Rep. Glenn Anderson (R-Fall City) made a joke to the current medical-marijuana legislation that would have given subsidies for stoned pot patients to order pizzas.
There is quite a bit of new information to digest in the field of cannabis these day.
Even the National Institutes of Health are allowing for the language of marijuana as a medicine to fill their pages.
So why do some people snicker when the hear the word ‘pot’? Especially when it’s usually related to a medical marijuana issue.
Encouraging those who do not understand their own cannabinoid system is the first part of the education process, but how long are we going to let the learning curve slide?
In California, we’ve had roughly fifteen years to deal with legislation that so far still has patients being harassed and providers being thrown in jail. Sometime patients are thrown in jail who have no dispensary but are just growing their own medicine. Patients like Susan Soares who is healthier because of the medicine she chooses to use and able to grow her own supply of it.
If law enforcement in Redondo Beach would have been trained about the medical cannabis laws, and the judge who signed the search warrant would have been informed that Ms. Soares was a medical marijuana patient, perhaps he wouldn’t have signed the warrant. Instead, Susan spend three days in jail and it wasn’t until a different judge reviewed the facts, looked at the law, and dismissed all her marijuana charges.
One Washington lawmaker made an joke while on the floor suggesting food subsidies for stoned patients, which shows the watermark of understanding and compassion is lower than previously thought.
The good news for Washington patients is they now have legal dispensaries, but if those enforcing the law don’t have a training course on how to handle medical marijuana patients during a police encounter, detention or arrests, and that if there are any raids they don’t need to put automatic guns in the faces of patients at the dispensaries getting their medicine in what is supposed to be safe access.
Having our tax dollars spent on the salary of law enforcement who don’t know the law shouldn’t be tolerated, but abusing a human being, let alone a suffering patient who finds relief in plant-based medicines, is unconscionable.
Having had several interactions with law enforcement officials lately, I myself know what happens during a law enforcement encounter that ends up turning into a detention. To then be arrested when the law is on our side is somehow status quo in America while there’s a war on drugs, all drugs, including cannabis.
Cannabis is only allowed to be persecuted these days because it is a Schedule I. For no other reason is it a schedule I narcotic according to Congress other than it was placed there almost forty years ago when they knew almost nothing about cannabis, and even less about the Endogenous Cannabinoid System.
Now that all this information is available it’s time to have the conversation out in the open about cannabis and for those who can’t sit through class without laughing are the ones who need to sit at the front of the class and pay the closest attention.
Maybe when we have a well-versed cannabis curriculum to choose from to train our law enforcers we will actually find people respecting those enforcing laws because we will have made sure those tasked to do so are actually understanding why cannabis is medicine and why the cannabis laws are opening up to patients who need it.
The last thing we need are a bunch of trigger-happy teenagers at the lowest levels of law enforcement following an outdated training method, be it raid tactics during a dispensary while patents are there, or simply the fulfillment of the oath they took and the obligation to see it through.
