tbaker@guardnet.com

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. (Ed. note: Later Gebbie became Clinton’s first AIDS czarina.)

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."