Alaska proposes letting one medical marijuana caregiver serve multiple patients

The Alaska Department of Health proposed regulation changes Friday that would let one medical marijuana caregiver serve more than one patient, and would extend registry identification cards to 24 months from 12.

The department would repeal its primary caregiver section. "The intended effect of this repeal is to allow an individual to be a primary caregiver for multiple medical marijuana card holders," the notice says. The current rule already lets the department approve a shared caregiver on written request in cases of patient hardship, hospice care, or patients living in the caregiver's household; the repeal removes the requirement to ask. Two other sections are rewritten to the same end, letting an applicant name a caregiver who already serves another patient.

State law does not change with them. AS 17.37.010(e) allows a caregiver for only one patient at a time unless patients are related to the caregiver by at least the fourth degree of kinship, no more distant than a first cousin. Neither the notice nor the public review draft addresses how repealing the regulation changes the statute.

The longer card does not touch AS 17.37.010(k), which requires patients to annually resubmit updated documentation, including a signed physician's statement, to keep the card effective. No regulation implementing that annual duty appears in the draft. The section being amended to conform to the statute cites subsections (g) and (h), the numbers those provisions carried before the 1999 rewrite renumbered them (k) and (l).

The draft also strikes the requirement that applicants provide a social security number, and softens its duty to convene a review group on petitions to add debilitating conditions from will to may.

Alaska voters approved medical marijuana in 1998 and the legislature rewrote the law in 1999 through SB 94; these are the first recorded updates since then. Reviewing that bill on May 24, 1999, Attorney General Bruce M. Botelho warned Governor Tony Knowles that a caregiver serving several patients "would be allowed to possess one ounce plus six plants for each patient, thus allowing large growing operations." The notice does not revisit that reasoning.

Written comments are due by 5 p.m. Nov. 6 to Abigail Newby-Kew at [email protected]. The only oral hearing is by telephone Oct. 29, from noon to 1 p.m. Requests for disability accommodation are due Oct. 21.