MEDICINAL POT NEEDS A VOTE!

LITERALLY surrounding themselves with school kids, Sen. Gordon Smith
and Oregon police chiefs piously proclaimed last week that the medical
use of marijuana shouldn't be decided at the ballot box.

Oh? Then if not there, where?

It certainly isn't being decided in Congress, where Smith introduced a
wrongheaded anti-medical marijuana resolution that doesn't even do what
he says it does. Nor in the Oregon Legislature, where a medical
marijuana proposal got exactly two minutes of public hearing - and no
vote - last session.

Nor in the federal Drug Enforcement Administration, which in 1988
overruled its own administrative law judge's conclusion that some
medical use of pot should be permitted.

So why not decide it at the ballot box, through one of the initiative
petitions proposed for Oregon's November general election? Just what
the initiative was invented for - a chance for the people to take
action on something that nobody else will touch.

Republican Smith and others appeared at a press conference at a police
chiefs' meeting in Eugene, to which a group of young people had been
invited.

They contended that legalizing pot - even to relieve pain and other
suffering of the seriously ill - will send the wrong message about
drugs to such young people.

Oh? And what message would that be? That it's wrong for a doctor to try
to ease intractable nausea, vomiting or pain?

That's all that one of the Oregon medical marijuana initiatives calls
for. The Oregon Medical Marijuana Act would allow the use of home-grown
pot, with a doctor's approval, to relieve symptoms ' ms associated with
cancer, AIDS, glaucoma, Lou Gehrig's disease, multiple sclerosis and
paralysis.

Patients would be limited in the amounts they could grow, would have to
have written documentation from a doctor, and have "a state Health
Division issued ID card.

Yet Smith and the others contended that such a measure would somehow
undermine cops' attempts to curb traffic in hard drugs. It was never
clear exactly how.

Smith said he's introduced a budget amendment specifying "that we not
use federal monies for purposes of legalizing medicinal use of
marijuana, but that we actually spend more, and research more, to find
ways to relieve human suffering."

BUT NEITHER THE first draft of his measure, passed out by his staff,
nor a second, provided later, would do that.

The first version simply bans using federal funds in any way "for the
purpose of the use of marijuana for medicinal purposes." When I pointed
out that it didn't mention any of the research Smith was talking about,
the second version was produced.

Handwritten onto the end was "except that this section shall not apply
to medical research and investigational new drug programs under the
Food & Drug Administration."

Still nothing in there directing that "we actually spend more and
research more." Maybe in the next version.

To some of us, this issue has a familiar ring You see, Oregon actually
legalized the medical use of marijuana - 19 years ago!

A conservative Republican legislator, Cecil Johnson, pushed it through
the '79 Legislature, and a conservative Republican governor, Vic
Atiyeh, signed it into law.

"A lady named Jean Lovejoy had an organization called 'Make Today
Count,' " said Johnson, today an 80-year-old retired farmer. "I met
with 'em and those

with cancer had their husbands out on the street making illegal
purchases of marijuana. They convinced me that in certain health
conditions it did work."

Lovejoy used pot, sometimes baked in brownies, to relieve nausea from
cancer treatments. But she died a year or two later, without ever
getting a legal dose.

Johnson's bill called for the state Health Division to get pot seized
by state police in drug busts and make it available to physicians,
certifying that it was contamination-free.

But division Administrator Kristine Gebbie said there was no way to
test and certify such pot, and other division attempts to make the law
work foundered in delay and/or disinterest.

So the law was later quietly repealed. But Johnson still thinks it was
a good idea:

"I'm convinced of it, if somehow they could work out the availability.
People are still breaking the law - and they don't want to do that, and
it costs way more than it should."

I suggested that he share his wisdom with fellow conservative
Republican Gordon Smith.

"Yeah, I might talk to him," Johnson said. "You've got to understand it
to be in favor of it, and you've got to talk to some of the people that
use it."

Which is what Smith and the chiefs should have
done before calling a press conference.