S.C. Politics Today
Drug testing candidates closer to becoming law

A key [South Carolina] Senate committee moved Tuesday to make drug testing mandatory for all candidates seeking elective public office.

The bill, passed easily by the Senate Judiciary Committee, but only after considerable debate, requires candidates for elective office to submit to a drug screen within 35 days of their election.

“Why don’t we get them to take a lie detector test to say they’ve never been to prostitute?” inquired Sen. Brad Hutto, D-Orangeburg, who questioned the bill’s effectiveness.

The U.S. Supreme Court struck down a Georgia drug test law for elected officials, citing the state’s lack of a historical pattern of such abuse.

“I can support the concept because I’m for a drug-free America,” said Sen. Gerald Malloy, D-Darlington. “But this is a bit of a stretch.”

Yes, drug testing for people who want to run for elected office in South Carolina. Not for people who have been elected; this is even if you wish to run for office. And since drug screening overwhelmingly targets cannabis consumers, they may as well just call this the South Carolina Marijuana Disenfranchisement Act of 2008.

They floated bills like this here in Oregon as well. Had they all passed, no person legally using medical marijuana could have been an elected official, a policeman, a teacher, or work anywhere in state, county, or municipal government.

Commentary from activist Laird Funk here in my home state of Oregon.  Laird was one of the exceptional people who helped to pass Oregon’s Medical Marijuana Act in 1998.  He writes about the contracting, drug rehab, and drug-testing lobbies who are pushing for discriminatory laws that would allow to fire registered users medical cannabis solely for their possession of a medical marijuana card:

NORML.ORG US OR: OPED: The Bulletin Supports Medical Marijuana Discrimination
Fire ‘em all! That is the thrust of your Feb. 25 editorial calling for laws allowing Oregon workers who therapeutically use marijuana to be immediately and arbitrarily fired, regardless of where or when they used their medication. Darkly hinting of problems in the workplace, you see danger in even such basic tasks as driving a car. Clearly you agree with the position of Associated Oregon Industries that the number of Oregonians lawfully registered with the Oregon Medical Marijuana Program is a serious and burdensome problem which actually ranks as an emergency!

Reviewing available information, including the number of accidents caused by therapeutic marijuana-using workers cited by AOI, we find the following: 1998, 0 accidents; 1999, 0; 2000, 0; 2001, 0; 2002, 0; 2003, 0; 2004, 0; 2005, 0; 2006, 0; and from 2007, 0! Yes, there is a story in those numbers, and it has a lesson to be learned - a lesson that fits right in between those we learned from other stories, like Chicken Little, whose sky was falling, and the boy who cried “wolf,” who felt neglected and made up claims of danger.And so it has been that for the last three legislative sessions, AOI’s “Chicken Little,” Don Harmon, has teamed up with a small rotating cast of ditto-heads in the role of the boy who cried “wolf” to call for emergency legislation to deal with the growing problem of therapeutic marijuana-using Oregonians actually having jobs and being productive members of society.

But even they had to answer “none” when asked by Rep. Peter Buckley how many accidents had been caused by those workers. Some emergency!

Each of the ditto-heads prefaced their remarks with claims that they themselves had voted for the Oregon Medical Marijuana Act, but then claimed that the Oregon Medical Marijuana Program had become riddled with fraud and abuse and that the number of registrants was both proof of that claim and a real problem for Oregon employers.

But patient numbers are not evidence of abuse - convictions are.

One thousand, eight hundred convictions a year would be an abuse rate of 10 percent.

But by most accounts there are fewer than 1 percent, or 180 OMMP registrants, annually arrested for violating provisions of the Oregon Medical Marijuana Act and, of course, far fewer convictions. Ninety-nine percent compliance seems OK to me. It is noteworthy that, by law, registrants who are convicted of violations must report that fact to the OMMP and may not be registered as a grower for five years.