Pubdate: Mon, 17 Mar 2014
Source: Boston Herald (MA)
Copyright: 2014 The Boston Herald, Inc
Contact:  http://news.bostonherald.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/53
Page: 14

STILL UP IN THE AIR

Gov. Deval Patrick has now been presented with several options to
correct the medical marijuana licensing process that his team has
royally botched. Perhaps he'll find a few minutes to consider them as
he wings his way to Mexico and Panama today on yet another
international jaunt.

Rep. Jeffrey Sanchez (D-Jamaica Plain), who chairs a legislative
committee probing the licensing procedures, has recommended that the
Department of Public Health expand the pool of applicants it is
considering for licensure. DPH has given 20 applicants the provisional
goahead (launching meaningful background investigations only after the
fact - and after the Herald and others starting digging up dirt).
Sanchez believes six others who had high scores but finished out of
the running should get another shot.

Those reasonably qualified applicants were edged out by others
subsequently found to have submitted false information or exaggerated
local support for their dispensaries, and by one politically-connected
applicant who managed to score three of the 20 provisional approvals.

"We do not want to undermine the hard work of applicants who followed
DPH instructions and were truthful in their applications," Sanchez
wrote in a letter to DPH.

The preferred alternative, of course, would be to drain the tainted
applicant pool and start over. The public can't possibly have an ounce
of confidence in a system that has proved so vulnerable to
misfeasance, malfeasance - or both. But that, of course, would require
Patrick and his staff to acknowledge their management shortcomings -
not to mention the money they wasted on consultants who were hired to
screen applicants but who apparently didn't have a clue what they were
looking for.

By the time he returns from this week's "innovation mission" perhaps
the state's chief executive will have swallowed his pride and realized
a do-over is the only reasonable way to restore the public's trust.
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MAP posted-by: Matt