Over the next six months, Florida lawmakers and the Health Department will have to write the rules that govern the implementation of Amendment 2, for medical marijuana.

And those rules are raising new questions.

  • Lawmakers concerned about Amendment 2 implementation details
  • Details include doctor training, law enforcement rules
  • RELATED: Making Sense of Amendment 2

“With the Amendment passing, we’ve introduced an entirely new murky water," said FL Rep. Jason Brodeur, R-Sanford.

For the last three years, Brodeur worked on a medical marijuana statute, addressing the minutiae of a new industry, from pesticides on plants to how high fences should be for growers.

Brodeur said all the work he and others did on the statute was upended with the passage of Amendment 2.

“I was worried that people would pass an amendment that left a lot of holes and that’s what happened," he explained.

Among the things not in the amendment he is worried about, physician training.

“Physicians have no idea how much to prescribe, to whom and for what side effects people might be experiencing," he said.

Brodeur was one of several experts Thursday on a panel hosted by the Seminole County Chamber of Commerce to address questions about medical marijuana.

Since marijuana is still a Schedule 1 drug, illegal federally, there are no clinical trials, he said. In addition, an amendment typically directs the legislature to write the language -- but Brodeur said that is not the case.

“For the things not contemplated in the amendment, it’s left to the Department of Health, who is waiting for direction from the Legislature," he said.

Brodeur says the state and Department of Health have six months to give guidance, which law enforcement and doctors need.

Hundreds of cities and municipalities will also need to make decisions on where dispensaries can be, unless the state takes that up as well.

Doctors trained to recommend medical marijuana, about 350 doctors throughout the state, need to see patients for months. They can then recommend the cannabis, after other treatments have been tried.

Patients need to qualify under the list of illnesses passed with Amendment 2:

“Debilitating Medical Condition” means cancer, epilepsy, glaucoma, positive status for human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS), post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), Crohn's disease, Parkinson's disease, multiple sclerosis, or other debilitating medical conditions of the same kind or class as or comparable to those enumerated, and for which a physician believes that the medical use of marijuana would likely outweigh the potential health risks for a patient.