Who I am, what I do, and why I do it

There has been some con­fu­sion late­ly about who I am, what I do, and why I do it. So, what’s new? I thought a for­mal post was in order.

Some peo­ple think show­ing their leg­is­la­tors med­ical evi­dence is a good idea. In fact, they think it’s such a good idea that they think I should do it. Here’s my prob­lem with that.

FIRST, I’m not a med­ical expert and nei­ther are my state leg­is­la­tors. My state sen­a­tor is an attor­ney. My state rep­re­sen­ta­tive is a school admin­is­tra­tor. My U.S. Sen­a­tor is an attor­ney. My U.S. rep­re­sen­ta­tive owns a seed com­pa­ny. There’s not a med­ical expert in the bunch.

SECOND, the Iowa Con­trolled Sub­stances Act has a detailed pro­ce­dure for eval­u­at­ing med­ical evi­dence, in Iowa Code Chap­ter 124 Sec­tion 201. The leg­is­la­tors made this law requir­ing the Iowa Board of Phar­ma­cy to eval­u­ate med­ical evi­dence based on 8 fac­tors. If the leg­is­la­tors had con­sid­ered them­selves experts on med­ical evi­dence, why would they have assigned this duty to the Iowa Board of Phar­ma­cy? This same law requires the Iowa Board of Phar­ma­cy to advise the leg­is­la­tors on what the med­ical evi­dence says.

So, clear­ly, the place to present the evi­dence is to the Iowa Board of Phar­ma­cy. I pre­sent­ed the med­ical evi­dence to the Iowa Board of Phar­ma­cy in 2009, and in 2010 the board ruled unan­i­mous­ly that mar­i­jua­na is med­i­cine. The board advised the leg­is­la­ture to change the law.

What needs to hap­pen now is that I need to con­tin­ue putting pres­sure on the Iowa Board of Phar­ma­cy to do its job by updat­ing the leg­is­la­tors and I need to put pres­sure on the leg­is­la­tors to obey the law they wrote. Going direct­ly to the leg­is­la­tors with med­ical evi­dence is con­trary to the way this law was writ­ten. What I need to be telling leg­is­la­tors is that I expect them to obey the law they wrote.