Once legal, medical pot can be limited

You might have heard that Florida’s proposed constitutional amendment to legalize medical marijuana is a bit light on oversight.

While open to debate, if Floridians approve the amendment in November, as polls say they will, lawmakers will have plenty of time to pass enabling rules and regulations to ensure our experience doesn’t become that of California, where medicinal pot dispensaries allow virtually anyone to get high.

So itwas surprising to see U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz— herself, a cancer survivor and a former state legislator who knows something about government regulations— come out against legalizing medical marijuana.

After all, for some cancer patients who are undergoing chemotherapy, smoking marijuana is the only thing that gives them relief from the nausea. And why should it be illegal for oncologists to give their patients relief?

Wasserman Schultz, D-Weston, says the amendment is “written too broadly and stops short of ensuring strong regulatory oversight from state officials.” For a look at possible unintended consequences, she points to Florida’s history with prescription-drug pill mills, where unscrupulous doctors handed out scripts for addictive narcotics as though theywere candy.

Wasserman Schultz is right that because of lax oversight, pill mills preyed on people and gave our state a black eye. But no one thought the solution was to outlaw narcotic drugs. For in the right hands, these medications can help people who suffer from chronic pain live normal lives.

Neither does it make sense to continue the ban on medical marijuana because proper oversight doesn’t now exist.

Rather, let us learn lessons from the pill-mill debacle and proactively create regulations that ensure medical pot is prescribed as intended.

By all accounts, state lawmakers are making appropriate plans. As one example, they’ve already decided that medical marijuana can only be grown by companies that have done business in Florida for 30 years. Surely, they also can create regulations that ensure the product reaches only those for whom it is intended.

After all, we’re not reinventing the wheel here. Twenty states have gone before us, so there’s plenty of real-life lessons from which to draw.

Amendment 2would legalize the cultivation, purchase, possession and use of marijuana to treat patients suffering from debilitating diseases, fromcancer to Lou Gehrig’s disease, fromepilepsy to HIV/AIDS.

Doctors knowthe definition of debilitating diseases. Voters knowthe difference, too. And Floridians are demanding access to medical marijuana. A recent QuinnipiacUniversity poll showed up to 88 percent of citizenswant doctors to be able to prescribe the drug when needed. That’s up from 82 percent last year and is about as close to a consensus as anything we’ve seen in Florida.

Though we disagree with Wasserman Schultz, it was unseemly for the amendment’s principle backer, Orlando trial attorney John Morgan, to so personally attack her, telling the Miami Herald, “I know personally the most-powerful players in Washington D.C. And I can tell you that Debbie Wasserman Schultz isn’t just disliked. She’s despised. She’s an irritant.”

Better if Morgan had responded like the group he helped fund, United for Care, which more delicately said: “It’s difficult to say whether Ms. Wasserman Schultz believes sick people should be kept from their medicine, or whether she thinks the public servants at the Department of Health are incompetent andwould implement the amendment irresponsibly. But both positions are puzzling, unfortunate and wrong.”

United for Care is right. If Floridians legalize medical marijuana, the Wild West won’t break out. Lawmakers will have a strong hand in crafting the enabling legislation that brings the amendment to life.

Rather than stand opposed, Wasserman Schultz should prove herself to be the leader she is and articulate reasonable regulations that help people with chronic diseases get the relief they seek.

If Floridians legalize medical marijuana, the Wild West won’t break out.