Ankeny Legislative Forum — March 14, 2015

Audio from March 14, 2015

Anke­ny Cham­ber Leg­isla­tive Forum — March 14, 2015

MODERATOR: Yes, sir.

LAURA JUMPER’S DAD: For­give me if I don’t phrase this ques­tion right, but it has to do with the impasse on cannabis oil. You know I’m new to this and I’ve got a daugh­ter who’s very sick and we think this could help her. And I know there’s been, I think there’s anoth­er bill that was pro­posed, and you can own it in the state of Iowa, you just can’t… I don’t know if you can own it, if you can’t trans­port it, and you can’t get it into the state. So it seems just kind of like a bot­tle neck of, you know that last bil­l’s kind of inef­fec­tive.

MODERATOR: So, the ques­tion is what’s the sta­tus of cannabis oil. What is the impasse, and where do you see it going? Sound rea­son­able?

LAURA JUMPER’S DAD: Yeah.

SENATOR JACK WHITVER: Yeah, so last year we did pass a bill that legal­ized some of the cannabis oil for a very lim­it­ed num­ber of peo­ple. That bill, frankly, I have one of our biggest advo­cates from the area Carl Olsen’s back here that has been big on this issue. I don’t know if he would agree, but I would say that I don’t think that bill was thought out as well as it should have been. And it does­n’t do what it was intend­ed to do. We passed it at 3 in the morn­ing the last day of the ses­sion. I believe that, and I’ve been open mind­ed but cau­tious on this issue. But I believe that before we expand it, which is what the bill in the Sen­ate that was pro­posed I think last week, expands it great­ly, I believe we need to fix what we have and make sure that it’s work­able. This is an issue that you real­ly need the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment and the state gov­ern­ment work­ing togeth­er. Because what we told par­ents like your­self last year is, sure you can own it in Iowa, but you have to go to Col­orado or Cal­i­for­nia to buy it and then you can bring it back, but once you bring it back you cross fed­er­al, or state lines, which is a fed­er­al crime. And so what we passed I don’t believe can help any­one. And we need to find a solu­tion with that and I think, frankly, it prob­a­bly starts with the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment and what they’re doing. Per­son­al­ly, I want to see more research before we blow that chap­ter wide open with a lot more.

REPRESENTATIVE JOHN LANDEN: It’s my opin­ion that you need to be able to go to a phar­ma­cy and get a pre­scrip­tion filled.

MODERATOR: Kevin?

REPRESENTATIVE KEVIN KOESTER: I vot­ed for that at 3 in the morn­ing on May 1, 2014. The access, for gov­ern­ment to restrict what could be legal in a way that would help a child is a real­ly tough issue. The slip­pery slope is where it goes from there, in terms of, “Should we serve it in school lunch?” Alright, I’m get­ting a lit­tle rad­i­cal with it, but I’ve been out of state in every direc­tion you can go with my daugh­ter that I ref­er­ence, hav­ing a dilem­ma, because of her birth defect, because you’ve got to lis­ten to the best sources you can to fig­ure out which surgery to do and what to do. And gov­ern­ment bet­ter not get in my way. What am I going to do for my daugh­ter? And at the same time, the bill we passed sat­is­fied some very impor­tant enthu­si­asts for this thing last year because we mis­un­der­stood how it would work. So, I agree with the com­ment that it did noth­ing help­ful to advance its pur­pose. It needs to be looked at, but in this very build­ing is the Anke­ny Sub­stance Abuse Project which looks real­ly hard at avoid­ing peo­ple get­ting into addic­tion around irre­spon­si­ble behav­ior when we cod­dle human nature to serve cannabis in school lunch and I’m going to do what I can to keep that from hap­pen­ing.

MODERATOR: So, just to con­firm, the ques­tion about school lunch­es was rhetor­i­cal and not a state­ment of sup­port, then?

REPRESENTATIVE KEVIN KOESTER: Oh, I for­got that we were record­ing. That’s new. These record­ings are new. I’m not used to this.