Pubdate: Sun, 16 Feb 2014
Source: Boston Globe (MA)
Copyright: 2014 Globe Newspaper Company
Contact: http://services.bostonglobe.com/news/opeds/letter.aspx?id=6340
Website: http://bostonglobe.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/52
Author: Joan Vennochi

SMOKE CLOUDS BILL DELAHUNT'S BIG SCORE

YOU KNOW what they say about pot. It gives you the munchies.

It certainly whetted Bill Delahunt's appetite.

One license to dispense medical marijuana wasn't enough for the
prosecutor turned congressman turned lobbyist. He went for three and
got three - perhaps with a little help from his friends, as Ringo
Starr might put it.

Cheryl Bartlett, the state public health commissioner whose agency
picked the lucky 20 applicants who won licenses to operate medical
marijuana dispensaries, previously held fund-raisers for Delahunt and
attended charity events with him. As the Globe reported, it wasn't
until the final weeks of application review that Bartlett disclosed
her longtime political association with Delahunt. At the last minute,
Bartlett delegated the licensing choice to her deputy, who awarded
three licenses to Medical Marijuana of Massachusetts, the nonprofit
company founded by Delahunt. No other firm got more than two.

Questions are now being raised about license requests submitted by
other applicants, as well.

As a result, House Speaker Robert DeLeo is belatedly concerned, and
health regulators are now asking companies that received the licenses
to submit sworn statements that their applications were truthful.
Isn't truthfulness something regulators should be checking for in the
first place?

But they didn't. According to the Globe, two companies proposing
dispensaries in Boston and Haverhill said they had support from local
officials when they did not.

In Delahunt's case, the questions relate to his close ties to Bartlett
and the credentials of the California resident, Avis Bulbulyan, who
was hired by Medical Marijuana of Massachusetts to run its cultivation
site and dispensaries in Plymouth, Mashpee, and Taunton. Bulbulyan was
initially listed as an executive of the company, but in the final
application he was taken off the leadership team.

That allowed him to skip an extensive background check, which would
have revealed that an Avis Bulbulyan of Glendale, Calif., filed for
personal bankruptcy in 2011. A Globe review of the case shows
Bulbulyan owed about $44,000 to a dozen creditors, including a loan
company that repossessed his BMW in 2009.

A spokesman for the public health commissioner said Bartlett had "no
role" in the final selection process. And in an interview with WBUR's
Sacha Pfeiffer, Delahunt dismissed the idea that political connections
played any role in his selection.

"I don't even know the individual who actually made the final
decision," he said. That's because the person he did know was
technically removed as the decision-maker, shortly before the official
decision. But you'd have to have been stoned to believe the final
selection happened in a merit-based vacuum.

The Massachusetts Republican Party does not believe that. "The public
cannot have faith in the decisions made by the Department of Public
Health because of the apparent conflict of interest for Commissioner
Bartlett and the secrecy surrounding the awarding of licenses," said
state GOP executive director Rob Cunningham.

About that secrecy, the public health agency has repeatedly declined
to release the scores awarded to applicants during the evaluation
process. Maybe if the scores were released, there would be less
skepticism about the process.

According to Delahunt, his proposed dispensaries garnered the highest
scores given by an independent consultant. But if the scores were
based on the credentials of the local team behind Medical Marijuana of
Massachusetts, they were based on a distorted picture.

Delahunt will be paid $250,000 a year as chief executive of the
company. But he won't be involved with daily operations, and neither
will other locals who made up the team that supposedly impressed
regulators. Bulbulyan is the person slated to oversee the day-to-day
business of dispensing medical marijuana.

In his WBUR interview, Delahunt said he was driven by "a passion" to
provide alternatives to prescription drugs, which have led to an
epidemic of addiction.

Of course, there's irony in marijuana's embrace by a former prosecutor
who put people behind bars for possessing it. Based on FBI crime
reporting data, and data provided by marijuana activist Jon Gettman,
Boston Magazine blogger Luke O'Neil estimated that during Delahunt's
20 years as Norfolk district attorney, "somewhere around 10,000 people
. . . had their lives upended under Delahunt's authority."

Of course that was then. Medical marijuana is big lucrative business,
and Delahunt's "passion" just earned him a big bite of it.
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