Minnesota’s list of conditions that qualify for medical cannabis became largely irrelevant Monday, when revised state law allowed patients to gain access simply if their doctors recommend it.

Giving doctors broad discretion to recommend medical cannabis makes sense, because patients are just going to turn to Minnesota’s recreational marketplace if they can’t get what they want from the state’s medical program, said Sen. Lindsey Port, DFL-Burnsville, whose legislation this session prompted the expansion.

“It just doesn’t fit anymore” to have one of the nation’s most restrictive lists of qualifying conditions, she said. “We want to make sure, if they have a condition that cannabis can help, that their doctor can help them find the right kind of cannabis. With the legal market open, there is really no reason to limit what doctors can prescribe because folks will be able to go out there and get anything.”

Minnesota became the 22nd state to launch a medical cannabis program in 2015, starting with a list of eight conditions such as cancer and seizures that grew each year as residents petitioned to add more. The qualifying list grew to 19 conditions, based on emerging evidence that cannabis use also helped people with intractable pain and post-traumatic stress disorder. Participation surged from 18,000 people in 2019 to 48,000, and has increased even in the months since the recreational marketplace debuted.

Minnesotans will no longer petition to add new conditions — an annual, adversarial process that forced the state’s health commissioner to pick between patients who badly wanted cannabis and law enforcement officials and doctors who worried about unintended consequences. The state repeatedly denied requests to make anxiety a qualifying condition because of these disputes.

People still will be able to petition for new consumption methods, though, such as the gummies and smokeable forms that were added in recent years. This year’s legislative expansion also allowed people to grow up to eight marijuana plants if a doctor has recommended medical cannabis for them, or if they are caregivers of people certified for cannabis.

Experience in other states suggests that only a few people will choose the home-growing option, and the medical cannabis marketplace will decline with the emergence of legal, recreational options. Port said it is important to maintain a commercial marketplace for medical cannabis, because the recreational market is only for adults. Some of the first advocates for medical cannabis in Minnesota were parents of children with seizure disorders.

“If we’re not thoughtful about how we do it, the recreational market can put the medical market out of necessity,” Port said.

Research about the risks vs. benefits of cannabis have been limited, because the federal government has classified it as a tightly-restricted Schedule I controlled substance that has high potential for abuse. Minnesota consequently set its medical cannabis program up as a broad research project that would take clinical and observational feedback from certified patients and build it into a database of what worked and what didn’t.

Research will continue, even with this year’s legislation moving the entire program from the Department of Health to the state’s Office of Cannabis Management, which also governs recreational use. Data from Minnesota’s early experience has already informed the ongoing federal process to reclassify marijuana as a less-restricted Schedule III substance, said Charlene Briner, interim director of the new state office.

“Minnesota is far and away the leader in the collection of data” on cannabis usage, said Briner. Her office is planning studies on everything from medical benefits to the frequency of impaired driving and first-usage psychosis.

Doctors and other health care practitioners still must be registered with the state program before they can certify medical cannabis for patients. More than 2,500 practitioners are registered, but the state doesn’t maintain a list of their identities.

Other changes Monday include a waiver of possession limits if patients keep their certification and purchase information with their medical cannabis supplies. Veterans also can self-refer to the program or be referred by a registered provider. Doctors with the Department of Veterans Affairs still cannot refer patients because of how cannabis is federally classified.

In March 2023, someone on the Quirky Minnesota Places Facebook page posted a picture of a Target shopping cart on a giant snow mound, an image that became viral because it seemed to capture that year’s long winter in Minnesota.

Quirky Minnesota Places struck again last weekend with a viral image that seems to sum up our soggy summer: A picture of guys kayaking past semi-submerged roller coasters at the partially flooded Valleyfair amusement park.

“Parking was a breeze!!! No long lines for Excalibur or Renegade!!!!!” was the way that Andrew Proballdescribed his kayak paddle into the park with two friends, Justin Berg and Karl Semeja.

Proball’s posted photos on Facebook of his excursion paddling over a waterfilled parking lot, past entry booths and floating next to closed thrill rides on June 29.

By July 1, the images had generated nearly 6,000 reactions, had been shared by nearly 2,000 people and spurred more than 600 comments, ranging from “I see they really expanded the water park!” to questioning the safety of the stunt.

“It’s all over the place,” Proball said.

Proball, a 37-year-old Shakopee resident, said he and his friends began their paddle at about 4:30 p.m. June 28, launching from Shakopee’s Memorial Park where the waters from the flooding Minnesota River reached nearly to the parking lot.

Then they headed downstream to the nearby Valleyfair amusement park and floated in on the swollen floodwaters covering an employee parking lot.

They cruised past three of the rides park’s rides that have shut down by the flooding, the Excalibur and Renegade roller coasters and the Thunder Canyon white-water rafting ride.

“We didn’t go through any gates. We just floated right in,” Proball said.

Proball said they also paddled on water covering some of the haunted attractions where Proball used to work when he was employed at Valleyfair’s ValleyScare Halloween attraction, first as a monster then as a lead haunt tech.

He said at one point a Valleyfair employee asked the paddlers to stay away from the rides, but they weren’t asked to leave. Though the rest of the amusement park was open, Proball said the closed part they were in had a deserted post-apocalyptic feel.

“All you hear is the distant rumbling of pumps pumping water,” he said.

Proball said he doesn’t believe what he did amounted to trespassing because he entered the park by floating on a public body of water and he never touched land.

He said he and his friends took safety precautions that included wearing life jackets, keeping a phone in a dry box and staying together.

“I didn’t want anyone getting hurt and also didn’t want to make Valleyfair angry,” he said.

When contacted, a spokesperson for Valleyfair said they were aware of the kayak trip, but had no further comment.

Larry Lucio remembers the day 60 years ago when he saw a bulldozer leveling his home. He was riding his bike past the house his family was given two weeks to vacate — the home where he and 9 of his 11 siblings were born.

“I could see my bedroom, the TV room, a lot of the memories of our family,” he said. “It was a neighborhood where everybody took care of everybody. And then it was gone.”

On Monday, West Side residents and community leaders released a report detailing the demolition of the West Side Flats, their flood-prone but tight-knit community that was replaced by an industrial park for which the city immediately built a flood wall to protect.

Now, as expensive apartment complexes have risen near where their longtime homes were flattened, West Siders say it’s time for the city to help them become whole again. The report, compiled by Research In Action on behalf of the West Side community Organization, recommends a number of measures government should take, including a public apology, compensation for affected families, development of affordable housing and pollution cleanup.

Monica Bravo, executive director of the West Side Community Organization, said decades of disenfranchisement followed the destruction of The Flats as residents struggled to recreate the same sense of togetherness.

In 2021, the organization began a “Stories of the Flats” project to collect the recollections of people who experienced the destruction 60 years ago. In 2022, the neighborhood organization started talking to St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter’s office about accountability and redress. In 2023, they contracted with Research In Action to study the history, cause and effects of displacement detailed in the report made public Monday.

According to the report, “Research In Action is a Black queer female-led, multi-racial and gender-diverse social benefit corporation created to reclaim the power of research by centering community expertise and driving actionable solution for racial justice.”

History of the West Side Flats

For generations, the area called St. Paul’s West Side was home to the Dakota people. Starting in the 1850s, French, Irish, and German immigrants settled on the Flats. In 1874, the area was annexed to St. Paul. In the 1880s, Russian Jews fleeing antisemitic violence began settling on the West Side. Neighborhood House was founded in 1895, first to provide training to Jewish children, then to serve a diversifying neighborhood.

Lebanese Christians, Mexicans from Texas and Syrians saw their numbers increase. The Mexican community established Our Lady of Guadalupe church in the Flats in 1931. In 1932, a major flood devastated the Flats and, again, in 1952. In 1956, the St. Paul Port Authority announced the creation of the Riverview Industrial Park, slated to be built on top of the existing West Side Flats.

In 1961, the city began buying the houses and tearing them down. In 1964, after the last family moved out of the Flats, a 3-mile-long levee, or flood wall, was built to protect the Riverview Industrial Park from floods. The park opened in 1965. According to the WSCO report, 2,147 people were displaced.

In today’s dollars, about half of the homeowners on the Flats received less than $50,000 (in today’s dollars) for their home, the report states. Renters got much less, between $35 and $1,000 (in today’s dollars) for moving assistance, based on the size of the rental property.

Bravo said community members don’t yet have a dollar figure for the reinvestment they want. On July 18th, the report will be presented to the broader West Side community for its feedback and mobilization at an event near the Robert Street Bridge, Bravo said. Several other recommendations will be made at that time.

Lucio, who was 10 at the time he saw his house demolished, was luckier than most. His family was one of the 37% of Flats residents who owned their home. They bought another home “up the bluff,” he said.

But while they worked to preserve connections through church and school, he said, it was not the same as on the Flats.

“I went to school with my cousin and then one day he just told me, ‘We’re moving,'” Lucio said. “We didn’t see each other for years after.”