WWire | Pot Poll: Support for Medical Marijuana is High
As reported in this week’s WW, Hoffman Construction general counsel Dan Harmon has been touring the state to stoke support for a new law making it easier for employers to fire medical-marijuana patients.But based on a new poll paid for by marijuana advocates, Harmon’s PR campaign hasn’t yielded much in the way of public support.
In a statewide poll from Dec. 3-7, 49 percent said they were opposed to Harmon’s proposed changes to the medical-marijuana law. Thirty-two percent said they supported the proposed changes, and 20 percent were unsure.
Anthony Johnson of the local marijuana reform group Voter Power released the results of the poll to WW. He says the phone survey of 500 people, with an error margin of plus or minus 4.4 percent, was done by Portland-based Grove Insight.
According to Johnson, the survey framed the issue like this:
“Current Oregon law does not require employers to accommodate the use of medical marijuana in any workplace. In the upcoming session, legislators may consider amending the law to allow employers to fire or not hire medical-marijuana patients, regardless of where the use of medical marijuana occurs.”
The people of Oregon are very supportive of medical marijuana. 56% of voters passed Measure 67 in 1998, and in the past ten years the program has operated at a surplus. Voters here also turned back attempts to recriminalize marijuana in Oregon. Only the state’s politicians, with their hands in the business lobby and law enforcement campaign contribution cookie jar, seem to feel there’s a problem with medical marijuana.
One of Harmon’s talking points is that there is widespread abuse of the program. He will cite growers who’ve been busted with much more than the statutory limits for registered medical growers. He will cite patients who use marijuana for pain as people who are “faking it” to get high. He will claim that when medical marijuana was proposed in Oregon, it was estimated only 500 people would be on the program when we now have over 20,000.
Yes, there are a few criminals who abuse the auspices of the medical marijuana program to cover their black market operations. There are a few criminals who abuse the Food Stamp program, too – does that mean we need to end Food Stamps because a few people sell them for cash? Every system is bound to have criminals that abuse it; that doesn’t mean we make patients suffer because a few people cheat.
This idea that medical marijuana would only be for 500 near-death patients is a claim only the opponents of medical marijuana seem to recall. The chief petitioner, Dr. Rick Bayer, tells me no such claims were ever made. The Act requires doctors to certify a patient has one of a list of pre-approved conditions; unlike California, Oregon doctors cannot recommend medical marijuana for “any other illness for which marijuana provides relief”.
The problem for medical marijuana opponents, it would seem, is that they can only conceive of cannabis as a “medicine of last resort”. See, they live in a frame where marijuana is an deadly-dangerous, mind-warping, personality-altering, soul-stealing, evil-creating illegal drug. So the only way they can reconcile allowing someone to use it is if they figure the user has nothing left to lose — “he’s dying in a few days anyway; so the evils of the pot can be overlooked.”
So when they see people who look relatively healthy leading productive lives and smoking marijuana for medical purposes, it shorts their circuitry. They’ll reject the patient who uses for chronic pain as someone who’s “faking a backache” or “it’s only a migraine”, not realizing that a cannabis regimen has helped that patient get off addictive and mind-stupefying painkillers. If you’re not emaciated, pale, chemo-bald, or in a wheelchair, these people think you’re just a pothead pulling a legal fast one to get high.
Fortunately, enough people have tried marijuana on their own to know it truly is no big deal and that if a doctor gives the go ahead to use it, who is a lawyer for a construction company to say otherwise?
