Marijuana Authority Swamped By Record Application Filings

2/11/2019

The Oklahoma Medical Marijuana Authority is under a siege of new applications and many are going unprocessed beyond the statutory 14 day mandate for processing.
Last week the OMMA announced the closing of their robust call center, so that the personnel which takes more than 1000 calls per week can help dig out the processing department.
Melissa Miller, a spokesman for the State Health Department's Medical Marijuana Authority said that every effort is being made to hire more competent personnel.
Up until Thanksgiving, the rate of granting patient license applications for patients was about 1000 per week. But the rate since the holidays has been higher than 2500 per week. Now the agency is admitting that they are failing to meet the legal mandate.
As a result, patients are going without their medicine or being forced to buy from the black market, and face prosecution just to get medical care for cancer care, epilepsy, chronic pain care, and severe mental disorders including veterans with PTSD.

The OMMA call center will be temporarily unavailable starting today while we focus staff efforts on timely processing of the increased volume of applications. Approved patients who have not received their license can email [email protected]. We apologize for the inconvenience.
— Oklahoma Medical Marijuana Authority (@OMMAOK) February 6, 2019

The current rate of licensing is about 50% higher than the department projected, last August. There will probably be about 120,000 licensed patients in the state, by fall.

Melissa Miller Communications Director for the OMMA

"We won't be answering phone calls for the time being," said Melissa Miller, the communications manager for the OMMA. "That will allow us to take those staff who are usually taking their time to answer phone calls to process applications instead."

According to Miller's account, in September, they were getting about 1,200 patients applying per week. In early January, it was about 3,200 per week. Now, it has reached about 4,000 per week.
"We anticipate it will probably continue to increase, we don't know by how much, but we're just preparing to meet the demand whatever it is," Miller said.

SoonerPolitics has been providing in depth coverage of this milestone change in Oklahoma's drug policy.

We have a special section devoted to the developments in state law and agency news, as well as directories of licensed physicians & dispensaries.

In addition, we have journalists devoting their time to matters of law, growing medicines, cooking with cannabis, and testimonials of recovery.

We also have the latest market wire, showing the latest wholesale prices that growers are selling their commodities for.

KOKH TV News carried a similar report on the developments at the OMMA.

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