For the second time, the Santa Fe Institute for Natural Medicine is running low on cannabis, proving once again that there is no way for a single non-profit producer to meet the statewide medicinal demand.

This time, however, SFINM says the Department of Health is doing something about it.

"The Department of Health is aware of this urgent situation and is working to issue a second producer license," SFINM's site tells its clients.

SFR received a screen capture of SFINM's password-protected site from an anonymous client late Thursday evening. We have not yet received confirmation of this information from the health department. (Update, Oct 2: Acting program coordinator is out until Oct 6, so we probably won't see movement *that* soon.)

In August, SFINM was completely out of stock and told clients it would resume distribution (with a new strain, "Big Buddha's Cheese," no less) in October. Now October's here and some Santa Fe patients will wait until November.

Citing "overwhelming demand," SFINM has stopped accepting orders and canceled most of its October delivery schedule:

The Albuquerque delivery scheduled for October 17 has been pushed back to October 31.

The Santa Fe delivery scheduled for October 24 has been pushed back to November 7.

The Alamogordo delivery also scheduled for October 24 is "expected" to arrive on schedule.

Here's SFINM's big caveat and finger-point: "Unfortunately there may be many times that all items are out of stock. We are sorry for the inconvenience, but the law limits the amount we can produce."

In 2007, the New Mexico Legislature passed a law allowing the DOH to set up a medical cannabis program. For the dispensary aspect, DOH decided to go with a non-profit licensing system, limiting each producer to 95 plants.

So far, the DOH has only approved one producer of the 21 producer applications it has received. There are more than 540 card-carrying medical cannabis patients in New Mexico, only a fraction of which are permitted to grow for themselves.