Long Silence and Unpublished Article

Par­don the long silence.  I’ve been busy work­ing on my state and fed­er­al appeals.  The state case is fin­ished and I’m wait­ing for the Iowa Supreme Court rul­ing. My final brief in the fed­er­al appeal is due next week and I’m work­ing on it now.  Back in Feb­ru­ary, the Polk Coun­ty Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty asked me to write an arti­cle for their blog.  Appar­ent­ly, they did­n’t like it, so I’m pub­lish­ing it here.  Enjoy!

As an advo­cate for mar­i­jua­na law reform, the past cou­ple of years have been very excit­ing for me as an Iowa Demo­c­rat.  In 2009, the Amer­i­can Med­ical Asso­ci­a­tion rec­om­mend­ed that mar­i­jua­na be fed­er­al­ly reclas­si­fied as a med­i­cine.  The fol­low­ing year, in 2010, Sen­a­tor Joe Bolk­com (D. Iowa City) and Sen­a­tor Jack Hatch (D. Des Moines) held a pub­lic hear­ing on their pro­pos­al to make mar­i­jua­na legal for med­ical use here in Iowa.  Short­ly after that Iowa Sen­ate hear­ing, the Iowa Board of Phar­ma­cy (which is autho­rized by law to eval­u­ate marijuana’s med­ical effi­ca­cy in Iowa) vot­ed unan­i­mous­ly that mar­i­jua­na has med­ical effi­ca­cy and should be legal­ized for med­ical use.  Not long after, the Iowa Med­ical Soci­ety joined in their sup­port.  Also, dur­ing that same peri­od of time, the Des Moines Reg­is­ter Poll showed that 64% of Iowans sup­port the legal­iza­tion of mar­i­jua­na for med­i­cine.

Our Iowa Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty State Plat­form has called for the legal­iza­tion of mar­i­jua­na for med­ical use con­sis­tent­ly for the past 14 years, as does the report of the Polk Coun­ty plat­form com­mit­tee that was approved on Feb. 11, 2012, for sub­mis­sion to the Polk Coun­ty Con­ven­tion del­e­gates on March 10, 2012.  This year, anoth­er Iowa Demo­c­rat, Rep. Bruce Hunter (D. Des Moines), intro­duced a bill to legal­ize med­ical use of mar­i­jua­na.

This has not gone unno­ticed by the Governor’s Office of Drug Con­trol Pol­i­cy (ODCP) which intro­duced a bill to main­tain marijuana’s sta­tus as a con­trolled sub­stance with no accept­ed med­ical use in the Unit­ed States.  Mar­i­jua­na has accept­ed med­ical use in 16 states and the Dis­trict of Colum­bia (with Con­gres­sion­al approval).   The ODCP bill does noth­ing, because mar­i­jua­na is cur­rent­ly not accept­ed for med­ical use in Iowa.  The Repub­li­can bill is noth­ing but sym­bol­ism of their hatred for sick and injured Iowans.  On Feb. 6, House Repub­li­cans held a vote on their bill in the House Com­mit­tee on Pub­lic Safe­ty which was opposed by 5 Iowa Democ­rats, Rep. Ako Abdul-Samad (D. Des Moines), Rep. Ruth Ann Gaines (D. Des Moines), Rep. Deb­o­rah L. Berry (D. Water­loo), Rep. Mary Wolfe (D. Clin­ton), and Rep. Rick Olson (D. Des Moines).

What is a com­mit­tee on law enforce­ment doing telling us what we should or should not accept as med­i­cine in Iowa?  There are Repub­li­cans on the Iowa Board of Phar­ma­cy as well as mem­bers of the Iowa Med­ical Soci­ety.  ODCP is led by a for­mer radio announc­er with a degree in jour­nal­ism, and that office doles out grant mon­ey to law enforce­ment and sub­stance abuse treat­ment pro­grams.  We need to let med­ical pro­fes­sion­als decide med­ical use and let law enforce­ment pro­fes­sion­als and sub­stance abuse treat­ment pro­fes­sion­als deal with unau­tho­rized use.  It seems sim­ple, but appar­ent­ly not for Repub­li­cans.