By Paul Meyer, MD
An innovative approach from Michigan: the not-for-profit Genesee County Compassion Club does not own, control, handle, sell or dispense Cannabis. It offers a secure space where patients and Cannabis providers can conduct transactions.
I’m in Genesee Township, hard up against the city limits of Flint, looking at what might be the future of medical cannabis in Michigan. The Genesee County Compassion Club (G3C) is tripling its size by adding a larger, somewhat classier storefront, two doors down from its current space. Both are in a small strip mall in a semi-gritty neighborhood right across the street from Flint proper.
The survival and expansion of G3C are cause for celebration in a city and state where the Republican administration elected in 2010 has made sabotage of the Michigan Medical Marhuana Act (MMA, spelled with the “h” in the state’s law) a central thrust of its program. After dispensary sale of cannabis was ruled illegal by the courts in a 2010 decision —followed immediately by a series of raids— most of the 400 distribution outlets then in business quickly folded.
But G3C is different. It operates as a “Farmers’ Market,” one of a small handful of such clubs in the state…
