[caption id=”attachment_109210″ align=”aligncenter” width=”695″] (AP Photo/Brennan Linsley)
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Medical marijuana became legal in Illinois over a year ago. There’s just one small problem: the state hasn’t granted anyone licenses to grow and sell it.
The state has approved 600 patients for medical marijuana cards, the Huffington Post reports, but has been excessively slow to approve licenses to growers and dispensaries. 2014 came and went, and no one has approval to grow marijuana—despite a self-appointed deadline that the state has now jettisoned.
This leaves the patients, some of whom have already paid $100 for their marijuana cards, out of luck, likely at least until the summer.
HuffPost interviewed multiple people affected by the state’s molasses-speed bureaucratic process. Patients suffering from cancer, epilepsy, Crohn’s disease, and other ailments are all anxiously awaiting the state’s approval:
“We are real people who have real lives, real jobs, friends, family,” Harper said of her fellow patients who suffer from chronic illness. “[Medical marijuana] will not just benefit patients, it’ll benefit all of those people, too.”
Gov. Pat Quinn recently shied away from estimating how long he’ll take to get businesses licensed. “It is a complicated law, and we’re working on it as best we can,” he told the Chicago Sun-Times.
“We’re gonna try to do it as best we can,” Quinn said. “There’s a lot of research to be done, and it has to be done right.”
One representative from a marijuana consulting business told the Associated Press that the state has not let the industry in on any of their projected timelines, leaving businesses wondering how to proceed. “Is it going to be a month? Or is it going to be six months? These centers don’t get up and running in a day. Open communication would be nice.”
