stuff is in the Constitution so we know this you do not have a constitutional right to be under the influence of marijuana when that would constitute negligence or professional malpractice you do not have the right to be under the influence of marijuana and operate a vehicle including a boat or a plane you cannot bring a claim against an employer or prospective employer for disciplining you up and up to and including termination for working while you're under the influence of marijuana that's in the Constitution there's no right to health insurance for medical marijuana and you have no right to consume it in a public place so the key here is that you have no right to go to work under the influence of marijuana so what does that mean we don't know there is no test you can test people and you can towel for most drugs whether they're under the influence to a to the extent to a standard that most professionals would agree they should not be operating heavy equipment which is usually the the problem that we're talking about there is no test for marijuana and the problem is it just it affects the body differently than alcohol then then opioids than other drugs it just works different so you can consume marijuana and you can have a fairly high test result a week later but not be high not be affected by the drug particularly if you use it quite a bit and there just hasn't we'll get there but there just isn't a test right now where someone can say using an objective biological standard you've got too much marijuana you've got too much THC in your blood you you can't be that we don't have that yet and I know that's very unsatisfying to you guys but that is the truth okay that's all I've got and that was actually good ten minutes 11 minutes left so perfect time for questions so how would we legally terminate somebody if the only way it seems like you could do it as if they were to admit that they shouldn't have been under the influence while operating machinery all right so here's the portion of my talk where I say I can't I give legal advice don't blame me if what I say is wrong but here's my take on it you guys are allowed to have your drug policies okay and if your drug policy says that if someone's over a certain level and they can't work for you it's a non-discriminatory policy it applies to everyone and if it's look weird zero-tolerance you can't have any marijuana we don't care if it's medical I don't care if your medical card you can't work here that's just our policy that's fine there's nothing illegal about that now so you're like oh that's a great answer let's take that to the bank right well here's a problem that I foresee someone comes in to you they haven't had an accident they haven't had a test but they come into your office and they plop down their medical card and they say I have a medical condition I need medical marijuana to treat that condition and I need accommodation they use the secret word what do you do then I need accommodation and I need an exception from your drug policy that's a tough one I think the answer is easy for you guys you pick up the phone and you call your lawyer but what the lawyer does I don't know because we don't have an answer legally in this state or in most states on how that plays out do you have to accommodate someone's you could call it a disability you call medical condition do you have to accommodate that one are you required to accommodate that or is it just the right thing to do to accommodate that if the accommodation requires you to allow them to be at work with a certain level of THC in their blood now that's gonna be as you guys can probably figure out that's fact case specific if they're operating a truck and it's a federally d-o-t regulated thing no you know the federal government's not going to be okay with that but I could see scenarios where you have an office worker or something and it's not going to be dangerous to anyone where they could have a pretty good argument on that so that is a lot less wishy-washy than usual for me as a lawyer so you guys should be happy how does this affect the like home health hospice world and having you know nurses come into their homes and you know making sure that they do have their medical card and they're not just recreationally using when we're there well I I would be hesitant as a home health aide or nurse or what have health care worker to take on too much of a role that I don't need to take on so let's say you're in there for someone who has a non let's say it's a non lung related disease you see indications that the person is smoking marijuana it's not affecting your job you're not the caseworker you're just there to do such and such and so and so I might ignore that because I don't want to take on the responsibility of law enforcement or something else yes I see something that's potentially illegal going on I know the person doesn't have a medical card but do I really care do I want to take on that responsibility so the only other thing I can tell you is you're way too anxious to follow up so I'm scared but the only thing I tell you is if they do have a medical card they have the right in their home to consume under the Constitution so that makes it kind of easy I think for you guys that they have a constitutional right there's nothing anybody can do about it right or wrong and if they do even if they do have some kind of health problem that you're thinking this is not a good idea you know you can tell them that but there's legally there's nothing you can do about it and so if we're in the home to do medication management that piece there would have they would have to have their medical card they would have to do those things and as a mandated reporter we don't report that to anyone is what you're saying no I that sounds terrible I would never say that if you have a legal obligation if you feel you have a legal obligation to report it then you should report it I'm just cautioning people on taking on obligations that they don't feel like they have but they're trying to do you know no good deed goes unpunished that is a immutable law of the universe now I'm not saying don't do good stuff but you're gonna pay for it right so you may just think twice about that but she bring up a great area for lawyers I mean look the great thing about Medical Marijuana there's gonna be so much work for lawyers we're gonna make so much money guys and we like money a lot but long-term care facilities what do you do there that's a that's a sticky wicket you know it just keeps going in the healthcare industry hospitals hospital rooms I mean at some point it becomes easy like a hospital can say no you can't do that here we're not gonna let you do that here but recently six months ago there was a hospital that got in trouble with the public and the media because they reported cannabis use right in this region to the to law enforcement law enforcement came and arrested the guy and he was terminally ill and hey his argument which i think is a pretty good one is you know screw you guys I'm doing this I don't care so attitudes have changed i i've been litigating for twenty years for the first ten years of my career I was a criminal defense attorney I walk into cultivation centers now and the first thing I think is ten years ago you guys would be going to prison for the rest of your lives federal prison and nobody would have batted an eye and they would have called you a bad dude on the way that is not the public's perception anymore the public perception now in Missouri and in other states is this is my right and and you government state or federal have for too long oppressed me and taken this away from me and that's wrong and if you dare if you dare try and interfere with my ability to consume this plant I will yell and scream because I the public feels now that they have the right to do this it's a it's a complete 180 it's kind of funny you know years ago I got a lot of guff for representing drug dealers now I get accolades like ah you were a social justice guy no I was a criminal defense attorney it's so funny the way the world has changed on this topic I'm I'm glad you brought up the rights aspect of it because it kind of tails into my question which is so given that it's a right in Missouri to use medical marijuana and assuming it's going to be a right to consume it recreationally soon does that also imply that there's a certain degree of personal responsibility or that there should be some allowance for that in the workplace and here's what I mean by that as a company that regularly drives d-o-t trucks and operates heavy machinery and equipment we have fall hazards for instance workers compensation the employer is to the greatest degree possible liable for almost everything that happens while an employee's employed while as an employee is performing activities on behalf of our company and so given that it's a right and there's a lot of personal responsibility should there be some kind of personal liability if that individual chooses to use marijuana and has an accident at the job site where the employer is no longer liable but instead it's the individual should be liable for instance we have certain certifications professional certifications in various industries right for a gate operator the installer of that for whatever reason separate from the company can be held personally responsible if somebody's injured because of an incorrect installation and so I'm just wondering is there anything presently in the law or any plans to institute something like that or how can we as employers advocate for something like that to where we don't have to be responsible for individuals personal choices okay so there are you gave me a choice of questions to answer there so I'm gonna pick the one I want to answer which is what's the state of the law right now all right and it's a great question because you're right the liability that employers have four employees hurting themselves for hurting co employees for things going very wrong very quick you guys are responsible for all of that legally right under workers compensation law for the most part so there is a law there is a there is a rule on this there's a statute on this that says that if you are under the influence of a non-prescription drug that's a term non prescription drug at work and that is the cause of the accident then your employer is not responsible for that okay so sure I'm not gonna quote the statute is not in front of me so just with that disclaimer I think I'm doing pretty good I'm not a workers compensation attorney but there is a statute I don't know what it is on the number but it says that if you're under the influence of a non prescription drug and you cause an accident it is presumed that the result that that accident was a result of you being under the influence that on prescription drug and therefore the liability on your employer is lessened or eliminated because of that scenario all right so you've got Frank Frank is prescribed opioids he's been very clear with his employer on you know what's going on and you guys have worked it out and Frank accidentally takes too much one morning and Frank causes an accident on a forklift and someone dies employer is responsible for that all right switch out opioid for medical marijuana who know it's is it a non-prescription drug yes it is you're not prescribed marijuana right you get a certification that you have a condition and then you willingly voluntarily go out and buy it there's no doctor that prescribes it to you there's no treatment plan that you're under so technically yes it's a non prescription drug is it illegal which is that I think that the point the spirit of the law was really supposed to be illegal drugs not non prescription drugs what's really trying to say is illegal yeah it's illegal right it's a Schedule one federally illegal drug so under that scenario under that analysis Frank is liable employer is not but it's legal in Missouri it's actually he has a constitutional right to do it so we haven't had that case yet that case will happen that case will wind through the courts I'm sure it will go to the Supreme Court of Missouri and in their wisdom they will probably tell me I'm completely wrong and my analysis is off but I'll be interested to hear what they say because I don't know in a fairness analysis in a policy analysis in a strict construction of the statute analysis it could go either way you know I mean the whole point of workers compensation is the the way it's supposed to work is the employer supposed to get a break on these big judgments these big verdicts and have kind of a controlled instead a controlled scheduled liability that they can predict and in exchange they take the they take the fault piece of it out of the equation that's sort of the exchange that's supposed to happen that really breaks down in in Medical Marijuana scenarios right here in a bad spot you know all I can say is stick to your drug policy that you have right not legal advice stick to the policy you have and enforce that policy as you normally would unless you get some kind of call for accommodation and that does that solve your workers compensation problem no you're still gonna have to fight about that but we fight about workers compensation stuff all the time you know were they on their way to work were they driving home were they in the scope of you know so it's just one more thing to fight about with all the states so many states go into the medical marijuana and just open do you anticipate federal government ever making that change and if so when sure I do not is a short answer that's actually good for the medical marijuana market in Missouri it needs some time some incubation time and if we got hit by interstate trade now they can grow a lot of marijuana in California outdoors for very cheap and it's pretty good we can't do that here so we really need some protectionism but there's a there a couple of bills out there right now there's the safe Banking Act which was passed by the house this year it's sitting at the Senate it will not pass the Senate because the Senate is not doing anything right now they're they're just sitting on everything including the safe Banking Act the safe Banking Act would allow medical marijuana or all really recreational marijuana facilities in states where it's legal to access banking right now medical facilities or medical marijuana facilities in Missouri and really marijuana facilities all over the country have a very hard time access banks because they're federally regulated and it's a it's an I mean look my company vertical enterprise is a federally illicit drug traffick
ng operation according to the DEA that's what we are so banks don't like us so that would solve that problem but even that bank even it's called the safe banking act for God's sake you know it's like doesn't have marijuana in the name it can't get through there's another one called the more Act there's estates Rights Act they're trying to deal with this on a federal level and D schedule I don't see it happening I talked to the the NCI a National cannabis Industry Association they have a lobbyist who spends all his time in DC lobbying for this stuff I talked to him about a month ago I asked him the same question he said happen there's an election coming up I think maybe even the Democrat side has come out against tea scheduling the leading candidate right now so there's a disagreement even on the week is called a liberal side of the progressive side on what to do at the federal level uh quite frankly it's pretty good from Missouri for the industry in Missouri I think you'll get I certainly know that vertical and my buddies in the industry don't want federal legalization we're just very happy with the system we have so if you anticipate recreational being passed yes how does that affect the medical ok great question that is also a very long Amendment so I can't really summarize it accurately but I'll do my best the the idea is that it opens up the market to people who don't have a medical card so anyone who's over the age of 21 can walk into a dispensary and buy marijuana which we've already discussed is not really medical or non-medical just is what it is so these dispensaries will turn from medical into recreational dispensaries overnight there will be no new licenses issued so we stick with the 350 licenses we've got so supply will not increase but demand will so people like me and vertical really like this thing it's very good for us economically and then they're going to add these what they call micro business licenses and there'll be 48 micro business licenses and this is for disabled veterans or economically disadvantaged people can open up a business where they can have up to 150 plants they can process those plants and the idea is they can then take that inventory that they create themselves and they can sell it in their own small dispensary that may not work there is no social justice program yet in medical marijuana or marijuana generally that has worked they've all failed terribly miserably so this one probably will too but that's a little add-on that is in this new twenty twenty one twenty eight ballot initiative other than that the taxes are different so if you go into a dispensary and you buy of a medical card and you buy medical marijuana you're paying a five percent excise tax if you go in and you by recreational you're paying a fifteen percent excise tax people from out of state can come by it it'll be good for the economy everything else is the same security regulations of the cain't are the same so it's gonna be cameras everywhere and access cards and all that stuff it just really opens up the market to recreational so you'll go from at best in a medical market five percent of the population that's high it's very very high for a state in a medical state five percent will have their card will probably hit five percent maybe two or three years so in a recreational market you're looking at thirty three percent the population that will buy within a six-month period and another 30% will consider so you can see the growth is pretty good and yeah I'm 10 minutes over thank you guys so much I really had a great time [Applause]
