Missouri’s newly sprouting medical marijuana industry has spawned a fight that may be headed for court between two companies competing over a contract to help run the new initiative. At issue is whether one of the companies failed to fully disclose its fee structure during the bidding process.
Transparency is especially crucial in growing a new, legal industry from a previously illicit and still-controversial drug. Which drives home the point of a pending lawsuit by the Post-Dispatch challenging the state’s deeply flawed policy of hiding the identities of those seeking licenses to grow and distribute marijuana.
The lucrative medical marijuana industry Missouri voters launched with a ballot initiative in November drew some two-dozen companies seeking a state contract to help run the new program. The winning group is called Metrc LLC.
But as the Post-Dispatch’s Kurt Erickson and Jack Suntrup reported Monday, a competing company, BioTrackTHC, is protesting the contract award, alleging Metrc’s bid didn’t disclose fees it will charge to growers and vendors.
The nature of this allegation is disturbing because it fits an emerging pattern of lack of transparency surrounding this process — a pattern the state itself has perpetuated by its continued insistence on unreasonable secrecy about how it will run a system that grows and distributes such a highly regulated and controversial product.
A judge on June 21 will hear the Post-Dispatch’s arguments in a lawsuit over the state’s decision to withhold the names of hundreds of companies and individuals seeking licensing to grow and sell medical marijuana products. That decision is based on a strained reading of the original ballot initiative, taking language that validly protects companies’ financial information from exposure and concluding that it somehow shields even the identities of the companies from being publicly known.
There’s no rational basis for this interpretation. It defies a basic principle of a free society that the public has the right to know which people and entities are operating their public programs. Such knowledge is particularly important when the program in question involves the production and sale of a drug still listed by the federal government as illegal and dangerous.
Missouri recently got a first-hand demonstration of why it’s so important to have full information about the players in this new industry. A consulting firm for people wanting to get into the medical-marijuana business conducted a workshop in February, but it failed to mention the firm’s representatives lost their cultivation and dispensary license in Colorado over numerous violations. That disqualifying tidbit would have stayed under wraps if not for news media investigating.
That kind of media oversight won’t be possible regarding potential marijuana growers in Missouri if the state succeeds in keeping their identities secret. Transparency is always the best policy in government — doubly so when it comes to something like medical marijuana.
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