The Alabama Senate Judiciary Committee passed a bill today 8-1 in favor of legalizing medical marijuana in the state.

The bill, SB 165 Compassion Act, will create the Alabama Medical Cannabis Commission, “provide for commission membership, and impose the following duties: Establish and administer a patient registry system; issue medical cannabis cards; issue licenses for the cultivating, processing, dispensing, transporting, and testing of medical cannabis; adopt rules; impose restrictions on licensee activity; and generally regulate, administer, and enforce a medical cannabis program in the state. “

A panel created out of this bill’s dilution in the previous session, has recommended that the state of Alabama implement a medical cannabis program. That decision was made two months ago and was addressed with the Alabama Senate committee hearing today.

The medical conditions covered are as follows:
a. Anxiety or panic disorder.
b. Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD).
c. Cancer-related cachexia, nausea or vomiting, weight loss, or chronic pain.
d. Crohn’s Disease.
e. Epilepsy or a condition causing seizures.
f. Fibromyalgia.
g. HIV/AIDS-related nausea or weight loss.
h. Persistent nausea that is not significantly responsive to traditional treatment, except for nausea related to pregnancy, cannabis-induced cyclical vomiting syndrome, or cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome.
i. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).
j. Sleep disorders.
k. Spasticity associated with a motor neuron disease, including Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis.
l. Spasticity associated with Multiple Sclerosis or a spinal cord injury.
m. A terminal illness in which the life expectancy is six months or less. Tourette’s Syndrome.
o. A condition causing chronic or intractable pain in which conventional therapeutic intervention and opiate therapy is contraindicated or has proved ineffective.
p. Any other medical condition added by the commission, by rule, based on scientific evidence indicating efficacy in treating the condition or treating symptoms of the condition, or any other condition approved by the Medical Cannabis Appeal Panel.

The same way Texas updated intractable epilepsy in HB 3703, the Alabama bill this session has been revised from the previous version. It will not require patients to take on other treatment options before they can access medical cannabis. Under this version, patients will be able to purchase a 70-day supply at a time, and there will be a nine percent sales tax on all cannabis purchases.

Any county or municipality seeking to ban the processing, testing, or dispensing of medical cannabis within its jurisdiction is authorized to do so by a two-thirds vote of the local governing body. That is provided, that the vote occurs no later than July 31, 2020, and the local governing body notifies the commission and the department within 10 days of a vote in favor of a ban.

There will be a cap of 32 dispensaries allowed in the state. A licensee may operate up to three dispensing sites, each of which must be located in a different county from any other dispensing site. Provided, however, the commission may authorize a licensee to operate a greater number of dispensing sites if, at least one year after the date when the maximum number of total dispensing sites authorized are operating, the commission determines that the patient pool has reached a sufficient level to justify an additional dispensing site in an underserved or unserved area of the state.

The bill also lays out some testing requirements to “establish 2 protocols for product testing by a licensed state testing laboratory, which shall be conducted during cultivation, processing and dispensing to ensure that all dispensed medical cannabis is consistently high grade and maintains a consistency with less than 0.5 percent variability among batches of the same product. The protocols for testing shall include the following, as well as a determination of corresponding tolerance limits:
(1) Cannabinoid content and potency, including, but not limited to, all of the following:
a. Total THC (THC+THCA).
b. Total CBD (CBD+CBDA).
c. THC/CBD ratio, if applicable.
d. Percent of THC relative to original plant 16 material (w/w).
(2) Terpene profiles.
(3) Heavy metals.
(4) Chemical contamination, such as residual 20 solvents remaining after extraction and concentration.
(5) Microbials, including pathogenic microbials.
(6) Mycotoxins.
(7) Residual insecticides, fungicides, herbicides, and growth regulators used during cultivation.
(8) Residual solvents.

This is could be considered by some to be a better plan than what Texas has right now. This bill does not place a limit on THC levels and will require proper testing by third-party license holders licensed by the state of Alabama. The money collected from taxes will also be portioned out to bill created Medical Cannabis Research Consortium for research on cannabis and medical cannabis.

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