[420 Girl]

After an hour-and-a-half of testimony in which medical marijuana was alternately painted as a pain-killing panacea and a youth-destroying gateway drug, Rep. Ed Trimmer had one simple request: a little more science.

"Do we have any evidence on either side from sources like the National Cancer Institute, the American Medical Association, the New England Journal of Medicine, the American Opthamological Association Journal?" Trimmer asked. "... I would hope that we have something in the medical profession that tells us whether these things work or not. I like to base policy on sound research."

The request from Trimmer, D-Winfield, came near the end of a House Health and Human Services Committee hearing that was packed with people, emotion and rhetoric, but short on scientific citations.

A bill sponsored by Rep. Gail Finney, D-Wichita, that would legalize marijuana for medicinal use drew a throng of supporters to the Docking building. Nearly a dozen spoke in favor of the bill, many saying they were testifying before a legislative committee for the first time.

But the committee also heard testimony against the bill from a doctor and two addiction specialists. After the hearing chairwoman Brenda Landwehr, R-Wichita, said she wasn't sold on the health benefits of pot, especially for cancer patients.

"I think that, if there was a huge benefit for those folks, the FDA would have already stepped in," Landwehr said.

Finney, who testified for the bill Tuesday, said that standard might be tough to reach while the substance remains illegal at the federal level.

"For one, everybody seems to be basing everything on FDA approval," Finney said. "It's not FDA approved, as I guess that is the premium or the coup de grace. If that's the standards, nobody's going to meet the standards."

Other states, like California and Colorado, have passed their own medical marijuana laws in defiance of the federal ban.

Depending on whose testimony one listened to Tuesday, those states are either awash in new revenue from a tightly-regulated wonder drug, or a Wild West with more pot dispensaries than Starbucks getting kids high on candy-themed cannabis.

Eric Voth, a doctor and the chairman of the Institute on Global Drug Policy, said marijuana prescriptions in California are dispensed with "a wink and a nod" and more prescriptions are filled on Friday afternoons by those under 25 than at any other time by any other group.

"It's a scam, it's not a prescription," Voth said.

Voth also said much of Oregon had to halt pre-employment drug screenings after medical marijuana because "they had no usable workforce."

But Voth and the two others who spoke out against the bill were outnumbered by a pro-pot contingent that included a family physician, a former police detective, a firefighter and several others who touted marijuana as the best source of relief for themselves or their loved ones.

Several of them pointed out that the FDA has approved a number of prescription drugs with potentially fatal side effects, while, as one of them put it, "it is physically impossible to eat enough marijuana to induce death."

Wichita resident Esau Freeman got choked up as he read a two-page list of side effects for the prescription arthritis drug Humera, which he said caused his mother's death.

"I didn't come here to complain about the doctors, or to ask you to go after the makers of Humera," Freeman said. "I'm here to ask you if we can do better. If patients in Kansas deserve the legal right to access safe and more natural medicine. I'm asking you as responsible and caring legislators of this great state of Kansas to investigate the evidence of medical marijuana with an unbiased and open mind."

Jon Hauxwell, the physician from Hays who testified for the bill, said he was confident his camp could win on the science and he would be sending some studies to Trimmer via email.

Finney was less certain.

"I don't think either side can win on the science, to be quite honest," she said. "But we're gonna try."



News Hawk - 420 Warrior 420 MAGAZINE
Location: Kansas
Source: Topeka Capital-Journal
Author: Andy Marso
Contact: letters@cjonline.com
Copyright: 2012 The Topeka Capital-Journal
Website: cjonline.com


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