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Missouri regulators say they believe it could be unconstitutional to require disclosure of medical marijuana business license possession under a House-approved amendment.

By Jason Hancock, Missouri Independent

An attempt by lawmakers to require property information disclosure for companies licensed to sell medical marijuana was dashed Thursday when state regulators suggested a possible gubernatorial veto.

On Tuesday, the Missouri House voted for the Department of Health and Senior Services to provide records to the legislative oversight committees of who owns the companies licensed to grow, transport, and sell medical marijuana.

The provision was added as a complement to another bill on charitable organizations.

His sponsor, Rep. Peter Merideth, D-St. Louis said DHSS’s decision to keep the property records confidential caused problems with monitoring the program. He referred to a recent analysis by The Independent and The Missourian of the 192 state-issued pharmacy licenses that found multiple cases where a single unit was linked to more than five pharmacy licenses.

The state constitution prohibits the state from granting more than five pharmacy licenses to an entity that is essentially under common control, ownership or management.

A conference committee met Thursday to work out differences in the underlying bill between the House of Representatives and the Senate.

Senator Eric Burlison, a Republican from Battlefield and the sponsor of the bill, called the medical marijuana amendment a “great idea. I think it’s great.”

However, he said the ministry’s opposition is jeopardizing the entire bill.

“The department came to me,” he said, “and said they thought it was unconstitutional.”

The DHSS has justified its withholding of information from public disclosure by pointing out part of the medical marijuana constitutional amendment approved by voters in 2018, which stated that the department would “maintain the confidentiality of reports or other information which are to be received from an applicant or licensee that contain individualized data, information ”. , or records of the licensee or his operation … “

Alex Tuttle, a lobbyist for DHSS, said if the bill were to be passed with the medical marijuana addition still attached, the department might recommend vetoing Governor Mike Parson.

The threat of a veto proved convincing as several members of the conference committee expressed concern that the amendment could sink the entire bill.

Merideth said the division’s conclusion was wrong. And also, he said, the change was tightly tailored so that the information wouldn’t be made public. It would only be handed over to the legislative control committees.

Rep. Jered Taylor, R-Republic, chairman of the Special Committee on Government Oversight, said the change was essential to ensure that state regulators “follow the constitution and do what they are supposed to do”.

The medical marijuana program has undergone intense scrutiny in the two years since it was launched by voters.

A House committee spent months investigating widespread reports of irregularities in the evaluation of license applications and allegations of conflicts of interest within the DHSS and a private company tasked with evaluating applications.

In November 2019, DHSS received a grand jury subpoena issued by the United States District Court for the Western District. It asked the agency to hand over all of the documentation on four medical marijuana license applications.

In the published copy of the subpoena, the identities of the four applicants were redacted at the request of the FBI. Lyndall Fraker, director of medical marijuana regulation, later said during a testimony that the subpoena was not addressed to the department but rather linked to an FBI investigation center in Independence.

More recently, Parson has been criticized for running a fundraiser with medical marijuana business owners for his political action committee, Uniting Missouri.

The group reported that they raised $ 45,000 in large donations from the fundraiser. More than half of that money came from a PAC affiliated with Steve Tilley, a lobbyist with numerous medical marijuana clients who has been investigated by the FBI for more than a year.

This story was first published by the Missouri Independent.

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