Despite Apparent Roadblocks, Legislature Should Legalize Medical Marijuana

[MedicalNeed]

For all of those hopeful, keep dreaming. Obtaining a written prescription for medical marijuana in Iowa likely won't happen anytime soon, according to one state legislator.

While the Iowa Board of Pharmacy recently took its final step, drawing up legislation for the Iowa Legislature to consider when it reconvenes in January, Rep. Dave Jacoby, D-Coralville, told the Editorial Board "the bill has no chance this year." Jacoby said he doesn't expect it to even get out of subcommittee.

The Editorial Board has consistently backed legalizing medical marijuana in the past, and we stand by that position. While Jacoby's comments aren't good for medical-marijuana advocates such as us, it doesn't deter us from restating our support. Iowa should join 15 other states and allow patients to receive marijuana for medicinal uses.

This past summer, there was confusion between the Iowa Board of Pharmacy and the Legislature over which had the authority to reschedule medical marijuana. With that dispute effectively over, the ball is now in Iowa lawmakers' court.

Jacoby said that for the Legislature to approve a rescheduling, however, it needs to be OK'd by health-care professionals, the general public, and law enforcement. "You need those three," Jacoby said. "Without all three of those, it just isn't going far." In addition, Republicans now control the House – a hardly propitious switch for medical-marijuana advocates.

Despite the apparent roadblocks, we still support legalizing medical marijuana, however. Opponents need only look at the facts.

Ronald Herman, a University of Iowa clinical professor and director of the Iowa Drug Information Network at the UI College of Pharmacy, said marijuana has legitimate medicinal uses, including relieving pain and nausea and stimulating appetite. There are current treatments used for each of the listed symptoms, all proving to work just as well, if not better. But when comparing medical marijuana to a placebo, studies have shown the marijuana works significantly better.

In addition, medical marijuana has been shown to effectively treat the following five ailments: multiple sclerosis, glaucoma, Parkinson's disease, Tourette syndrome, and epilepsy. Still, very few studies have been conducted, and further research is necessary. "Moving it from schedule I to II will allow more search to be done related to its merits," Herman said. (He wouldn't comment on whether he favored rescheduling the substance.)

While there are certainly other current regiments that provide the same medical benefits as marijuana, every patient is different. Medical marijuana is merely another alternative. Its effects might prove to work better on certain patients than the medicines currently available.

People are suffering, and the current treatments are failing to ease their pain. It's crucial that legislators at least look into the medical marijuana legalization issue before pre-emptively dismissing it. They owe it to Iowans.


NewsHawk: MedicalNeed: 420 MAGAZINE
Source: dailyiowan.com
Author: DI EDITORIAL BOARD
Contact: The Daily Iowan | Online Edition
Copyright:2010 The Daily Iowan
Website:Despite apparent roadblocks, Legislature should legalize medical marijuana - The Daily Iowan

 

[thebabyalex]

OK'd by health-care professionals, the general public, and law enforcement.

The political-legal discussion over marijuana, as per medical legalization, must, foremost, meet with the imprimatur of the Pharmacratic state. All other apparent "considerations" are immaterial. As politician and physician are clearly in the drivers seat, certainly as pertains to the health of the body politic, there is little discussion to be had outside that of "progressive", pubic health policy (so much for the empowering nature of the "free-market" of contractual medicine).
The state licensed physician, through his legal authority of prescription, acts in accordance with what is best for public health. The latter, this prescription law, extending itself to plant material, is but one example of the collectivist-coercive feature of American Pharmacratic law. Individual patient autonomy and self-determination is nothing more than a vacuous. The state of sick care, as it now exists, is not one of extending the right of the individual to be let alone in matters private: that of freely contracting parties (patient and physician, unmolested by the state).

Most Americans fail to see how the government's promise, of "better" health care for all, as politically vapid, is really a means of enlarging the scope of the state's control and influence in civil medicine. Much of what has traditionally been a matter of the private (smoking, obesity, sexuality, drug use, etc.), medicobureucrats, including the mainstay of clinical and scientific medicine, and the state have seen fit to transform into emergent public health concerns.
To be sure, the state has a right and duty to protect public health, as in that of providing immunizations against communicable diseases.
The inflation of the definition of "disease", now including all manner of personal lifestyle habits and choices, public health officials have made further inroads for socialist-statist political and social values, under the banner of improving the quality of life of the American body politic. Again, as was the case with Nazi and Soviety medicine, with its emphasis on the "collective good", so it is, presently, with health-statists: By alter the individual and one alters the social.
The freedom to contract freely with one's physician, free of a meddling bureaucratic-state presence, has been seriously hobbled by the coming into being of Socialist-statist medicine. Ironically enough, to most Americans, good health has come to be construed with Liberty, in spite of those facts to the contrary. The biblical injunction, "Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, and to god what is god's" has no meaning in its application to the present state of medical care and services in Modern America. After all, how much in the way of "medical freedom" have Americans rendered unto its health-commisars?