Allow us to take respectful exception to Jay Evensen’s Op-Ed (linked below). No one at TRUCE (nor, to our knowledge, at the Utah Patients Coalition which is sponsoring the Initiative) has ever said that average citizens are “qualified” to make MEDICAL decisions, nor even that anyone in TRUCE is so qualified.
However, at the heart of the Ballot Initiative, and exposing the true flaw in his argument, is that whether or not to ALLOW DOCTORS to make decisions about whether to prescribe a medicine – which was only prohibited for POLITICAL and not MEDICAL reasons in the first place – is FACTUALLY just that: a political matter.
Removing the prohibition restrictions on the medical use of cannabis does not allow ANY citizen to be able to go out and procure cannabis at a corner store to treat their own ills, rather it will simply allow DOCTORS to recommend that their patients, if the physicians feel they will benefit from it, be allowed to get medical cannabis from carefully regulated medical dispensaries.
What happened to medicinal cannabis in the US was this:
“Normal” non-expert citizens took this right away from doctors in 1937 and then took further steps in 1970 to make federally approved research nearly impossible.
ALL the Ballot Initiative does is give physicians back rights they had from 1850 – when medical cannabis entered the official US Pharmacopoeia – until 1937, when the political process took those rights away under the most questionable of circumstances and for largely indefensible reasons.
And you, the people of Utah are now being afforded the opportunity to restore those rights to doctors on 10th Amendment grounds….. …and WE (apparently unlike Mr. Evensen) trust you to make use of the chance wisely.
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Notes: Our remarks are directed at the Op-Ed author as a writer working for a commercial newspaper, not as a representative of any other organization. Our intent is never to demonize ANY person or party who may see matters differently than some of us here, only to share science and offer fair news analysis (not slant) on current events.
Credit where due: we find the D-News reporters on this beat generally make scrupulous efforts to be objective, and recently we’ve been truly impressed by some in-depth investigative reporting on related issues.
#MMJ #DNews #OpEd #UTpol #UPC #Initiative18 #UtahNext
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See full article – Jay Evensen: Voters aren’t qualified to make marijuana decisions
