The people who truly need marijuana in Oregon are the people who use it for medical purposes. And the argument of the Oregon Cannabis Commission is that the system in place to serve medical marijuana patients is not where it should be.

Patients can’t get their needs met by the retail market, the commission says. And the systems put in place to help patients get low-cost cannabis “are not working” as anticipated.

Medical marijuana can be the best solution for some to provide relief from chronic pain, cancer and more. When Oregon broadly legalized marijuana use by adults in 2015, the state’s medical marijuana program declined.

“From October 2015 to October 2018, OMMP experienced a 55 percent decline in patients, a 61 percent decline in caregivers and a 66 percent decline in growers,” according to a state report from 2019.

Some decline was expected. It happened in other states where marijuana was legalized, too. Of course we would never suggest that Oregonians were using a medical marijuana card as a way to get pot before it became legal, but….

The Oregon Cannabis Commission is coming back with renewed recommendations for the state to take more action. It wants the state to launch a pilot program to ensure medical cardholders get better access to and reduced costs of retail marijuana. It wants changes so cardholders and their caregivers can purchase up to a 90-day supply, instead of a 30-day supply, so fewer trips are necessary.

And the last issue we will highlight has to do with a state incentive for medical marijuana that the commission wrote no producer is using. Producers of marijuana for retail may grow more marijuana if they provide most of it for medical production and transfer it to patients at no cost. The state cannabis commission suggests that the state tweak the rules so it is more attractive.

If the concerns about the medical marijuana program are true, these recommendations from the cannabis commission deserve review.

But what’s absent in the cannabis commission’s recommendations is evidence that the medical system is failing patients. There are no numbers or anecdotes to back it up. We would not be surprised that it is occurring. Maybe that is just general knowledge among members of the state cannabis commission.

We did reach out Monday to the Oregon Health Authority and were unsuccessful in reaching a member of the commission by our deadline. If the cannabis commission is trying to rally support for its recommendations to fix a problem, it should provide clear evidence of the scope of the problem for all to see.