Medicinal marijuana? You’ll decide on Nov. 4

BY SEAN KINNEY

KONK LIFE STAFF WRITER

On Nov. 4 voters will head to the polls to decide, among other questions, whether Florida will join 23 others states and the District of Columbia in letting physicians prescribe medicinal marijuana to help patients manage chronic pain and other afflictions.

The ballot language informs voters that, if approved, the so-called Amendment 2 to the state Constitution would “allow the medical use of marijuana for individuals with debilitating diseases as determined by a licensed Florida physician.”

If passed, the measure would also allow caregivers to assist patients in using medical marijuana.

On the regulatory end, the Florida Department of Health would oversee production and distribution centers and provide users and their caregivers with identification cards.

Also noted directly on the ballot is the unknown increased governmental costs associated with administering such a program as well as any potential tax- or fee-based revenues.

Here in Monroe County, former State Attorney Dennis Ward, a candidate for a seat on the Islamorada Village Council and a former Miami cop, is throwing his support behind Amendment 2.

In a recent interview, Ward told Konk Life that “what’s really important here” is the possibility of helping sick people.

He recalled speaking with a Key Largo breast cancer survivor who had a relapse and took to applying hash oil, a concentrated derivative of marijuana, directly to the tumor with positive results.

“She swore by it,” Ward said, noting the potential to share those benefits with other cancer patients, people with HIV or AIDS and those with ALS, the recently hyped ice-bucket challenge fundraising recipient.

“If it works for a patient and a doctor thinks it’ll help a patient,” Ward said, “why not try it? That’s the way medicine should be prescribed — by a doctor. I don’t know what medical school these people went to,” Ward said in reference to the measure’s opposition.

That group is organized into the Drug Free Florida Committee, which has received $2.5 million in funding from Sheldon Adelson, a gaming billionaire who put $150 million into Republican campaigns in the 2012 election cycle.

That group has distilled their message into four “loopholes,” described on its website, www.voteno2.org.

The first is the “pill mill loophole,” in reference to the walk-in clinics concentrated in Miami-Dade and Broward counties partly responsible for the prevalence of opioid drugs in South Florida, that doesn’t regulate location of “pot docs,” as the opposition group refers to them.

 

Then there’s the “drug dealer loophole,” which notes that caregivers, who would be licensed to help patients use medical marijuana, “can be felons — even drug dealers. It will be easier to get a caregiver’s license than a driver’s license.”

The “teenager loophole” places no age restriction so “teens and children will be able to legally purchase pot without their parents’ consent.”

Finally, there’s the succinctly titled “pot-for-anyone-who-wants-it-loophole. Amendment 2 authors define ‘debilitating medical condition’ from back pain to trouble sleeping. As a result, anyone who wants pot will get it.”

The measure defines that key language—debilitating medical condition—as cancer, multiple sclerosis, glaucoma, hepatitis C, HIV, AIDS, ALS, Chrone’s disease, Parkinson’s disease “or other conditions for which a physician believes that the medical use of marijuana would likely outweigh the potential health risks for a patient.”

Based on recent data from the California Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, encompassing 7,525 adults, 92 percent of medical marijuana users said the drug helped alleviate their symptoms.

From the physician side, a 2013 poll conducted by the New England Journal of Medicine, 76 percent of 1,446 doctors are “in favor of the use of marijuana for medicinal purposes.”

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