KEEP YOUR LAWS OFF PATIENTS' BROWNIES

If you put THC in a lollipop, it
will end up in a child's mouth.

That's the reasoning behind House Bill 1250, which would ban the sale
of edible forms of medical marijuana. The bill's sponsor, Rep. Cindy
Acree, R-Aurora, claims she became aware that pot brownies, beverages
and candy were accidentally being ingested by kids and landing them in
the emergency room. She wants to stop this before some child ends up
very, very stoned.

OK, she didn't say that. What she did say is this: "I've never heard
of anybody dying from it, so that's not what I'm talking about. I'm
talking about kids that have never exhibited psychotic episodes that
end up having reactions or young children who have reactions."

Of course, she didn't offer any proof that such incidents had occurred
or proof that edible/drinkable medical marijuana was to blame. When
asked specifically which medical experts she'd lined up to testify
about these regrettable and distressing incidents, she said she didn't
know yet who they would be.

Instead, she talked about the fact that the FDA hasn't studied
marijuana or established safe doses. This presents a safety concern
for patients, she says.

"It's unlike any other pharmaceutical, where somebody has a big
interest in it so the pharmaceutical companies actually spend millions
to study it, do test studies and blah blah blah," she said. "We all
know this stuff 's been around forever, but nobody's studied it or
reported it if they have."

Blah blah blah, indeed. What Rep. Acree is missing is that medical
marijuana (MMJ) isn't a pharmaceutical. If MMJ has one thing going for
it, it's that Big Pharma - the profit-driven industry that does tests
on drugs, suppresses the results and then releases unsafe chemical
drugs onto the market only to withdraw them after people have died -
hasn't been able to exploit marijuana. There's little that the
pharmaceutical laboratory needs to do to make marijuana safe or
effective or available to anyone who wants it.

But, yes, marijuana has been studied. Millions of trials are conducted
each day across the country by willing volunteers, who are satisfied
enough with the results to repeat these experiments the next day. I
admit to conducting some trials myself when I was in junior high and
high school. (I am not a marijuana user now, medical or
recreational.)

In fact, the medicinal uses of marijuana were discovered by people
conducting these studies on their own.

Widespread understanding that marijuana has medicinal value - and
personal experience with marijuana in large segments of our society -
spurred voters to legalize medical marisee juana a decade ago.

Now that MMJ is a thriving industry, lawmakers seem to be in a rush to
control it in the name of safety. Why?

Acree insists that it's a public safety issue.

"We're at the front of this huge industry, and I also am concerned
that we're going to have patients who are relying on people who are
developing this big money stream who may not have their best interests
at heart," she said. "How do we protect patients so they don't get
priced out of the very product they wanted access to and it doesn't
get mixed with things they don't want?" That's a very good question.
How do we protect patients so they don't get priced out of the product
they need?

When it comes to all other drugs, we don't. We let people get "priced
out" every day. If you don't have health insurance and the antibiotic
you need is still under patent, you can expect to cough up a lung
before our state lawmakers help you out. If Acree wants medical
marijuana to be treated like any other pharmaceutical, then ensuring
accessibility and affordability are the very least of her concerns.

What ought to worry her is government interference. That's what the
GOP continually crusades against, isn't it? And in this case,
government interference might be telling someone with terminal cancer
or serious mobility issues that they have to buy medical marijuana and
then bake their own pot brownies at home if they don't want to smoke
the drug, even if doing so presents serious struggles for them.

Believe it or not, people are smart enough to manage the "dosing" on
marijuana themselves. An acquaintance with chronic pain issues finds
the brownies from her dispensary to be too strong. And guess what she
does? She eats a half of a brownie, something she discovered through
trial and error - without Acree or the legislature holding her hand.

If medical marijuana is ending up in the hands of children, let's deal
with that problem. But let's not remove a viable, helpful product from
those who need it. And most of all let's not interfere with MMJ
patients' lives in the name of "safety."

Claiming to want to protect people when what you really want to do is
control them is the ultimate in big government manipulation.