People from across the country rallied Wednesday at the Kentucky Capitol hoping to ultimately influence state lawmakers to legalize marijuana for medicinal purposes.
Members of the House and Senate Committee on Health and Welfare listened to passionate testimony along with occasional outbursts from the audience in what Sen. Perry Clark, D-Louisville, called a historic hearing.
Clark pointed out that 20 states plus Washington, D.C., have permitted people to use marijuana for medicinal purposes.
“We can’t really say that marijuana has no medicinal value,” Clark said. “The cat’s out of the bag. Marijuana is a medicine; it is a forbidden medicine.”
The senator called current marijuana prohibition laws “hypocrisy” and pointed out the federal government actually holds a patent for the plant.
Irvin Rosenfeld of Florida is a medical marijuana patient who is one of four Americans authorized by the federal government to hold a prescription. Rosenfeld, born with a rare debilitating bone disease, said without decades of cannabis, he likely would be dead or homebound and a “drain on society.” The stockbroker used marijuana illegally for about a decade but successfully fought federal officials and won the legal right to have a prescription in 1982.
Before turning to cannabis, Rosenfeld took potentially addictive prescription drugs such as morphine, Valium and now-outlawed Quaaludes. He pointed out that morphine is synthetic heroin. Chuck Thompson of Paducah voiced similar sentiments about the popular prescription painkiller methadone and pointed out that Nazi scientists invented methadone.
Thompson, who uses a wheelchair due to severe limb swelling and nerve damage, says he was prosecuted under current state laws for using marijuana for medicinal purposes. As a result, he risks five years imprisonment for any further illicit cannabis use and says he is forced to take four methadone pills a day to alleviate his “chronic, excruciating pain.”
“I am a medicine user,” Thompson said. “I am not a drug abuser.”
After the session, dozens of activists, including Randy Grimes of Stanford and Paula Kaye Willett of Marshall County, met at the steps of the Capitol Annex building.
Cannabis “has never killed anybody,” Grimes said. “(Medical marijuana) is even legal in D.C. where the president of the United States lives.”
Willett, who had hoped to testify before the committee but did not get an opportunity to do so, has battled numerous medical problems since the 1970s, including chronic pain from two motor vehicle collisions, anxiety, depression and an inflammation of the colon.
“The one plant that God Himself put on this planet for man’s use helps everything that is wrong with my body,” Willett said. “I do not use cannabis to get ‘high’ and have a party; I use cannabis to heal my body and bring me closer to my Creator and help make me a better person, a better mom and able to do my job as a mom and be productive in society.”
Wednesday’s hearing represented the beginning of what could be a long process to get a bill sponsored let alone passed through state legislators. Any bill sponsored in the near future would face opposition by Republican Rep. Robert Benvenuti of Fayette County; the representative is a former Inspector General for the Cabinet for Health and Family Services.
"When I read articles that medical marijuana is good for anxiety, I'll tell you right now that tells me one thing — it's open to abuse,” Benvenuti said. “And until I'm assured where the clinical evidence is, this is not going to have my support.”
No comments:
Post a Comment