Insensible Drug Policy
At a campaign appearance in Dover, New Hampshire on Saturday, Mitt Romney was confronted head on with the issue of medical marijuana. Clayton Holton, whose muscular dystrophy keeps him in a wheelchair, explained to Mitt that pot is the only medicine that seems to help him, and his doctors say he is “living proof [that] medical marijuana works.”
“My question for you,” Holton continued, “is will you arrest me or my doctors if I get medical marijuana?”
Romney’s reaction, as seen in this video, is contemptible. He says, shortly, “I am not infavor of medical marijuana being legal in this country,” and abruptly walks away. Another member of the audience asks Romney if he’s going to answer Holton’s question, and Romney replies, “I think I have.”
I can’t imagine what it must have been like to be Holton in that situation—to have a leader of your country say, effectively, that they’d let you die or go to prison before they’d let you smoke pot, and then walk away, smiling and shaking hands.
My infuriation with the anti-medical pot camp lies in their dogmatic denial of hard science that refutes their position. If people’s lives are at stake, the least you should do is enter into a reasoned debate where all the facts are openly considered. Then again, this might be too much to expect from our government, where the pre-Iraq war debate amounted to a quibble over whether Iraqi’s would welcome us with open arms or whether they’d bring us fruit baskets as well.
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McCain’s got a great line also when he was confronted by a women
Ah yes, arresting dead drug users. The compassion of the republican candidates.
Actually, I wish I new how much testing it would take for the public to accept that for some diseases like cancer and HIV wasting illnesses etc and so on marijuana does seem to work better than other drugs. It’s not like people are trying to become drug kingpins or that the people using the drugs are immoral. They’re in pain that can be alleviated by a sensible drug policy.
So as you say here’s to a reasoned debate on this and many other issues.
The point is, the prohibitionists believe they have the right to control my mind and yours. This is the logic of their drug war, the foundation of their hubris and their oppressive laws. It’s irrelevant to them that cannabis can alleviate some forms of suffering (when he was dying of cancer, my father-in-law could only eat food after a toke, which cut the nausea from chemotherapy). It’s the buzz they’re intolerant of, as though they have a vested interest in what happens within their neighbors’ minds and the legitimate right to dictate it.
And, if they would set aside their arrogance for one second, they’d realize that they’re creating black markets that feed evil men, when instead they could bring drugs within the law and regulate, standardize quality, and tax the stuff, just as with liquor now. It would even be easier to keep it away from kids (again, as with liquor). Their narrow-minded hunger for control has blinded them.