Growing giggles

‘Pot’s’ kettle of fish

It happens every time I give a public presentation on the election. I’m explaining the medicinal marijuana question, which is the proposed initiated act known as Issue 5.

Everyone seems attentive and contemplative. Then I describe the last element of the proposal. And people laugh. It’s the part about growing your own.

Politically, that provision risks rendering the proposal, which otherwise is deadly serious, non- serious.

I can understand why it’s contained in the proposal. There is a logical context.

Issue 5 outlines a system by which doctors would provide certification of an affliction providing eligibility for limited amounts of medicinal marijuana. It provides that the state Health Department would establish and regulate a card-eligible system of controlled distribution through nonprofit dispensaries.

But then the proposal says local jurisdictions could choose to keep these dispensaries out of their communities, as many would.

In that case, it provides that any card-eligible person living more than five miles from a dispensary could grow a limited amount of his own marijuana. The point is either:

To provide leverage by which communities would choose, under duress, to allow the dispensaries in order to avoid granting official permission for local growing; or,

To accommodate a sparsely populated rural culture in which people must drive long distances for just about anything.

The political effect, though, is to get people laughing about some aging hippie holding a license for that pot he’s growing.

The state Health Department, the designated administrator of this proposed new law, has no police force or regulatory means to limit the grower to the prescribed limit on plants by number and size.

If no such provision had been included for self-cultivation, then we would have ourselves a more viable political proposition.

I’m saying that less audience snickering translates into greater political viability.

Until this initiative in Arkansas, the nationwide trend had been to move away from grow-your-own authority. Fourteen of the 17 states allowing medicinal marijuana permit home growing. But the two most recent authorizing states, Connecticut and

INew Jersey, restricted distribution to licensed dispensaries only.

And I am told that, should this proposal fail Tuesday in Arkansas, proponents will come back in two years with the same proposal, absent the grow-your-own complication, which they know to be the political Achilles’ heel.

Sometimes a worthy piece of legislation needs a little amending and a second go-round. have encountered two other prevailing attitudes.

One is that people tell me they favor Issue 5 from a broader view that the pharmaceutical industry is smug and abusive and that this is one way—maybe the only at our disposal—to tell Big Pharma where to jump off.

There are synthetic marijuana pills. But doctors are loath to prescribe them and insurers are loath to cover them and drug companies will sell you a month’s supply only on a cost-prohibitive basis.

So we’ll show them, some say.

The other prevailing attitude is that marijuana ought to be fully decriminalized like alcohol and Issue 5 would be a step in that sane direction.

But we didn’t partially repeal alcohol prohibition by legalizing booze incrementally for medicinal purposes. We repealed it outright.

And that’s the real debate—a uniform national debate—that we need to have on marijuana, on growing it, selling it, buying it, smoking it and taxing the holy heck out of it.

So for the record: I voted against Issue 5, and, of course, regretted it instantly. That’s all right. I would have regretted it instantly had I voted the other way.

I voted “no” on account of this liberal grow-your-own authority existing beyond the confined on-site regulation.

That provision seemed to take the issue beyond the suffering cancer patient’s bed and into the remote regions.