I’m sure if you took a poll of lawmakers from around the United States and asked them if they believe they should have the power to decide if a legal medical cannabis patient in their state can smoke it if they choose, most of them will tell you that they absolutely should have that power.
They see nothing wrong with taking that decision upon themselves, instead of the patient and their doctor making that decision. These lawmakers, by virtue of getting a minority of eligible voters to vote for them, feel they can now make medical decisions for people they have never met.
I have yet to see a cogent argument as to why these politicians are qualified to make that decision, much less what right they have to make it.
For example, next year there will be a political battle in Minnesota over whether or not the state’s medical cannabis patients will be allowed by their overlords to smoke marijuana. Politicians are lining up on both sides of the issue, and the major argument for allowing smokable medical cannabis seems to be that it will bring prices down for patients.
Don’t get me wrong; I’m all for anything that brings down the price of legal cannabis. And having a greater supply of cannabis available at a lower cost will certainly go a long way toward bringing down prices, but I find it a bit disconcerting that no one seems to be questioning the right of politicians to make these decisions for strangers in the first place.
For all the advantages that would come with allowing smokable marijuana, there is only one reason it should be allowed: those who do it are not infringing on the rights of anyone else. Adults should be allowed to make their own decisions about what they ingest into their bodies, in consultation with a medical professional, if they so choose.
Most patients use cannabis by smoking it. It will be much cheaper for them in most cases than buying edibles or concentrates. The notion that an important medical and financial decision like that should be made by strangers in the state capital is incomprehensible to me.
And yet here we are. We have gotten so comfortable with others making our adult decisions for us that there is no going back. Even some of the most important decisions we make are now controlled by people we will never even meet.
I wish I could offer a solution for this problem, but this is bigger than all of us. All I can say is that the more decisions we make for ourselves, the better off we’ll be.
If you are a child-patient then you should be able to carefully use the cannabis products that are prescribed for you. If you are an adult not carrying a gun, then you should be able to carefully use the cannabis that you grow or purchase. In both cases you should have federal protection.
Starting from the prohibition of cannabis with its redundant exception for hemp, which is defined and designed to be onerous to farmers, we can evolve to prohibiting only the smoking of cannabis, by convincing lawmakers to carefully deschedule cannabis by reconstructing the malformed federal definition of marijuana to make it literally uphold our Constitution and the original intent of its 2nd, 9th, 10th, and 14th Amendments, like this:
Sec. 802.
(16) The term “marijuana” means all parts of the smoke produced by the combustion of the plant Cannabis sativa L., which is, as are the viable seeds of such plant, prohibited to be grown by or sold by any publicly traded corporation or subsidiary company, and such smoke is prohibited to be inhaled by any child or by any person bearing any firearm, as is their intake of any part or any product of such plant containing more than 0.3% THC by weight unless prescribed to such child by an authorized medical practitioner.
After the definition is reconstructed to inform state and local controls, then the debate will be about using cannabis, and the controls for smoking it. Sooner or later, that can result in cannabis smoke being either descheduled or rescheduled.
That makes more sense than rescheduling this malformed definition:
Sec. 802.
(16)(A) Subject to subparagraph (B), the term “marihuana” means all parts of the plant Cannabis sativa L., whether growing or not; the seeds thereof; the resin extracted from any part of such plant; and every compound, manufacture, salt, derivative, mixture, or preparation of such plant, its seeds or resin.
(B) The term “marihuana” does not include (i) hemp, as defined in section 297A of the Agricultural Marketing Act of 1946; or (ii) the mature stalks of such plant, fiber produced from such stalks, oil or cake made from the seeds of such plant, any other compound, manufacture, salt, derivative, mixture, or preparation of such mature stalks (except the resin extracted therefrom), fiber, oil, or cake, or the sterilized seed of such plant which is incapable of germination.
Happy New Year to all. Let’s end cannabis prohibition with a 2020 vision of a clear definition with limited federal prohibitions that carefully protect our rights to cannabis.