Long Silence and Unpublished Article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.

Iowa Rep­re­sen­ta­tives Ako Abdul-Samad and Ruth Ann Gaines

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.