Reefer Madness 2007 The people want medical marijuana, but Uncle Sam is hooked on demonizing weed

Reefer Madness 2007
The people want medical marijuana, but Uncle Sam is hooked on demonizing weed

Source: The Scene
Pubdate: October 2007
Website: http://scenenewspaper.com/
Contact: jlundstrom@new.rr.com
Author: Jim Lundstrom
Note: This Month's issue is about marijuana. The cover illustration is a
small pot plant and the text, "IS MY MEDICINE LEGAL YET?"

REEFER MADNESS 2007 THE PEOPLE WANT MEDICAL MARIJUANA, BUT UNCLE SAM IS HOOKED ON DEMONIZING WEED

Someone has been telling lies about Mary J.

Take, for example, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s position paper on medical marijuana (www.usdoj.gov/dea/marijuana_position.html). The lies are so blatant and self-serving that if there were any political leadership in this country, the DEA’s bloated budget would be frozen immediately while it undergoes investigation into whether the public that pays its $2.5 billion budget and employs its 11,000 workers is best served by the agency’s current policies and practices.

The DEA medical marijuana document is so fraught with “Reefer Madness” era lies and obfuscation that it would be laughable were it not coming from a Justice Department agency that wields such unchecked power over the lives of the citizens who pay its bills, and if its regressive policies were not denying a better quality of life for the thousands – and perhaps millions – of Americans who could find relief through legal prescription marijuana.

Oh, you believe what the DEA says, that there is no such thing as medical marijuana, that it’s all just a hippie ploy to legalize recreational use?

Then you must have been living under the same rock as the DEA.

“You see living, breathing, walking, rolling evidence right here,” said wheelchair-bound Jacki Rickert as she and three other medical marijuana patients spoke at the state Capitol during the Sept. 18 introduction of the Jacki Rickert Medical Marijuana Act, a new Assembly medical marijuana bill named for Rickert.

“If you took anyone who is against medical marijuana and made them deal with what Jacki has to deal with for just five minutes, they’d be balled up in a fetal position sobbing uncontrollably,” said Gary Storck, a Madison medical marijuana advocate who works with Rickert in Is My Medicine Legal YET? (a not-for-profit organization created to provide information and education about the therapeutic use of cannabis, www.immly.org). “Jacki is so strong and proud. She hurts but doesn’t show it. That’s why it’s so fitting the act is being named after her.”

Rickert suffers from Ehlers-Danlos syndrome and advanced reflex sympathetic dystrophy. She is also a stroke survivor. Many drugs have been prescribed for her conditions over the years, even Marinol, the expensive Food and Drug Administration-approved synthetic marijuana pill that many patients complain does not provide the relief of the real herb, and often has nasty side effects.

“I took Marinol with a very open mind,” Rickert told the small audience of press and fellow medical marijuana advocates at the Capitol ceremony last month. “You wouldn’t have to go through all this crap if you could just take a pill. It didn’t work. My tongue swelled in my face.”

Rickert is actually eligible for marijuana the federal government grows at the University of Mississippi and dispenses freely to a handful of patients under the Compassionate Use New Drug Program.

Rickert was approved for participation in the program in 1990, which would have provided her with 300 joints of federal schwag every month at no cost.

But the government dragged its feet on her application and those of others who tried to get in on the federal marijuana program, and in 1992 Bush I pulled the plug on the program for all but those few already receiving free government pot (see sidebar on George McMahon, one of the five surviving federal pot recipients). Bush I felt providing free, low-grade government pot to sick people would send the wrong message at a time when the federal government was amping up its continuing war on drugs.

State Reps. Frank Boyle (D-Superior) and Mark Pocan (D-Madison) sponsored the Jacki Rickert Medical Marijuana Act with the idea that putting a human face on the bill might cut through some of the nonsense that has been dispensed about the therapeutic uses of cannabis.

“I do think naming this for Jacki focuses the attention to a single individual who has been fighting her entire life to survive with this debilitating neurological disease,” Boyle said. “The pain can only be relieved, she has found, by using marijuana. To deny her, this woman in a wheelchair, a solution to her pain is unconscionable, absolutely unconscionable. She is the perfect person for this.”

Pocan said the Rickert Act is modeled after medical marijuana laws that have passed in 12 other states – Alaska, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Maine, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Oregon, Rhode Island and Washington.

“What this bill essentially does, it provides a medical defense to marijuana-related prosecutions and property seizure actions,” he said. “It doesn’t change federal law, however, 99% of the arrests are at the local and state level.”

Former state Rep. Tammy Baldwin – now representing Wisconsin in the U.S. House of Representatives – first introduced a medical marijuana bill in the state Assembly in 1993. A version of the bill has been introduced in every session since then, but it has never made it out of committee, and, so, most lawmakers have not had to go on record about where they stand on medical marijuana (see sidebar on the House Health Committee, where the new medical marijuana bill will likely end up), and resulting public input on the question has never been sought by the legislative body.

“We need a public hearing,” Boyle said. “We’ve never been allowed a legitimate legislative hearing, and that’s absolutely intolerable.”

Longtime Madison marijuana activist Ben Masel says it is the stigma of recreational marijuana that keeps legislators from acting on medical marijuana.

“I don’t think it’s so much opposition as fear to be on record for,” he said. “Plenty of members of the Legislature have been telling me for years, ‘If you ever get it to a vote you’ll get my vote, but you’ll have to get someone else to push it that far.’ It’s mostly a political fear.”

Boyle agrees there is a distinct lack of political backbone.

“We’ve been trying to get this message across for 10 years,” he said. “We’ve had endorsements from editors around the state. Still, we have a legislative body that is running scared. They function by moral/political expediency, they don’t function by what is right. That’s a sad statement, but I think it’s true.”

And he fears the Assembly still is not ready to address medical marijuana.

“We’ve picked up a dozen co-sponsors on the bill, but with a Republican-controlled Assembly, we will not have a hearing on anything,” he said. “The Assembly has met 13 times since January. We are the most do-nothing group of elected officials in the history of this state.

“The Health Committee chair has already said, absolutely not,” he said. “This won’t happen in the Assembly. It’s got to come from the Senate.”

Sen. Jon Erpenbach (D-Middleton) agrees the state Senate should be involved in the medical marijuana issue, so has scheduled an informational hearing on the subject for next month under the auspices of the Senate Health and Human Services Committee that he chairs (10:30 a.m. Nov. 14 in Room 411 South of the Capitol, but that was only tentative at press time).

Because marijuana has been so stigmatized in the federal war on drugs, Erpenbach said an informational hearing is needed before legislation is introduced in the Senate in order to open some minds to the facts about marijuana as medicine.

“I think there are a lot of misperceptions out there about medical marijuana,” he said. “This is the first time I’ve actually chaired the health committee, but I’ve always wanted to hold an informational meeting on it.”

Erpenbach said the format will include speakers on both sides of the issues presenting their views before the hearing is opened for public comment.

“The whole idea is to get the idea out there,” he said. “I think if we just introduced a bill without shining some light on it first, it would be a little more difficult to pass legislation.”

Erpenbach said he has been keeping abreast of medical marijuana issues by talking with Gary Storck, an internationally recognized medical marijuana advocate and 35-year user of medical marijuana.

“Most of us would be in a box right now if it weren’t for cannabis,” Storck said. “It’s about legalizing it for people who are really ill. I don’t think there’s anybody could look Jacki (Rickert) in the face and say, ‘No, you shouldn’t smoke medical marijuana’.”

Storck, of Madison, works with Rickert in IMMLY and is co-founder of both the Wisconsin and Madison NORML organizations.

“I was born with glaucoma and stared losing my sight at an early age,” he said. “I went to see my eye doctor on Oct. 3, 1972, after having some marijuana as a high school senior of 17. He was very pleased to find my eye pressure was normal, whereas it was usually elevated. But I didn’t tell him why because I was nervous about it. I’ve been a medical marijuana patient for 35 years now, since I could first document that it could help me.” As a tireless activist, Storck said he hears from patients around the state.

“I hear some really sad stories of people who just can’t get it, like multiple sclerosis patients,” he said. “It’s a very valuable remedy for MS. I’ve worked with a number of MS patients over the year.”

One of those MS patients was at the introduction of the Rickert Act. Carolyn McDonough of Sun Prairie is 21 years old and she arrived at the Capitol for the unveiling of the Rickert Act with her seeing-eye service dog. McDonough was stricken with MS two years ago and lost her vision and mobility, until smoking medical marijuana.

“If you had a 19-year-old daughter who was in pain every day, what would you do to help?” she said during the bill’s introduction. “You could be put on five different drugs three times a day every day, like I was. Or you can take pot, and now I’m on two drugs a day.”

“To many, this is an illegal drug of use, even thought it’s been scientifically shown to be so medically useful,” he said. “There are literally hundreds of ailments it’s good for. Cannabis is really good for people with muscle spasms. It’s good for seizure disorders. It contains over 60 therapeutically active cannabinoids, with a handful of those being more important. One of them is a pain reliever and it protects your brain from trauma or stroke. There’s no medication on the market that will do that. It’s an anti-oxidant and anti-inflammatory. It’s very useful for neuropathic pain like diabetics get, pain that opiates just won’t touch. Another irony about it all, if you are also taking opiate pain medications, cannabis and opiates work together so you can get superior relief with less sedation. This has been medically documented. The problem is that many pain doctors or clinics test you for drugs. If you test positive for cannabis, they will cut you off your opiate pain meds. They get downright barbaric.”

While Storck says progress is being made in the fight to recognize legal medical marijuana, that doesn’t help those suffering now and in the past.

“Things are better than they’ve ever been, but when one patient is at risk of being arrested or one patient won’t break the law to get their medicine or one patient can’t even find a joint, it’s still wrong,” he said. “We pride ourselves on having such a great health care system and then we turn our backs on these people who our great health care system can’t help because their medications are too toxic. It’s really a national shame.”

Storck said a 2002 IMMLY poll found 80.3% support statewide for medical marijuana. A separate poll conducted by Chamberlain Research Consultants found 75.7% support.

“People aren’t doing anything to demonstrate that support,” Storck said. “They need to call their legislators and keep calling them. Let them know. Send them information. When they see them in public, say they support this. When candidates come looking for their vote, tell them they support this and they need to support it if they want their vote.”

Updated Wednesday, October 10, 2007