by Ray Stern | Phoenix New Times
Arizona has reached a marijuana-legalization milestone, with more than 80,000 people now qualified to legally possess, grow, or sell pot for medicinal purposes.
State voters passed the 2010 Medical Marijuana Act by a slim margin, resulting in about 90 dispensaries statewide and an ever-increasing number of patients, caregivers, and registered dispensary agents.
Here are the relevant stats from the Arizona Department of Health Services latest report, which includes totals as of the end of July:
Qualifying patients (adults): 78,830
Caregivers: 597
Qualifying patients (minors): 126
Caregivers (to minor patients): 126
Dispensary agents: 1,972
Total: 81,651
The tallies have risen steadily since the DHS began issuing registration cards in spring 2011. Last year ended with about 65,000 patients. A glance at DHS reports from 2015 shows a steady rise of several thousand more qualified patients each month. There’s no sign the increase will level out.
“Because more dispensaries have opened up, an increase in patients was expected,” says Ryan Hurley, a local attorney who works with dispensaries. “Also the stigma and fear of being a cardholder gets reduced each passing day, particularly when you have mainstream media outlets, [including] CNN’s Sanjay Gupta, extolling the myriad benefits of MMJ. Because of all of this, I expect to see steady measured growth in the number patients over at least the next year or two.”
