The New York Assembly health committee advanced two pieces of legislation Monday that would expand the state’s medical marijuana program.

The bills, sponsored by Assemblyman Dick Gottfried, who chairs the chamber’s health committee and is one of the architects of the state’s so-called Compassionate Care Act, would eliminate the requirement that the registered organizations charged with growing and distributing marijuana be vertically integrated and would double the amount of companies in the state’s program.

Gottfried’s bills would allow medical marijuana companies to expand the program from the four companies that are currently operating in the state, to eight.

Both bills were reported out of committee, readying them for a vote on the Assembly floor. Three members of the committee voted against them: Republicans Andy Goodell and Andrew Garbarino, as well as Democrat Sandy Galef.

“We have a program that is tied in up restrictions that make really no economic or political or public safety sense,” Gottfried said during a medical marijuana rally outside the Senate chambers after the committee meeting ended. “We treat medical marijuana with restrictions that nobody would tolerate if we tried to apply them for any of the other controlled substances that are prescribed hundreds of thousands of times a day in New York.” [Read more at Politico New York]