People who want to buy marijuana in Maryland for medicinal purposes are probably going to have to wait until 2017, nearly four years after the state made it legal.

The Maryland Medical Cannabis Commission announced Monday that it will not award licenses to grow and process the drug until sometime in the summer - and industry officials say it will take an additional four to six months after that for the product to be ready to sell.

The commission said it has no target date for allowing retail dispensaries to begin operating and cannot say when marijuana will be available to patients.

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For Anthony Miles, Feb. 15, 2013, was a busy day of juggling calls, setting up meetings and touting a high-quality shipment he was expecting soon. Still, he found time to put air in the tires of his Mercedes and to note how well the day was going. Raising a large stack of bills in both hands, he bragged to a companion: I just made $20,000 in one hour.

Just three days later, Miles was less euphoric. He grumbled he was making "chump change" while an associate was clearing $150,000 a day "with his eyes closed."

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General Assembly Council Recommends Shorter Terms for Nonviolent Offenders

An influential General Assembly panel is recommending significant changes in sentencing laws for drug use - part of a plan to imprison thousands fewer people and use the savings to help others stay out of jail.

The bipartisan Justice Reinvestment Coordinating Council says the state can reduce the number of imprisoned Marylanders by 4,000 over the next decade, a decrease of nearly 20 percent.

It recommends using the roughly $250 million that would be saved to invest in drug treatment programs and other services to help ex-prisoners successfully return to society.

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On behalf of the Maryland Cannabis Industry Association, I would like thank to Hannah Byron for her leadership of the Natalie M. LaPrade Medical Cannabis Commission ("Byron to resign as head of Maryland cannabis commission," Dec. 2). What is truly remarkable are the strides the Maryland program has made under her leadership over the last year.

Many people do not realize that the first medical cannabis bill was introduced in Maryland in 1980 by former state delegate and current Baltimore County Councilman Wade Kach. The journey for Maryland patients began in 1980, but the momentum for getting medicine into the hands of patients really gathered steam in 2014, when Dels. Dan Morhaim and Cheryl Glenn and Sens. Jamie Raskin and Bobby Zirkin won the support of 177 of Maryland's 188 legislators to approve this sensible, compassionate legislation.

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Calvert County wants out of Maryland's burgeoning medical marijuana program, and some officials want to take the state to court if lawmakers say no.

The county commissioners voted 4 to 1 this week to ask state lawmakers to let counties ban marijuana-growing facilities and dispensaries in their jurisdictions.

County officials said they are concerned about county employees facing retribution from the federal government for participating in the program, which remains illegal under federal law.

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Hogan Needs to Make a Substantial Commitment to Reducing Overdoses

Atask force appointed by Gov. Larry Hogan to look into how Maryland can reduce the number of heroin overdose deaths released a wide-ranging series of recommendations Tuesday that included both expanded access to treatment for addicts and tougher law enforcement measures against drug dealers and gangs.

The 11 members of the panel, chaired by Lt. Gov. Boyd Rutherford, acknowledged that there are no quick or easy solutions to overdose deaths and that a coordinated, multifaceted approach is needed to address them. But their final report offered few specifics regarding how large an effort will be needed to make a dent in the problem or how much it would cost.

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For over two decades I have provided weekly clinical care to prisoners at the Rhode Island Department of Corrections. This experience of meeting thousands of patients has confirmed the epidemiological data suggesting that over half of all current prisoners have an addiction problem.

About one in seven has opioid dependence, a consistent and predictable, all-consuming, chronic relapsing and potentially fatal brain disease.

The current epidemic of opioid dependence has been driven by the flooding of the market with increased prescribing of pharmaceutical opioids. Regulatory pressures that have encouraged physicians to prescribe opioids for the management of chronic pain, along with unscrupulous profit-motivated pharmaceutical industry practices, have created this problem.

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Entrepreneurs want to build medical marijuana dispensaries pretty much everywhere in Maryland.

Last week the state's medical marijuana commission released a geographic breakdown of the 811 dispensary applications it received this month - an uptick from preliminary numbers.

More than a quarter of dispensary applicants proposed building storefronts in Baltimore City or Baltimore County, and a third of them applied to build in the Washington suburbs. The interest in those areas, however, does not mean they will be inundated with dispensaries. Only two are allowed in each of the state's 47 legislative districts.

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Baltimore- Deep into a three-day heroin binge at a local hotel, Samantha told the newbie he was shooting too much. He wasn't accustomed to heroin, she said, and hadn't waited long enough since his last injection.

"But he didn't listen," she said. Sure enough, he emerged from a visit to the bathroom, eyes glazed, and collapsed from an overdose.

Samantha, who declined to give her last name to avoid trouble with her bosses at a nearby strip club, said she grabbed her naloxone, the fast-acting antidote to opioid overdoses. She was too panicked to place the atomizer on the end of the syringe, but her boyfriend wasn't. He sprayed the mist into the nose of the unconscious drug user, who awoke minutes later.

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A discussion of police tactics and resources isn't enough; to stop the violence, leaders need to delve into root causes

At the end of April, Baltimore had recorded 73 homicides and was on pace to see 222 for the year - high by most communities' standards but about the same as the city had suffered in recent years.

Since then, police have reported 229 killings in 200 days, a breathtaking pace of carnage that suggests we could end 2015 with more than 350 homicides, a figure not seen since the worst days of the crack epidemic. Something changed after that cruel month of April, and it isn't changing back.

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Ex-Mayor Renews His Call for Decriminalizing Marijuana in Wake of 300-Plus Killings

University of Baltimore President Kurt L. Schmoke condemned the city's "subculture of violence" on Sunday and reiterated his call for the decriminalization of marijuana and an increase in employment opportunities, as the city's annual homicide total hit 300 for the first time since he was mayor in the 1990s.

Speaking on a panel on WMAR's "Square Off" talk show with Richard Sher, Schmoke called the mounting death toll an "absolute tragedy" and said the community must take a stand against the violence to stop it.

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Regarding Dr. Leana Wen's Nov. 11 op-ed, the use of so-called synthetic marijuana is an unintended side-effect of the war on natural marijuana ("Real danger in fake drugs").

Consumers are turning to potentially toxic drugs, made in China and sold as research chemicals before being repackaged as incense for retail sale in the U.S. A punitive criminal justice system incentivizes use. These potentially deadly chemical highs cannot be detected by standard drug tests. Military personnel and persons on probation use synthetic drugs to escape detection.

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Officials Swamped As Almost 900 License Applications Flood In

Maryland officials said Thursday that they expect to delay the state's medical marijuana program as they sort through a deluge of nearly 900 applications from businesses seeking licenses to grow, dispense or process the drug.

The crush of 882 applicants brought in more than $1 million in license fees and prompted officials to push back plans to grant preliminary approval to licensees by mid-January.

Extending the deadline to review, score and award the licenses into next year "in turn will extend the overall program rollout," said Hannah Byron, executive director of the Medical Cannabis Commission.

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Baltimore Moves to Eradicate Synthetic Drugs in the City As Emergency Room Visits Rise

When you think about drugs that ultimately lead people to the E.R., the first things that come to mind might be heroin, cocaine or prescription drugs. However, there is another dangerous set of substances that are sending thousands to hospitals across the country: synthetic drugs.

As an emergency physician, I have treated high school students who came in unresponsive and needed breathing tubes to stay alive. I have seen teens hallucinating and suffering seizures. I have attended to adults who sustained long-term brain, heart and kidney damage because of these harmful drugs.

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More Than 350 Apply for Licenses to Grow, Process or Dispense It

"We could be very successful here." Dr. Greg Daniel, who hopes to operate a "seed-to-sale" operation that grows marijuana, processes it and sells it at a dispensary

Maryland's nascent medical marijuana industry is already booming.

More than 350 applicants for licenses to grow, process or dispense medical marijuana were filed with the state's Medical Cannabis Commission by Friday evening's deadline as entrepreneurs try to get in at the ground floor of the newest pot market. The applications cover every county in the state.

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Who should be licensed to grow medical cannabis in Maryland? That question will soon be answered by the Natalie LaPrade Maryland Medical Cannabis Commission, which is authorized under state law to award licenses to 15 organizations to grow medical cannabis. The qualifications of these organizations are important, but so is where in Maryland they intend to locate. We want to shed light on why a qualified, licensed medical cannabis grower could be a tremendous asset for a community like ours.

We live and work in Cumberland, a small Western Maryland town blessed with stunning natural surroundings, tranquillity and friendly neighbors.

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Unexpected Players Getting in at the Ground Level

A 152,000-square-foot warehouse in Cumberland, Md., could soon be the home of some of Maryland's first legally produced medical marijuana. To address security concerns, Peak Harvest Health says it will install bulletproof glass and retinal scanners to identify those entering the building. Employees will wear color-coded uniforms confirming where they are allowed to be.

By late 2016, if approved by state regulators, the windowless building next door to a police station could be churning out up to 18 pounds of marijuana a day, enough to treat thousands of patients a month.

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Headlines like those in The New York Times ("U.S. to Release 6,000 Inmates From Prisons") and in this newspaper ("Hundreds of Marylanders will be among federal drug prisoners released early") are enough to add to the jitters of a city already grappling with an explosion of violence.

But hold your horses.

The U. S. Sentencing Commission is essentially admitting that tens of thousands of men and women should never have been punished so harshly. They were victims of the hysteria of a war on drugs that disproportionately targeted blacks and Latinos. Among the 13,000 federal inmates who are eligible for reduced sentences, including the 6,000 whose release will begin at the end of the month, 72 percent are black or Latino, and a majority have done time under draconian drug laws. They will be released in waves; some are already in transitional programs, like the 37 in a facility operated by Volunteers for America Chesapeake.

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Mass Incarceration and Long Prison Terms Don't Make Us Safer From Crime

The federal prison system holds thousands of inmates who probably don't need to be there, either because they received unduly long sentences for low-level, nonviolent drug offenses committed decades ago, or because they're now simply too old to represent much of a threat (crime being overwhelmingly a young man's game). The U.S. locks up more of its citizens per capita than any other country, despite the facts that it hasn't made us any safer, and the costs, both economic and social, have been enormous.

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Statute Gives Physicians Permission to Issue Blanket Prescriptions for Naloxone

Thousands of people have been trained to use a drug that prevents heroin overdoses, but many have faced a hurdle to obtaining naloxone - - a doctor's prescription.

Under a Maryland law that takes effect today, doctors at local health departments can write a blanket prescription that covers anyone who is trained on how to administer the drug, also known as Narcan. They simply need to present a card at the pharmacy showing they had been taught by a state-certified trainer.

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