PMEDICAL MARIJUANA MEASURE IS ABOUT GREED

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MEDICAL MARIJUANA MEASURE IS ABOUT GREED.

Editorial
Wevley William Shea
Anchorage Daily News
10-12-98

Ballot Measure No. 8, "Allowing Medical Use of Marijuana," before Alaska voters in November, would be a bad law. All Alaskans concerned about the future of this great state should vote no on Ballot Measure No. 8. It creates a large new "bureaucratic Agency" in the department of Health and Social Services.

Ballot measure No. 8 requires a confidential registry of drug user patients. It requires the state to police the medical use of marijuana .Ballot measure 8 allows the drug user patient or the caregiver to cultivate, grow, possess and distribute marijuana for the patient. The patient and/or caregiver may grow and possess the following amounts of grass.

1. No more than 1 ounce of marijuana in usable form.
2. No More than 6 marijuana plants, with no more than three mature flowering plants producing usable marijuana at any time.<</p>

Basically, the patient drug user is allowed to grow his own pot. There is absolutely no quality control provisions in Ballot Measure No. 8. The patient physician would be prescribing "street-grade grass" for an alleged "debilitating condition.

"Debilitating" is so broadly defined in the bill as a medical condition that it can easily be misused by the patient, caregiver and or the prescribing physician.

The psychoactive ingredient in marijuana, tetrahyrocannbinol, is commonly referred to as THC. Today the THC or psychoactive ingredient in high quality-street grass is 50 to 100 times stronger than the pot of the 1960's smoked at the Filmore West, Golden Gate park and the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco. Many of the 1960s free-thinkers are now trying to push legalization nation wide.