21 FILE APPLICATIONS IN NEW ROUND FOR MEDICAL-MARIJUANA COMPASSION
CENTERS IN R.I.

PROVIDENCE -- Twenty-one candidates have filed applications to open
medical-marijuana compassion centers in Rhode Island.

The deadline for the new round of applications was noon Friday.
Annemarie Beardsworth, spokeswoman for the state Health Department,
said she did not know whether the 15 former applicants who were
previously rejected had refiled.

She said that it will take "a matter of weeks" for the department to
review the new applications for completeness "to make sure everything
we asked for was included in the application." Once an application is
deemed complete, she said, it will be posted online for public
inspection on the Department of Health's website.

The 21 new applicants are each vying to open one of up to three
medical-marijuana compassion centers the state has agreed to open to
serve the 2,156 chronically ill and pain-debilitated patients now
registered in the program.

Beardsworth says that the state is receiving about 75 new applications
per week from patients who've been certified by physicians as eligible
for registration cards for the medical-marijuana program. It is the
patients' responsibility to find a caregiver, or licensed supplier of
marijuana, to provide the drug to ease pain, anxiety or other medical
problems.

Currently, the state licenses 1,753 caregivers who are each allowed to
grow up to 24 plants (or a maximum of 12 plants per patient).

The compassion centers would be another legal avenue for the patients
to get their marijuana.

Beardsworth said the Health Department hopes to make a final decision
on who can run a compassion center by March or April of next year but
that no center will be up and running by early spring.

She said that after the department makes its final decision, those who
have been OK'd to run the centers will have to get their dispensaries
ready, get staff in place and pass a building inspection by Health
Department personnel before they will be permitted to open. They will
also have to comply, Beardsworth said, with any applicable municipal
ordinances.

In a surprise move in September, the Department of Health announced
that none of the 15 applicants seeking to open the state's first
compassion center for medical-marijuana patients was qualified to open
its doors. The department said that all of the applicants -- which
included a former state auditor general, an acupuncturist, a retired
Cranston police chief and a longtime educator -- "either failed to
meet the minimum scoring requirements or they were disqualified from
review for failing to comply with the application requirements."

State law requires any compassion center that opens to be a nonprofit
organization.

David R. Gifford, Health Department director, said at the time that he
was optimistic that by clarifying the application process "we will
have a clearer process going forward that will yield at least one
successful application."

But JoAnne Leppanen, executive director of the Rhode Island Patient
Advocacy Coalition, called the delay in approval "just horrible. ... I
feel like the patients' welfare is being lost in a bureaucratic haze."

The new application form puts no limit on how long a proposal may be.
It seeks three-year, instead of two-year, projections, on the
"schedule of personnel," meaning how many people are estimated to be
working in the center in 2014.