Five years after medical cannabis became available in Utah after being legalized by voters, the program, while still controversial, keeps on growing. This year, the state counted over 100,000 medical cannabis card holders, a new peak in the program’s five-year existence.
Members of the Utah Patients Coalition, a plant medicine advocacy group which lobbied hard to help pass the 2018 referendum that allowed the medical cannabis program in deeply conservative Utah, see the milestone as a demonstration that the system to obtain a card is getting easier to navigate.
Even now that a major 2025 cannabis bill has gone into effect and eliminated a system that allowed for a cheaper, more accessible way to obtain a card, the group remains hopeful for the future of medical cannabis in the state.
One of the 2025 general session’s routine bipartisan medical cannabis bills, sponsored by Minority Whip Jennifer Dailey-Provost, D-Salt Lake City, and Sen. Evan Vickers, R-Cedar City, went through several iterations and proposed allowing more medical cannabis pharmacies in the state. But, it didn’t make it to a vote on the Senate floor, ultimately failing.
Most of the provisions of the House bill, including new licenses for pharmacies, were included in HB54, another bill sponsored by Dailey-Provost that passed, allowing 17 pharmacies to operate in the state, up from 15.
However, SB64, another bill sponsored by Vickers, also became law, containing a provision that Utah Patients Coalition considered “a heartbreaking loss.”
Up until this month, pharmacies were allowed to partner with clinics that have medical providers qualified to prescribe medicinal cannabis to host “card drives,” a sort of pop-up clinic in pharmacies’ parking lots in which doctors could see patients and issue cards, often at a discount.
But, with that loss, also came some flexibility on who gets to recommend medical cannabis to a patient. Now, medical providers who are licensed to prescribe controlled substances can recommend the treatment, which according to a Department of Health and Human Services April report is mostly used to treat pain.
Read the full report at UtahNewsDispatch.com.
