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. - --- MAP posted-by: Matt