Last July, Delaware became the 16th state (along with the District of Columbia) to enact a medicinal marijuana law. Six more state legislatures have recently considered such proposals. If those bills are eventually signed into law, approximately 40 percent of the United States population will live in states that permit the use of medical marijuana.
Florida will not be among them.
It’s been a long, strange but mostly unsuccessful trip for those who yearn for the Sunshine State to join their more progressive friends. And the fact that two Florida Democrats have introduced bills for the current legislative session isn’t likely to bring about such a law anytime soon either.
But to Lake Worth state Representative Jeff Clemens, the introduction of HJR 353 is about moving minds, if not actual votes.
“Basically Floridians deserve the right to vote on the issue itself,” the Democrat told CL recently.
His bill would seek to put medi-pot on next November’s ballot, but a three-quarters vote in both the House and Senate would be needed to allow such a referendum. Given the large conservative Republican majorities in both bodies, that would seem to be mission impossible (a companion bill in the state Senate is being sponsored by Democrat Larcenia Bullard).
Clemens says that a number of members in the opposite party would support the measure, but believes that such a pot-positive stance would run counter to the image the GOP wants to project, and that’s what will win out.
“There are Republicans that will tell me behind the scenes that if they have the opportunity to vote freely on the issue, they will vote in favor of it,” he says, before conceding that such an opportunity will probably never arise. And he says that’s a sad commentary on the state of affairs in the Capitol. “We have this idealistic view that 120 state representatives go to Tally, they all bring their best ideas, those ideas are debated, and the best ideas win. It’s a very top-down process, and whether or not bills are heard in committee is really controlled by five to six in the House of Representatives.”
Floridians have always supported medicinal marijuana, going back to the late 1990s (in 1997, 63 percent approved it in a poll). Last spring, Rick Scott’s own pollster, Tony Fabrizio of Fabrizio, McLaughlin & Associates, reported that 57 percent of Floridians supported such a measure (an impressive but problematic number, since 60 percent voter approval would be required for it to pass). A national Gallup poll conducted last year found that 70 percent of Americans favored making it legal for doctors to prescribe weed in order to reduce pain and suffering.
Meanwhile, pot smoking in America — whether for medicinal reasons or just as an excuse to party — has never been more popular. Gallup announced in October that for the first time in over 40 years of polls, exactly half of those surveyed say they support the legalization of pot, straight up.
Of course, as has been the case with other progressive measures that had no hope of getting approval from the Legislature, Florida citizens still have the ability to go the constitutional amendment route. Such was the case in 2010 when the group known as Fair Districts Florida got two amendments passed that aim to make the drawing of congressional and legislative districts fairer. That group spent millions of dollars to assemble the signatures necessary to qualify on the fall of 2010 ballot, and millions more to win last November.
But the pro-medicinal marijuana movement is not nearly as organized.
People United for Medical Marijuana (PUFM) is the political action committee that tried to get MM on the ballot last year. It didn’t come close, and it won’t again in 2012.
As of the end of October the group had 29,922 verified signatures. They would need 676,811 by February 1.
Josh Giesegh, a spokesman for PUFM, admits that the group would probably already have enough signatures to qualify for 2012 if they had some deep pockets, saying that “doing it as an all-volunteer effort is very, very difficult.”
Morgan Fox, communications director with the Marijuana Policy Project in Washington D.C., says that while having a strong base of activists on the ground is vital, it’s generally not the deciding factor in winning serious support.
“We must be very careful to concentrate our limited resources in states where we have a definitively good shot at passing a law,” he wrote to CL in an email. “Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem as if the Florida Legislature is there just yet.“
Some advocates of medicinal marijuana are now trying a different route — the federal government. They want to have the feds reclassify pot as a Schedule II drug, which would allow its use for treatment, as prescribed by doctors and filled by pharmacists.
Washington Governor Christine Gregoire and Rhode Island Governor Lincoln Chaffee last November filed a petition with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration requesting the re-classification. The petition would require the Federal Drug Administration to conduct a new scientific review of recent advances in cannabis research (the last time the agency did such an analysis was in 2006).
Cannabis (which is the word advocates prefer to marijuana) is a Schedule I drug (alongside cocaine, LSD and heroin), which means according to federal law it has no medicinal use, so it can’t be legally prescribed. Advocates say moving a drug from one schedule to another doesn’t require an act of Congress, so they are calling for that reclassification, which would allow doctors to prescribe it but still make it illegal for recreational use.
Mary Lynn Mathre is with Patients Out of Time, or POT, a patient advocacy organization in Virginia dedicated to educating public health professionals and the public about medical marijuana. She says there’s “zero justification” for cannabis being classified a Schedule 1 drug. “They can’t pretend to think that it’s more dangerous than morphine or cocaine or oxycodone.” She says people need to realize there are many strains of what are called cannabinoids — the unique group of metabolites found in the cannabis plant that are responsible for the plant’s peculiar pharmacological effects.
The best-known cannabanoid is THC, the ingredient that provides the “high” in smoking pot. But Mathre talks enthusiastically about a different cannabinoid called Cannabidiol (CBD), the main non-psychoactive chemical component of marijuana. She and other advocates believe CBD has immense therapeutic potential.
Patients Out of Time is encouraging growers to breed strains of the herb with a higher content of CDB, and then deliver those to dispensaries in the states that sell medical marijuana so patients will have a choice.
“When you’re thinking of an elderly patient… they don’t need to get high, they need something for pain,” Mathre says. “All of this could happen if we just get cannabis out of Schedule 1 and make it available to the market.”
Dr. Juan R. Sanchez-Ramos, who studies movement disorders in the department of neurology at USF, agrees. He says such a change would allow the movement to make marijuana available to people who need it medically.
“I really am of the opinion that it should be available to everyone, but not all potent forms should be available to everyone because it should be by prescription.”
Sanchez-Ramos says as a neurologist he studies diseases, but has always kept his eye on cannabis pharmacology. He says there’s a very close relationship between the animal and plant world, and that’s why cannabis can be used to help rebalance some of the disturbances to our metabolism that result in illness.
Although there have always been concerns that legalizing medicinal marijuana could open the floodgates to a more stoned population, one recent study indicated positive effects from such legislation.
That paper, published by University of Colorado Denver Professor Daniel Rees and Montana State University Assistant Professor D. Mark Anderson, looked at traffic fatalities nationwide for the years 1990-2009 to see if there were any correlation between highway fatalities and liberalized medical marijuana laws. They found that, in states that legalized the medicinal use of marijuana, both traffic fatalities and alcohol consumption declined.
The authors found that in states that legalized medical use, there was no increase in weed smoking by teenagers. However, there was an increase in pot smoking among young adults in their 20s (the paper has not yet been peer reviewed).
So does pressing Barack Obama to reclassify the drug give medi-pot advocates their best shot at getting medical marijuana to the people who need it in Florida? Maybe so. But if Representative Clemens’ bill does nothing else, perhaps it advances dialogue on the issue.
St. Pete House Democrat Rick Kriseman (who is co-sponsoring the bill in the House) thinks so. He says, “Sometimes when you file these things, you know they’re not going to go anywhere, but you do it to get the discussion started.”
Judging by the polls, Floridians have discussed the issue and come to a conclusion. But as we know very well, some things happen slowly, very slowly, when it comes to achieving progress in Tallahassee.
This article appears in Jan 19-25, 2012.