I’ve always said that medical marijuana is a beautiful thing. If I believe that all people have a right to use cannabis, then of course sick people have the same right and should be given the first place in line.
I’ve also said that I hate the line “I’m a patient, not a criminal” because that defines me, the healthy person, as a criminal. I cannot accept that a medical marijuana user sharing a joint with me equals a “patient” and a “criminal”. It’s the same joint, so how is my relative healthiness a crime?
Medical marijuana is a double-edged sword to me. It has been invaluable in opening up people’s minds about cannabis and its uses. It has afforded the kind of political victories for legalization that no other strategy has (and sorry, medical folks who dislike “legalizers”, medical marijuana is legalization.) It has, without a doubt, saved tens of thousands of lives and made hundreds of thousands of lives more bearable.
However, I fear that the medical marijuana strategy may have outlived its usefulness. The medical marijuana bills this year in Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, New Hampshire, and now an Arizona initiative are becoming more restrictive. After a dozen years of medical marijuana success, defined as “the sky didn’t fall when we legalized marijuana for sick people”, bills and initiatives should be getting more relaxed, not stricter; more inclusive, not less; and more conditions covered, not fewer. With polls consistently showing mainstream support increasing in states with medical marijuana and holding steady in the states without, medical marijuana bills and initiatives should be getting better, not worse.
What I fear is that the public’s mindset is moving from “marijuana is a deadly addictive gateway drug whose users should be punished” to “marijuana is a powerful medicine that should be used only under strict controls and supervision”. The most recent bills take away the right of a patient to grow their own medicine, substituting instead requirements that medicine come only from dispensaries over which the state maintains a monopoly. They’ve pared down the list of “qualifying conditions” to the point where only the gravest ill, the terminal cases with less than six month to live, who’ve tried and had no success with all the other pharmaceutical drugs, only they have any access. This upcoming Arizona initiative will even electronically track how much medical cannabis a patient purchases and require criminal background checks and fingerprinting that will be forwarded to the FBI!
As fewer and fewer patients qualify for medical cannabis under new, tighter laws, pharmaceutical companies continue to derive and patent cannabinoid compounds and prepare them for dose-regulated delivery by spray, inhaler, cream, and pill. They’ve used their lobbying power for decades to oppose nature’s finest medicine, the biggest threat to their market for benzodiazepenes, NSAIDs, and opioids, because they couldn’t slap a bar code and a 250,000% markup on pot. Soon they will be able to provide all these patients with all the benefits of medical cannabis, but without the pesky “high” and the ability to thwart their profits by growing it themselves.
(Huffington Post) According to USA Today in 2005, there were 1,274 registered pharmaceutical lobbyists in Washington, D.C. — more than two for every member of Congress. In 2003, $143 million was spent on lobbying activities by the Pharmaceutical industry. There are more lobbyists from pharmaceutical than any other industry trying to bend legislators’ ears.
This is big business, and that means that your health care is not in the hands of people who really want to help you, but in the hands of people who view you as a market.
Caveat emptor. You expect to beware in a used car lot. But buying a lemon auto is not nearly as likely to kill you as prescription medicine. Approximately 43,000 people died in car crashes in the U.S. in 2004, and the rate has been declining every year since. 100,000 people die in the U.S. every year from properly prescribed and properly administered prescription drugs, according to the Journal of the American Medical Association. The Florida Medical Examiners concluded that three times more people die from prescription medicine as die from illegal drugs.
What I fear is dispensaries becoming pharmacies and cannabis becoming another pharmaceutical and those lobbyists turning that $143 million toward enacting horribly restrictive medical marijuana laws that preserve their profits by banning home growing. Medical marijuana is beginning to steer marijuana law reform toward treating cannabis like codeine and away from treating cannabis like Coors Light. Whether you and I are busted because we’re “dopers smoking an illegal drug” or because we’re “recreational prescription cannabis abusers”, we’re still busted.
The beauty of medical marijuana is that people can cheaply and easily care for themselves. That’s also threatening to the health care model as it is run today, because cannabis violates that need for the middlemen and bureaucracy to receive treatment. I don’t need to see the doctor every so often to have him re-approve my prescription and I don’t need to see the pharmacist to fill it up. I can grow it and use it when I need it. It can’t kill me so I can’t take too much. It can’t addict me so I don’t need supervision. It doesn’t alter my perceptions and actions to the point that I need strict regulation. (In a sense I liken it to Martin Luther nailing up his protest of the Catholic Church to the church door on Halloween of 1517 – we don’t need intermediaries, we can find our salvation ourselves!)
But now we’re seeing these new bills and initiatives requiring more visits with the doctor, requiring the cannabis to come from dispensaries, and strictly documenting how much is to be used. Cannabis is being forced to fit into the paradigm of health care for profit with all the intermediaries, bureaucracy, markups, and restrictions. Once it is locked into the health insurance – pharmaceutical – medical complex, legalization for you and me will be farther away than ever.
This is why I think the next eighteen months are crucial in marijuana law reform. We’ve never had higher support for legalization, in part due to the economy. A state needs to break through with legalization for you and me, before the economy begins to recover, before cannabis pharmaceuticals gain widespread approval, before a half-dozen more states enact increasingly restrictive medical marijuana laws, and before cannabis becomes so ingrained in the public’s mind as a medicine that we can’t get them to accept it as a social intoxicant.
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I agree with your point, Radical Russ, that marijuana, having long been discriminated against, is not going to suddenly get special, favorable, tax treatment.
But I think that ED may be making a strong point if he thinks that MJ just doesn’t have the strong social harms that are supposed to be the justification for “sin taxes.”
Most of our problem is that the beer-drinking tradition in America is stronger than the pot-smoking tradition.
Why don’t we offer an olive branch?
Why don’t we get into a coalition with the beer-drinkers–instead of a pissing match? (Besides, how are you going to win a pissing match against a man who just chugged a 24-case of Bud Light?)
Why don’t we offer to *lower* the alcohol tax in exchange for a rather higher tax on legal pot? All of a sudden, the beer-drinkers and pot-smokers will be united in a pro-fun coalition. Surely, pro-fun has to be the majority in one of our 50 wonderful states. right? Right?
A man can dream, anyway…
Because marijuana, unlike every other crop in existence in America today, will be the only commodity bought and sold in America where there will be absolutely no taxation on the transaction and no licensure or regulation for the commercial producers and sellers.
Somehow ED thinks legal marijuana wouldn’t be like legal artichokes or legal carrots or legal potatoes, which have regulations controlling how the farmers may grow it and taxes on the sale of it.
Grow up, ED. When marijuana is re-legalized, it will be taxed, just like everything else. But just like you can go buy some artichoke seeds and plant some in your home garden, and harvest them and eat them without any taxes or interference (except the sales tax you paid on the seeds), you’ll be able to do the same with cannabis. But if you want to convert your whole yard into a large-scale artichoke farm and sell your artichokes at the farmer’s market, then you’re going to have to follow some government regulation and pay some more taxes. Just like cannabis will be taxed and regulated.
Now, if you want to have a discussion about “sin taxes” and whether cannabis should be taxed more than other crops, you’ve got a valid point (I may even agree; I think cannabis taxes should be less than alcohol or tobacco because cannabis doesn’t cause the social harm). Or if you want to discuss whether legalization initiatives should have the taxation directly in the text, rather than just making initiatives that legalize while assuming once passed, natural taxation and regulation would be promulgated or cannabis would just fall under some existing agricultural category of taxation, there’s a valid argument to make. But please, cease this fantasy that somehow marijuana will be legalized completely free of taxation and regulation; it’s a specious argument.
Ah, but are the medical needs of the few justification enough to squelch the civil rights of the many?
(There is a similar battle going on in the battle for recognition of gay people’s right to marry. Some say we should support the incrementalism of civil unions, for at least half a loaf is better than none. Some say cut the push for non-discrimination laws for the transgendered so it can get passed for the gays and lesbians.)
I, for one, am tired of being told that I’m a criminal and I need to shut up and accept being a criminal for just a little while longer, that I need to tolerate going without a joint just a while longer, lest I mess up the chance for a cancer patient to have a joint with her chemo. It feels a bit like extortion, don’t you think? “How could you do anything to deny a suffering person?” is the line we used to use against the prohibitionists, now it’s being used against us “legalizers”.
Say somebody put forth an initiative that only lets a guy with two weeks to live named Chet smoke <5% THC medical marijuana between 2pm-4pm in a locked room with armed guards. Would we have activists saying, "Well, we've got to support the Chet Medical Marijuana bill, because at least it is some movement forward to legalization”? In a sense, every medical marijuana measure is a way of saying, “OK, everybody deserves to be locked up for marijuana, except these few people, because they are sick.” And as that list of “few people” keeps getting shorter and shorter, it is making the list of people whom we think should be locked up longer.
I’m not against any medical marijuana measure; however, I worry about “medicalization” getting locked in and “legalization” being pushed out. Because as these medical marijuana measures get stricter and stricter, they are immunizing the people who would be least likely to be busted and imprisoned even if marijuana remains illegal anyway. Really, if they catch the terminal cancer patient in Arizona with half an ounce of weed NOW, do you think any D.A. will press charges?
What’s being instituted lately is a medical marijuana system that only protects the sickest of the sickest (the ones who’d not likely be prosecuted anyway), underprotects them in terms of medicine allowed (we reduce the law to only the worst cases, then reduce the limits to a point that would only help the best cases), and locks them into the same paradigm of pharmaceutical health care that requires strict doctor supervision and routine visits to a pharmacy to acquire medicine at ridiculously marked-up prices.
I think the mistake in reasoning is trying to compare “the right to a buzz” with “access to medicine”. Why the distinction? That leads to a litmus test as to who’s healthy enough to be locked in jail for choosing to use cannabis. I’m saying that with twelve years of medical marijuana, and now knowing how medically useful it is for stress, anxiety, depression, PTSD, etc., and knowing how superior it is to alcohol as a social relaxant, these medical marijuana laws should be getting bolder, not more timid. If marijuana ends up being solidified as only “medicine” in the public’s mind, then people like me will be looked at like those who chug cough syrup for a “buzz” at best or those who forge Oxycontin scrips at worst.
I’m neither. I’m just a guy who likes to drink a beer on occasion, except it isn’t a beer, it’s a bowl.
If cannabis went through FDA approval, would it be classified as an “over the counter”,”behind the counter”,or prescription drug?
I would say that it’s as safe as an “over the counter” but would have to be a “behind the counter” drug to age restrict it. Compared to OTC drugs it would be hard to justify prescription status. BTC status fits the goal of what NORML has wanted all along. Focus on the fact that cannabis is safer than OTC drugs when debating medical use of cannabis.
Similarly, bills that try to lure support with cash, by taxing consumers who choose to exercise their right to responsibly use cannabis, will impede progress toward the real freedom to which we are all entitled. Ending prohibition should provide all the financial incentive necessary. You should not have to pay a tax to exercise your rights. By supporting measures that include special taxes for consumers of cannabis, you are inviting continued governmental interference and abuse.
Legalize it and leave it alone.
So, if you would like to be free of unreasonable government interference, then please tell the purveyors of the “legalize it and tax it” bills that you are down with the “legalize it” part, but insist that they remove the “tax it” part before you support their legislation.
-ED
Wonderful analogy to Martin Luther
Exactly the way I have been feeling and for the same reason. Most of the new bills wouldn’t even cover me and I have daily nerve pain/back injury from competitive sport. It drives me crazy to think that we’ve made it this far with the public, yet these politicians are still finding ways to screw people who need their medicine and the rest who are recreational users. I actually consider myself to be a user of cannabis for both medicine and recreation. If suddenly my back was completely healed, would I still use cannabis? Yes, I would.
See my testimony at the MA State House, I’m the last speaker in the video, linked below. The medical bill in MA has 80%+ voter support, yet as the days go by, I’m less and less optimistic it will pass or survive without getting gutted like the others have.
I foresee a big problem here. Obama says cannabis is no different than morphine. If that’s his view on it then no one can get it unless they are dying or maybe after surgery for a month.
Our head of the ONDCP said the biggest issue facing America in terms of drug abuse is presciptions like Oxycontin. They want to divert to treatments and Drug Courts instead of jail, treat it like a health care issue.
This could be a setup to make money off of anyone without a prescription to cannabis in the future because then basically no one could get a prescription or grow it and they could bust everyone again.
Instead of sending to people jail for cannabis we will be sending them to treatment and labeling people as drug addicts and prescription medication abusers. Maybe they won’t get healthcare, or they have to pay extra.
I see the government thinking REALLY hard, as hard as it possibly could, about taking this medical marijuana thing and running with it and the money.
It seems to me what Obama said about morphine and what Kerlikowski said about the health problem of prescription abuse are premonitions.
I disagree.
While I certainly support relegalization, I believe we must consider the urgency of medical access. Just because the opposition to MMJ has been successful in weakening recent medical cannabis laws doesn’t mean it’s a lost battle. Most of us can tolerate doing without a joint for recreation, but some of us are sick, disabled, or dying, and shouldn’t have to needlessly suffer for lack of access to medical cannabis.
Getting a buzz in a responsible, appropriate way should be everyone’s right, and the debate must carry on, but not if it means more delays for those medically in need in 37 states and D.C.
It’s a matter of priorities. Is the right to a buzz more urgent than access to medicine?
Too many people are in pain every minute of every day of their lives. Pain which can be lessened with marijuana. Are you saying we need to tell them they need to put their needs on the back burner while we work out this legalization thing?
Just one side-thought: Any chance the opposition is fueling this debate? Divide and conquer?
Or if they guy who stole your trailer also had some weed on him, maybe the stealing charge would be dropped all together for prosecution of the “worse crime” Hope you get it back buddy.
Nicely put Russ,
I do believe your instincts are correct about this; the powers that be will seize on this medical issue to continue prohibition of a harmless plant. In the respect that cannabis helps relax people, ALL cannabis use is medical in nature.
We must all put pressure on our representatives, all the way up to President Obama (who claims to want transparency in government)to take this God-given plant off that stupid schedule altoghether.
could this be our two steps back?
So throughout prohibition when ever we made progress it was always followed by major steps back. In ’69 the Marijuana Tax Act was ruled unconstitutional followed by the Controlled Substance Act a year later and Nixon’s war on drugs in ’72. In ’78 Randall sued the US which created the CIND program. That was closed a little over a decade later by Bush sr. This latest movement via the states has looked very promising but for the last couple of years I’ve been wondering “what is going to be our two steps back?”
At first I thought it was going to be the supreme court ruling that fed laws trump state law there by voiding state mmj laws. It didn’t and I was relieved
Lately I’ve been thinking that legalization attempts in California and Massachusetts might not work as well because farms and companies wouldn’t pick up on it for fear of federal law. And lack of resounding success would be used against us. I’m still afraid this could happen but if the medical movement really back fires as much as you suggest then perhaps that’ll be our two steps back.
or I suppose both could happen…
Well finaly it has been said, I have thought that for years now. That the medical side could kill any hope of ending prohibition and instead put marijuana on the Rite-Aid back shelf and doctors would keep a tight hold like they do with pain meds!
I have always supported the medical side being Im disabled with mutiple problems but I feel its going to backfire and take it completely out of our hands!
So, I second or third this statment and agreee we need to re think the next year or so and push the “end prohibition all together” side and be weary of tighly regulated medical laws that are written for cops more than any type of basic reform.
P.s. It makes me sick that today, fathers day, I wake up and smoked a fattie outside then I see someone stole my trailer, $700 gone! Yet if I had walked out with that same joint while the cop was here taking my info down, he would have arresed me just like the guy that stole my trailer should be. How does that work, that im a criminal just like a theif? Its just wrong, we hurt no one, take nothing from anyone and yet we would get a longer sentence than “trailer stealing guy”, sad, real sad!
No, more related to seeing these awful bills and initiatives that have come up this year. There is no new direction for NORML to move; for 39 years we have always been about ending adult marijuana prohibition and allowing for the responsible use and cultivation of marijuana for adults.
Part of that mission includes support of medical marijuana laws, but only inasmuch as they represent as path toward legalization for all. If they start to become an impediment to legalization (as I predict), then maybe we have to re-evaluate that portion of the strategy.
This sounds like a real breakthrough in thinking. I have to wonder if this new perspective is somehow related to your recent fraternizing with the NORML bigshots in Colorado. Will NORML be moving in a new direction soon?
Perhaps by focusing on the medical aspects of cannabis, those with the most dire need of this herb have been given priority. However, the rights of responsible religious and recreational users have not received much attention or respect.
One solution might be to declare cannabis, because of its long history of safety, to be an over-the-counter drug, no longer requiring a prescription, medical card, or $X00 fee for use. Include the right to grow the herb for medicinal purposes, and not-for-profit transfer of the product – to ensure availabiilty. The feds have stated that they will respect state laws for medical use. Smirk. Wouldn’t that be something?
Yes, it would, but as cool as that would be, ED believes that there is an even better way.
-ED
Hear, hear!!!
Hear, all ye good people, hear what this brilliant and eloquent speaker has to say!