CTNewsJunkie’s Brian Scott-Smith spoke with Lou Rinaldi, a medical marijuana patient and advocate for other people like him to find out more.
TRANSCRIPT:
Brian Scott-Smith: We’re speaking with Lou Rinaldi, a Medical Marijuana Patient Advocate. Lou, you’ve been very outspoken about the cannabis industry here in the State and especially since adult recreational use started two years ago. Talk to us about your concerns for patients, also your thoughts on the industry and how the state is regulating the industry as well.
Lou Rinaldi: Well, my thoughts are that we live in a place that is nicknamed, The Land of Steady Habits and a lot of the people in positions of power culturally are tolerant of alcohol, but are not tolerant of cannabis. I think there is a dearth of research primarily because of federal prohibition, but also because I don’t think the state of Connecticut has really been courting this kind of research.
I mean, outside of Yale, that does have a cannabis-specific research entity stood up at this point, but I think all the arguments that you can make in favor of cannabis, some folks are just never going to have ears to hear those. I think a lot of what cannabis brings to the table that alcohol does not is harm reduction in, areas like getting America beyond the opioid crisis, things like that.
And these are things that are not even being considered. So, I think it is somewhat hypocritical in my opinion, especially now. There’s been, just within the last few days major news stories about links between alcohol and cancer and you know, additional harms. And now maybe it’s not safe to drink any amount of alcohol on a regular basis.
You know, some of these stories that I’ve been reading the last few days, I do think that we are typically slow to catch up with the larger national cultural zeitgeist here in Connecticut. I think we still have a very puritanical mindset in a lot of ways. I think the reefer madness and the Nixonian war on drugs propaganda is still very deeply rooted around here.
And, I think that, unfortunately, is only going to change with generational die off and the passage of time. I think some folks that feel as strongly as they do, a lot of them want to blame it on the fact that they have an anecdote that they hold very close to their hearts about a friend or loved one who tried cannabis once and then years later died from a heroin overdose or something like that.
And they want, and it’s not to minimize their suffering or their pain at all, but they want so badly to be able to create a causal linkage to something that can be punished for the pain that they’re experiencing. And they cast that blame on cannabis. I’m not going to say that no one has ever started by trying cannabis and then eventually moved on to harder drugs.
But I also feel like that could be true of alcohol as well. That could be true of anything. If someone is in pain, if they are experiencing a mental health crisis and they turn to substances to help and to self-medicate are we really solving root cause if we’re attacking the substance rather than the source of that pain, whether it be economic disparity, or, you know, whatever the case may be, there are a lot of conversations that the folks who oppose cannabis simply don’t want to have because it would expose some of these issues and bring them into the light of the public square. And they just don’t want to have those conversations. And that’s why I say for some of them, it’s just going to take generational die off and it’s sad. I mean, I’m 47 years old. I’ve been waiting a long time for this sort of turnover to happen, and it just does not appear to be happening in the Northeast.
And it’s very disappointing.
Brian Scott-Smith: Talk to us about some policy goals for the legislative session.
Lou Rinaldi: So, I’ll start by saying that some of these policy goals I consider to be very low-hanging fruit.
Some of them I don’t even necessarily think would require legislation. And that seems to be consistent with the response that we’ve received from the Governor’s Office after submitting some of these proposals. But some of the very simple ones. We’re looking at updates to the registration process to get a medical card in Connecticut.
While some producers, including one that you recently interviewed, have been on the record as saying that it is a natural thing for the medical program to die following the rollout of adult use. There’s still close to 40, 000 residents of the state who would beg to differ. And a lot of those are suffering from various physical disabilities.
They don’t have the freedom to move about as, you know, just get in a car and drive somewhere. They have difficulty with technology and maybe scanning something into a JPEG or a PDF is not within their skill set. So, we’re looking to reduce or remove some of the barriers associated with enrollment and renewal within the medical program.
We’re also looking at why it’s required to renew annually if that’s necessarily in the best interest of patients. So, the registration process is one thing. Reciprocity with other neighboring states is a big one right now. If you hold a medical card in Connecticut, you can go to Rhode Island, you can go to Maine, you can go to other states, and they will treat you like a medical patient of their own state.
That is to say you won’t be charged tax, you’ll likely have access to a wider range of menu options, and you won’t be paying the price premium that’s associated with adult use. We would like to return that reciprocity, we would like to allow for medical card holders from other states to be able to enjoy those same benefits here in Connecticut. So that’s another one.
Perhaps the biggest one, in my opinion, at least the biggest one that we’ve revealed thus far, is what we’re referring to as product universality, and what that relates to is Connecticut is one of only two states with legal markets that has enacted a potency app, an upper limit on what the potency of various products can be.
And this was done without a truly fundamental understanding of how these products are produced, what goes into making them, and what the processes involve. Only that we feel that we should be able to arbitrarily cap something. Now imagine, again, you want to use the alcohol analog.
Imagine you can’t have anything above 40 proof. You can’t have anything above 80 percent alcohol content on the shelves. For most people, that won’t matter. For a small subsection of people, that will matter a great deal, what the potency cap has effectively done in Connecticut’s cannabis market, rather than attempt to comply and produce compliant products, the producers have just said, we’re not going to make these products at all.
We’re not going to bother making high potency products, because we can only sell them to the 30 something thousand people in the medical program, we can’t sell them to the adult use consumer. So, they’re effectively throwing the baby out with the bath water. And what we’re pushing for is product universality.
Which is, you know, a more palatable way of saying a revocation of the potency cap, doing away with the potency cap and pairing it with some thoughtful allocation to the two different markets. One of the problems as soon as adult use launched was that a lot of the formerly medical products were now being reallocated to the adult use program and patients are not able to find this medicine that they rely on for their functional day-to-day.
So part of what we’re proposing is not only to get rid of the potency cap, but to guarantee a minimum threshold of medical inventory for all medical and hybrid retailers to say, you will have on hand at any given time, the following product mix for patients to be available for patient purchase and only for patient purchase.
Maybe that’s something like 25%. I don’t know that the exact percentage is sort of arbitrary to be able to say to guarantee patients that when they go to retail, they’re going to be able to find the products that they need and not have them pulled out from under them so that they could be sold to an adult use consumer.
And then maybe the pushback from some of the producers as well. Then what happens if the products don’t sell to which I would say, okay, they typically have an expiration date of a year out from the date of production. Let’s say, within 30 days of that expiration date, they can be released to the adult use market and then they can be sold at discount or whatever, the same way that they already do with adult use products that haven’t sold and are about to expire.
So, there’s some real common-sense approaches that can be taken here. And I would say that not doing this also carries the biggest risk to the industry. We’ve heard a number of producers, Ben Zachs at Fine Fettle, for example, has been quite vocal about the fact that since he operates retail, both Connecticut and Massachusetts, he sees a lot of Connecticut license plates going to his Massachusetts retail locations for those highly potent concentrates that cannot be purchased here in Connecticut, or at least not easily found. And he would like very much to be able to sell those in Connecticut, to keep the tax money in the state, rather than flowing into our neighbors. So, I think this is something that patients want.
This is something that producers want. And really, it comes back to what you asked about the difference in alcohol and cannabis and the education of our elected officials and our lawmakers there, which I think is also lacking. So, that’s probably my biggest one.
We’re also looking at workers compensation.
Again, I mentioned overcoming the opioid crisis. One of the things that we would love to do is solve for root cause there and stem it at the source. When someone gets hurt on the job and they have a worker’s comp claim. Give them options. Don’t necessarily prescribe them, you know, opioid-based relief.
Give them the option of choosing plant-based medicine and normalize that. Don’t make it so they have to jump through any additional hoops beyond what they would for the opioid offering. And that way, you’re cutting off the fentanyl crisis at the origin point rather than all the way at the bottom.
You know, you can address that before it becomes a crisis. And similarly, we’d like to expand insurance coverage for medical cannabis, and there is precedent here. Trenton, New Jersey, has become the first municipality in the nation to allow full reimbursement of medical cannabis for all municipal employees through their current health insurance market.
I believe Liberty Mutual is the insurer there and they’re working with a third party called Cannasure, which is doing the underwriting and assuming what I would, I’m not in the industry. I can’t really say this definitively, but it sounds like they have a third party, assuming the majority of the risk here, but the fact is, they’ve done it.
They’ve already done it. And if you work for the city of Trenton, New Jersey, you’re able to get reimbursed for your medical cannabis. We would love to see that done here. Part of the issue, I think, with our retail channels currently is, there’s been a lot of friction between medical patients and the staff working at these facilities.
A lot of these staff get trained as if they were a cashier at Walmart. I think they need to be trained more as if they were a physician’s assistant in a medical context. They need to understand how do you deal with someone who’s in a mental health crisis? How can you best serve the needs of someone who is experiencing extreme PTSD, even as they’re walking through the door of your retail location.
What are some de-escalation tactics that can be used in situations where things get loud or confrontational? We don’t have that right now. And a lot of patients, you know, again, this is coming straight from our ombudsman. Patients have been going to her and saying that they were verbally abused, or in some cases, they had hands put on them.
They were escorted out of the facility simply for asking questions at times. So, we’re looking to push training, both human interaction training, and also real training about the products they’re selling that is not provided solely by their employer because there’s some issues there as well. They open the door for a lot of gaslighting when the producer is the one giving them the scripted answers to these questions.
And then finally we’ve got some minor changes to laboratory test reporting requirements. We want all test results to be included in the state’s public data portal, not just certain subsets. We want all of that data to be added. There’s a number of structural and integrity issues with the data portal.
Now, I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but a few years back through Freedom of Information request, I was able to get every single laboratory certificate of analysis, that is to say, the artifact that is created when a lab runs a test for a cannabis product. All of those are now added to the public data portal and are viewable by anyone who wishes to look up an individual product or perform a larger scale data analysis as I typically do.
But there are problems in terms of the accuracy, as I mentioned, the structure, the integrity of that data. The simple fact of the matter is there are easy, low effort fixes for this, for best practices in terms of it’s not even about the data collection because it’s already been collected.
It’s about how are we presenting this data to the public and making it available for public consumption. So, the recurring theme here, Brian, that I think you’ll have picked up on is that all of these proposals are in service to improving patient outcomes. Some of them have tangential benefits for industry as well, but we’re not seeking to make things better for industry.
First and foremost, we’re looking to improve outcomes for medical patients in the state. I mentioned there are some other proposals that we’re still working on that we have not begun to socialize yet. Those will also be getting a lot of attention in the coming session. But I think you know what I’ve covered here constitutes what I would consider to be very low risk, low controversy, common sense populist change that can be enacted with little or no, as the state likes to call them, fiscal notes, these are not high-cost items to implement.
A lot of this is simply getting everyone to put their hands in the middle and say, go team, you know, we’re going to agree to make some minor pivots with the way that this program operates so that we can continue to improve it. Because from January to January, we have lost 26, almost 27 percent of the registered patient population in Connecticut.
That’s one out of every four patients that was registered at this time last year is now no longer registered in the program. And there’s a wide variety of reasons for that, but a lot of the reasons behind it are what we’re hoping to address with some of these legislative proposals.
Brian Scott-Smith: So, I just want to pick up on one thing. And you just said there’s a lot of reasons why there’s been a drop in the medical marijuana is part of it to do with, and of course you know, we have been discussing about the availability retail wise. Is it because people maybe have somewhere a little bit closer to go now as well?
Also did they not drop also the fee for a medical marijuana card? So, it’s a few things have fed into that possibly?
Lou Rinaldi: Yeah to answer your question, there are multiple fees associated with registering and renewing a medical card. What they got rid of was the state’s cut for the renewal process, there’s still a fee for the certifying provider.
So, patients are looking at an annual expenditure, depending on who their provider is of anywhere from 150 to 300 plus. And I’ve heard it said that in order for that to make financial sense a patient needs to purchase a minimum of something like 600 worth of cannabis products annually in order for that to be worth it.
As far as what’s happening with all these people who are leaving the medical program and not just that, but where are a significant number of adult use consumers sourcing from, if not from the state’s regulated market, and there is a plethora of options that are available to these folks. As you said, sometimes they have a legacy connection who is known to them from years past and they simply continue that relationship because they’ve come to grow accustomed to a certain level of quality, which we don’t have here in the legal market. The two main drivers are price and quality. The prices are astronomically high, and the quality relative to even other legal markets is utterly abysmal.
And that has driven folks to not only go, return or stay with the black market, but a lot of them are driving to Massachusetts and Rhode Island, staying within the legal guardrails of the system, but they’re simply buying it in a state that is getting their tax money. That isn’t their home state.
And frankly, has much better prices and much better variety in the product mix on the quality is higher because there’s more competition. We have purposely restricted competition here in Connecticut. We have, you know, functionally, we have four corporations who control 99 percent of the supply chain and the rest of the producers are either shell companies or what’s called equity joint ventures, which is basically, another way of allowing these incumbents to increase their footprint, you know, with slightly better optics, because we make it look like we’re helping folks who were disproportionately impacted by the war on drugs.
But in reality, they’re just token fronts for expansion of our retail footprint. So, folks can go to other states, they can utilize traditional market resources. And increasingly, they can order online. It is extremely easy to go online and order hemp derived products that are going to provide very similar, if not superior, effects to what they can buy legally here and have it shipped to their door.
One of the biggest secrets, which isn’t really a secret, is that the U. S. Postal Service is the largest drug dealer in the country. A lot of producers in the West Coast markets, Washington State, Oregon, even Colorado, California, they make it very easy for someone to go online and browse their products that they claim are compliant with the farm bill, and they will ship those directly to your door, there’s no shortage of choice.
And I think if we want to recapture some of those tax dollars, if we want the consumer spend in Connecticut to return to licensed Connecticut retail, then we need to provide that same level of choice. That consumers are currently enjoying outside of that market.
And that means opening up the market to small craft producers, locals. This state prides itself on its craft beer brewing business. Which admittedly has been taking it on the chin a bit lately, but for years was thriving. We celebrate the art form of brewing and allowing these different brewers to bring their degree of artistic expression to the fore and again, letting the market decide you can put it out there and you can put it on the shelf next to the mass produced product, and you can let individuals make a choice of how they wish to spend their money.
And that is what we have doggedly refused to do here in Connecticut. We have made it so that only the wealthy and politically well-connected are able to engage in these enterprises. And the few exceptions to that rule have been either incumbents who no longer are associated with the company that they worked for, or in some cases, former state legislators, who opposed cannabis vehemently during their time in office and are on the record voting against it every single time they had the chance.
Who, now magically have a license for the largest outdoor cultivation facility in New England, or so they claim. So, this is really what’s ailing the industry in Connecticut is a focus on corporatism and crony capitalism, as opposed to populism.
Cannabis has a rich culture around it, just as much as craft brewing or anything, you know, craft spirit distilling, which we also allow in the state, the fact that we are deliberately going out of our way to block those folks from getting entrance to the market, in my opinion, is the root cause of a lot of what is currently leading to, for example, the fiscal year that closed on June 30, was 58 percent below the state’s own projections from the Office of Fiscal Analysis in terms of tax revenue that was going to be collected from legal cannabis.
58 percent less than they anticipated. And that was the most conservative of the estimates. Some of the lobbyists that were pushing for legalization back in 2020 2021, they projected more than double that. So, the miss would have been an even wider swing. Now, if I’m a CFO and I make a projection like that for a new emergent industry, and I miss that badly, I’m fully expecting to be handed my walking papers at that point.
I don’t expect to keep my job if I messed up that badly, but you know, we’re just, we’re so reluctant to have these conversations in the public square in an open and honest fashion. And the pride and the hubris is so strong that I genuinely feel like the people in positions of power who have the decision-making ability here would rather let the market fail entirely.
Then open it up because really most of them are prohibitionists at heart, and they were only convinced to vote in favor of legalization because of the promised tax revenue windfall. They were willing to kind of hold their nose and vote yes because they thought it was going to be a boon for the state in terms of the economy and the tax benefits, and we’re going to be able to do all these amazing things with all the tax money that was going to pour in, and that’s the only reason they agreed to do it.
They don’t want to hear about it. The legislative session that is starting is the final one before all cannabis regulations are completely codified and handed over to the Department of Consumer Protection. There will be no more cannabis lawmaking or law changing as part of Connecticut’s legislative sessions after this coming one.
So, this is an extremely crucial time, not just for industry, but more importantly, for patients. Because if we don’t do some serious reflection and course correction now, we’re setting up the industry to fail. We’re setting up the patients to have any number of harms inflicted upon them by the ever decreasing quality and people who are immunocompromised or have mold allergies are increasingly at risk as we continue to loosen the safety standards of the regulated market.
Just so that we can guarantee that more products will pass the lab testing. It’s supposed to be one of the pillars of regulated cannabis, right? It’s safe because it’s lab tested. Well, we have one lab in the state that’s doing this currently. The reason we only have one lab is because I got the other one shut down.
The Office of Connecticut Auditors is currently performing an audit on DCP for fiscal 23, which would encompass when all of this happened, and it will come to the light of day. They won’t be able to sweep it under the rug anymore. And someone somewhere better be held accountable for this because we are playing fast and loose with people’s lives and their health and their well-being, all for the sake of enriching those who are already enjoying outsized wealth increase over the average Connecticut resident.
So, I know I have veered far off the course that you’ve laid out for me here, but I hope you will appreciate some of that context because I think this is a lot of what gets lost in the discussion about cannabis in Connecticut. And I feel that if it were more widely known, if more folks knew about the landscape and sort of the nuances and the pay to play that goes on, I think there would be a lot more outrage.
I’m still working on getting a lot of those stories out there. And it’s a challenge for me because I face threats and I faced people trying to get me fired from my day job, which has nothing to do with cannabis whatsoever because they don’t want me to continue to make this information available to the public.
And they ascribe all sorts of motives to me. That I’m secretly working for whoever they dream up on a given day. I have no skin in the game other than being a former medical patient myself.
I just want to see people get taken care of properly and not treated like cattle.
I mean, the fact that someone … is celebrating the death of the medical program, which legal cannabis was built upon, which allowed him to prosper and to build his own personal fortune. And now he’s saying, well, you know, patients have served their purpose, they’re obsolete. Now we’re looking forward to the adult use market. That is utterly egregious to me. And if Hearst has done anything, it has done a service in getting that quote on the record because I think that’s going to be a particularly useful one during the session to show where these people’s heads are at.
The fact that I had to fight for five years to get an ombudsman position created… When industries start screwing up that badly to the point where they need an ombudsman, yes, it is a negative reflection.
So, rather than trying to gaslight and sweep under the rug and characterize me as some sort of crackpot on the internet, why wouldn’t you be supporting this?
Legislators who I genuinely believe they get a one-pager from their assistant, right?
They get a short synopsis. This is what the concern is. This is what we’re hearing from the lobbyists, whatever they don’t know.
So, I applaud you for continuing to have these conversations and not just with one side or the other, but well rounded holistic view into what’s going on in this landscape, what the moving parts are, what the risks are to individuals and to organizations and companies.
I think if we’re not even willing to have these types of conversations and to have them openly, then no forward progress will be made. The medical program will continue to degrade. Adult use will continue to underperform in terms of tax revenue. And nobody wins. Nobody wins at that point. And it can’t just be about preserving the pride and the optics for some small subset of people in our state.
It has to be something that serves everyone’s interests. And you can’t say the same about alcohol. Alcohol, for all the lobbying dollars and influence that it enjoys, does not have any sort of therapeutic or medical benefit the way that cannabis does. So, I can only hope and pray that in the fullness of time, more and more people, especially as we get more and more younger legislators in there at the Capitol, we’ll start to wake up to these realities and we’ll start bringing folks to the table like Erin Gorman Kirk and actually trying to leverage her experience and her knowledge rather than stifle and sabotage her and set her up to fail in her ombudsman role because I truly believe that’s what is happening in the state. I will be shocked if they fund that role for a second year. I think everyone except for her own parent office, the office of the healthcare advocate has done everything in their power to ward her at every juncture, every step of the way, and it makes me sick to think that I spent that many years and finally succeeded in getting this created and getting the perfect person into the role. And even under those ideal conditions, it’s still being sabotaged, it’s still being fought against by people who either have a financial interest to protect or a reputational interest or both.
H/T: ctnewsjunkie.com
