New Jersey medical marijuana has “a good chance” of passing Assembly

(CentralJersey.com) Legislation that would make New Jersey the 14th state to legalize the use of marijuana for medicinal purposes has a good chance of passing the state Assembly and being signed into law, according to Assemblyman Reed Gusciora, who is among the bill’s sponsors.

Entitled the “New Jersey Compassionate Use Medical Marijuana Act”, the bill would allow patients suffering from debilitating illnesses to receive prescriptions entitling them to bags of the drug at special “alternative centers,” to be established across the state.

The bill, which was released from the Assembly Health and Senior Services Committee Thursday, will likely face a vote in the full Assembly within the next year, according to Mr. Gusciora, D-Princeton, a strong supporter of the bill.

Previous versions of the bill would have allowed patients to grow their own plants, like in other states, but those provisions have been eliminated. Assembly members tightened restrictions by requiring a prescription from a primary care physician, which will cut down on the practice of “doctor shopping”, where persons approach numerous doctors to receive an illegitimate prescription for a particular drug.

Also, the latest bill makes the list of eligible patients more restrictive.

Patients suffering from “general chronic pain” would have been eligible for medical marijuana under the form of the bill that passed in the state Senate, but Assembly members revised the bill’s language to be more ailment-specific.

The bill now includes a list of diseases like seizure disorder, HIV and HIV complications, AIDS, cancer resulting in severe pain and any terminal cancer, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, and other diseases to establish eligibility for a marijuana prescription.

Any medical marijuana bill that passes in New Jersey is better than no medical marijuana bill passed in New Jersey.  That said, in pandering to law enforcement this bill has been watered-down to put undue burden on patients.  My analysis below… and let’s hope this is like Vermont, where they passed a restrictive law and then amended it to be better later.

First, a patient can’t grow their own medicine or have a caregiver grow it for them, but they must purchase it only from “alternative centers”.  So, how potent will that marijuana be?  What strains will be grown?  You do know that a strain that works for nausea may not work for pain, right?  So, is New Jersey ready to supply multiple strains of marijuana at varying potency levels, or is this going to be like the one-size-fits-all seeds-and-stems-included, low-potency schwag that Dr. ElSohly and the University of Mississippi supply to the four remaining federal medical marijuana patients?

Second, how much will this medicine cost?  If experience is a guide, California dispensaries are selling medicine at $10-$15/gram or $45/eighth.  I know patients who go through a quarter ounce per day, because they need to cook with it.  Let’s see, that’s $2,700 in marijuana expenses per month – a patient could buy lights and ballasts and equip a grow room with that kind of money and then spend maybe one-fifth that amount in electricity and supplies per month to grow a supply of medicine — the exact strain and potency of medicine that the patient needs, too.

Third, the reason this “doctor shopping” goes on is because a great number of primary care physicians still believe reefer madness about medical marijuana and won’t recommend marijuana for their patients.  Then there are those who believe in marijuana’s efficacy, but cannot recommend because of workplace policies at their clinic, from their HMO, or from their insurance.  In states like Oregon where 3/4ths of doctors won’t recommend and medical marijuana clinics are allowed, a doctor reviews the medical records from the primary care physician, performs an examination, verifies the qualifying condition, and recommends marijuana, so in essence, two doctors have verified that a patient suffers from a qualifying condition.

Fourth, the bill requires the marijuana sold through these state dispensaries to be tracked in a database.  Yes, just what every medical marijuana patient needs, a record of their violation of federal controlled substance laws that could be used as evidence at a trial.

Fifth, most patients who could benefit from medical marijuana use for treating chronic pain are left out.  Here are the newly-amended qualifying conditions from bill A804:

“Debilitating medical condition” is defined as:  (1) seizure disorder, including epilepsy, intractable skeletal muscular spasticity or glaucoma that is resistant to conventional medical therapy;

…which leads me to believe if you have glaucoma that is responding to an expensive, side-effect-laden pharmaceutical treatment, you can’t have cheap, safe marijuana instead.

(2) positive status for human immunodeficiency virus, acquired immune deficiency syndrome, or cancer that results in severe or chronic pain, severe nausea or vomiting, cachexia, or wasting syndrome; (3) amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, multiple sclerosis, terminal cancer; or (4) any other medical condition or its treatment that is approved by DHSS by regulation.

…so no medical marijuana if you have migraines, fused discs in your spine, skeletal pain like from the rare disease Irv Rosenfeld has, phantom pain from amputation, or any other pain that isn’t caused by cancer.  You can just go on downing expensive liver-killing addictive opioids whose side effects are often worse than the pain.

Sixth, the permissable amount of marijuana a patient can acquire at the dispensary is one ounce in thirty days:

A physician is to provide written instructions for a registered patient to present to an alternative treatment center, at the time of pickup or delivery, concerning the total amount of usable marijuana that a patient may be dispensed, in weight, in a 30-day period, which amount shall not exceed one ounce.  If no amount is noted, the maximum amount that may be dispensed at one time is one ounce.  A physician may issue multiple written instructions at one time authorizing the patient to receive a total of up to a 90-day supply…

…so these patients, the ones who are going to need the largest supply of medicine since you’ve narrowed it down to the sickest of the sick, can only get one ounce to last a month.  Their doctor can write three separate recommendations, post-dated so the patient can pick up this month’s marijuana and the next two months, but that means that a patient is going to have to visit their doctor — and pay those doctor bills for the appointment — four times per year.  Not bad if you’ve got a job, insurance, and a $15 co-pay, but pretty tough when you’re a multiple sclerosis patient who can’t work and lives on a fixed disability income (and private health insurance, for an unemployed MS patient with pre-existing conditions? Ha ha ha!)

Seventh, I see nothing in this bill protecting a patient’s right to work.  Now, granted, most of the severe conditions allowed for in this bill would prevent most people from working, but not all.  Lots of people with epilepsy, glaucoma, HIV/AIDS, and cancer have jobs, but not for long if they are popped for a random pee test.

All these hoops to jump through because New Jersey legislators are afraid some healthy person might get high.  Until marijuana is legalized for all of us, patients will always face high prices, bureaucratic hurdles, pathetic possession limits, job discrimination, and lack of choice.