Neb.: Practitioner protections bill heads to the floor!

The Nebraska Legislature’s Health and Human Services Committee advanced a bill that is vital to making Nebraska’s medical cannabis program workable — LB 933. This bill provides that Nebraska medical practitioners cannot be disciplined solely for recommending medical cannabis as long as they abide by the standard of care. 

Given Attorney General Mike Hilger’s hostility and threats, this bill is essential to giving practitioners the comfort they need to make a recommendation if they believe their patients could benefit from medical cannabis. Advocates and lawmakers aren’t aware of a single provider in Nebraska who is willing to make a certification because of fear of retaliation.

If you live in Nebraska, ask your state senator to support LB 933 to protect providers who recommend medical cannabis.

All but one of the other medical cannabis states has similar language in their law. Medical providers take on hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt to get their licenses, and both providers and the health systems that employ them are risk averse. Unless providers know they won’t lose their licenses for making a good faith recommendation, they won’t participate in the program.

Under Initiative 437, patients can possess medical cannabis with a recommendation from a practitioner from any state. But patients shouldn’t have to seek out an out-of-state provider to use a medicine 71% of voters legalized. Moreover, the Nebraska Medical Cannabis Commission’s outrageous rules only allow patients to purchase medical cannabis products in Nebraska if they have a certification from a Nebraska-licensed provider. For more background, here is a video of the bill’s hearing.

This bill is a vital companion to voter-enacted Initiatives 437 and 438, which had to be extremely narrow in scope due to an outrageous “single subject” ruling on the 2020 ballot measure.