April Ankeny Legislative Forum

Audio from April 11, 2015

MODERATOR: Sir.

CARL OLSEN: Yes, Sen­a­tor Whitver, can you tell me how you’re going to vote on the med­ical cannabis pro­gram and what we might need to do to get the House to adopt that?

SENATOR JACK WHITVER: The cur­rent bill as is that great­ly, in my opin­ion, great­ly expands what we did last year, I would not be sup­port­ive of at this time. I’m more inter­est­ed, I think there’s a right way… The last year we passed a bill that said the state of Iowa believes mar­i­jua­na has med­i­c­i­nal val­ue. If that is true, and that’s what we think as a state, I think there is a prop­er way to do it going for­ward. So, mov­ing from sched­ule 1 to sched­ule 2, some­thing like that would be of much more inter­est to me than just blow­ing open that code chap­ter. It’s impor­tant to me that what­ev­er we do with med­ical mar­i­jua­na is test­ed and we have the research behind it. And right now that bill, I don’t think it gives us that oppor­tu­ni­ty to do that. So, I just think there is a process to go through that we need to go through. It’s not as fast as a lot of peo­ple that are advo­cat­ing for it would like, but I thinks it’s our role to do it the right way.

CARL OLSEN: Is there any chance of fix­ing it before it goes to the House?

SENATOR JACK WHITVER: It depends. It was sup­posed to go for a vote Wednes­day. It did­n’t, so I don’t know when it’s going to come up. It could be Mon­day, I guess it could be Tues­day. We’re work­ing on it, but I don’t know if it can be changed to the point where I can vote for it.

REPRESENTATIVE JOHN LANDON: We were promised in the House when this bill passed last year at 2 o’clock in the morn­ing on the last day that we would have time to run a test from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Iowa, that we would have absolute­ly sci­en­tif­ic evi­dence and results before we were ever asked to expand or do any­thing with it again. And I don’t know how this request before the test has even got­ten its legs under it hon­ors that promise that we were made in the House. So, I would tell you that I’m very inter­est­ed in that test and the sci­en­tif­ic data behind it to make sure. And I would like to see it done through phar­ma­cies where a pre­scrip­tion can be made to an indi­vid­ual and they can go get what they absolute­ly know is the right lev­el of med­ica­tion. And I’ll give you an exam­ple, today if you go to the phar­ma­cy you can buy cer­tain lev­els of maybe ibupro­fen, you know what’s in an aspirin, you know for sure. But you don’t know that with cannabis oil because there’s no stan­dards for man­u­fac­tur­ing. The process is unde­fined and before that hap­pens I think there’s a lot of things that need to be put into place for that. And so, for us just to prove what­ev­er, who’s going to be respon­si­ble for unin­tend­ed con­se­quences if things hap­pen that aren’t med­ical­ly proven yet? And that’s the ques­tion that we all deal with and I don’t for a sec­ond want any­one to suf­fer for any rea­son. But I do think that some­times we look at issue like this and we can do more harm than we can good for folks. We want to make sure that every step that we’re tak­ing helps peo­ple and is the right thing to do.

CARL OLSEN: How do you explain twen­ty-three states mov­ing ahead with some­thing like that?

REPRESENTATIVE JOHN LANDON: You know I can’t explain Wash­ing­ton DC.