Connecticut’s medical cannabis market has suffered in the two years since Connecticut legalized sales for recreational purposes. Two proposed bills put forward this legislative session seek to change that.
State Rep. MJ Shannon, D-Milford, worked with the advocacy group known as the Cannawarriors among others, to help craft his proposal.
“I sat down with the Cannawarriors and those advocacy groups, and heard their stories, heard where they’re coming from, and they’ve been working on these issues for a long time,” he said.
State Rep. Anne M. Hughes, D-Easton, a social worker by trade, has also proposed changes to the state’s medical cannabis program. Her proposed bill would make it easier for patients who use cannabis as a medication to obtain it.
Hughes, she said, is “really trying to increase ease and access for medical patients, for veterans, for people with, you know, PTSI, ideally, under some sort of medical care, behavioral health care, to get their medicine.”
Medical cannabis sales have taken a 44.4 percent hit since Connecticut began allowing recreational sales two years ago.
Medical cannabis sales hit their peak in March 2023 when there were $12.6 million in sales. Since then, sales have steadily, inexorably decreased to $7 million in the last month of 2024.
Two qualifying conditions were added in 2021 to the list of those for which medical professionals may prescribe cannabis. Two more were added in 2024: autism spectrum disorder and female orgasmic disorder.
Nonetheless, the number of registered medical cannabis patients has also decreased precipitously, going from 48,896 in January, 2023 to 36,170 by the end of December, a 26 percent decrease.
“I’ve heard that it’s the lack of products on the market,” said Rino Ferrarese, partner at cannabis cultivator Affinity Grow in Portland. “The medical market is going to naturally die when adult use programs happen. You just naturally see there’s this attrition from the medical program.”
Some cannabis products, particularly higher dose cannabis products like concentrates, are only legally sold on the state’s medical market to registered medical cannabis patients. But because those patients make up a comparatively small and shrinking proportion of the total number of customers, retailers are less likely to stock the higher dose products they buy.
“Connecticut had an unbelievably robust medical program in terms of product variety,” said Ben Zachs, co-owner of retailer and cultivator Fine Fettle. “Why are we going to focus on what’s going to be probably 30 percent of the market?
“The potency limits on concentrates in the adult use program don’t make it commercially viable for them to make that stuff anymore,” he said.
Among the changes proposed in Shannon’s bill, state statute would better define “qualifying patient” and “qualifying caregiver,” allow for more, smaller-scale cannabis cultivation and “provide additional anti-discrimination protections to qualifying patients and medical cannabis caregivers.”
“It’s a fact that the numbers are decreasing, and I think it’s time we do something creative,” Shannon said. “With this legislation, I think it empowers our medical cannabis providers and the medical cannabis patients with a different perspective on what’s going on, and gives them a way to be part of the conversation and actually get involved in the medical cannabis industry more than they might have been in the past.”
Despite the decrease in cannabis patients and medical cannabis products, there has not been as steep a drop-off in the number of qualified cannabis caregivers.
There were 4,372 certified cannabis caregivers in January 2023, and 3,384 as of December of last year, a decrease of 22.5 percent. Hughes’ bill is focused on increasing that number.
“There’s a lot of practitioners that are prescribing cannabis as one of the tools in the toolbox, said Hughes, who consulted with both industry leaders and the state’s medical cannabis ombudsman when crafting the bill.
Though she does not prescribe cannabis to her patients, Hughes said that, “As a licensed master social worker, not everything works for everyone, especially people with pretty intractable behavioral health needs.”
“It’s really hard to find the combination of treatments that work for people,” she said, particularly when”people are housing insecure, and they don’t have very easy ways of getting access or they’re home-bound.”
