In May 2014, just before the Florida Legislature passed the state’s first medical marijuana law, then-state House Reps. Matt Gaetz and Jason Brodeur teamed up to add a provision to the bill forcing any company that wanted to grow and sell cannabis in Florida to also hire a physician as medical director.
One week later, records show, one of their friends — Orlando hand doctor Jason Pirozzolo, who had been on the floor of the state House that day — started a new consulting business providing medical directors to cannabis companies.
It was an entrance onto the ground floor of the medical marijuana industry in Florida, a business that helped propel Pirozzolo from secondary political player popular with a handful of Republican members in the state House of Representatives to successful entrepreneur and major GOP fundraiser who personally flew future Gov. Ron DeSantis around the state and whose fundraisers drew politicians from across Florida to his 5,000-square-foot home in Winter Garden.
It’s also part of how Pirozzolo became so personally close with Gaetz — now a member of Congress — that the two of them would be part of an intimate group that traveled to The Bahamas in 2018, on a trip that investigators are now scrutinizing for alleged violations of sex-trafficking laws.
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