Beginning of the legislative process

I attended my precinct cau­cus last night.  We had ten peo­ple.  There was only one plat­form res­o­lu­tion, mine.  I explained that since the last cau­cus I had picked up sup­port from the Des Moines Reg­is­ter (opin­ion poll on Feb­ru­ary 16, 2010, find­ing 64% of Iowans in favor of med­ical mar­i­juana), the Iowa Board of Phar­macy (unan­i­mous rul­ing on Feb­ru­ary 17, 2010, to reclas­sify mar­i­juana as med­i­cine), the Iowa Med­ical Soci­ety, and the Iowa Phar­macy Asso­ci­a­tion.  I explained how I had to sue the Iowa Board of Phar­macy just to get them to con­sider the issue.  One of the precinct mem­bers asked me if I had heard the Office of Drug Con­trol Pol­icy (ODCP) had just filed a bill to keep mar­i­juana clas­si­fied as non-medical.  I responded that I had been on the phone with the ODCP last week and just received an offi­cial response from their office by email the same day as the cau­cus.  The ODCP is bas­ing their opin­ion on a 2006 let­ter from the FDA.  The FDA inter­prets the fed­eral Con­trolled Sub­stances Act, not the Iowa Uni­form Con­trolled Sub­stances Act, so I’m going to sue them for vio­la­tion of state sov­er­eignty.  Grin­spoon v. DEA, 828 F.2d 881, 887 (1st Cir. 1987): “Unlike the CSA sched­ul­ing restric­tions, the FDCA inter­state mar­ket­ing pro­vi­sions do not apply to drugs man­u­fac­tured and mar­keted wholly intrastate. Com­pare 21 U.S.C. § 801(5) with 21 U.S.C. § 321 (b), 331, 355(a). Thus, it is pos­si­ble that a sub­stance may have both an accepted med­ical use and safety for use under med­ical super­vi­sion, even though no one has deemed it nec­es­sary to seek approval for inter­state marketing.”