West Virginia Should Legalize Marijuana

A handful of states have started cashing in on marijuana.  Should West Virginia join them?

The debate would have to undo decades of faulty "drug education" which tried to establish direct causal links between so-called "gateway drugs," such as alcohol and pot, with harder intoxicants such as narcotics.  

The gateway to hard drugs, however, has more often been an injury.  For almost twenty years, report an injury to the doctor and he prescribes a strong narcotic.  Prescription drugs, such as hydrocodone, have high rates of an addiction particularly tough to escape.  The intoxicant is the same as that in heroin or opium, just stronger.  Unlike conventional drugs, such as ibuprofen, they do not kill physical pain so much as they make the user not care that it exists.

Pills are big business.  A pill mill pharmacy in Mingo County sold 3.2 million prescription units in a single year before the FBI busted it.  Any better alternative coming into the market, especially one that could be grown in the user's backyard, would cut into both legal and illicit revenues.

Marijuana does have addicts, but not in the physical sense.  It has very mild physical effects.  Pot addiction is more along the lines of "addictions" to gambling, video games, and shopping, or even hyperfocusing on work.  "Addicts" get irritated when they cannot obtain it, but have no physical withdrawal. People often overuse some form of stimulation or lack thereof to escape everyday life or feel good. Pot is less addictive than alcohol and certainly caffeine.  It can get a hold on a person's mind, but does not wreck the body when people try to get off of it.

It makes sense to legalize pot even just for medical use.  Unlike narcotics, which simply kill sensation, marijuana may have positive effects even on catastrophic illnesses such as multiple sclerosis.  The District of Columbia and 21 states agree and legalized it.  When choosing between drugs with strong physical and merely psychological effects, it seems that pot is the superior alternative.

West Virginia could reap a particular bonus from the movement.  The Mountain State already produces a staggering amount of the plant.  Legal cultivation could make currently unused land productive.  Legal growth would help to fill state coffers with green.  Millions could be made by people already in the state who already own the land.  Tax revenues for states who fully legalized have been generous.  In February of this year, Denver took in $3.2 million in tax revenue from pot alone.

West Virginia should legalize the production and sale of pot at least for medical use.  The state has a massive pharmaceutical firm, land, and people who know how to work it.  It should also consider at the very least legalizing pot that is grown and used within property boundaries.  

With the money saved, the state could use more resources to go after drugs such as meth and pills that are destroying families and communities.

Has the Federal Government Inadvertently Set a States' Rights Precedent? Delegates Sobonya and Cowles Think So

Since 1819, McCullough v. Maryland has served as the law of the land.  At that time, state governments exercised more power and held more credibility than the still infant federal government.  Chief Justice John Marshall and the Supreme Court sought to bolster the federal government's position to prevent disruption from jealous states.

Marshall wrote the opinion broadly enough so that it legally prevented any state from officially acting in contradiction to any federal policy or agency.  State police cannot even legally pull over a federal vehicle that is speeding.

Obviously this decision came in the context of its times.  The federal government was very small and claimed few powers.  Some of the states had existed for almost or over 200 years as political units.

Delegates Kelli Sobonya (R) Cabell, and Darryl Cowles (R) Morgan, think they may see a breach in the iron wall of McCullough.  

In a recent Legislative committee meeting on medical marijuana covered by the Charleston Daily Mail , Sobonya queried about the inconsistent enforcement of marijuana laws by the federal government.

If Sobonya and Cowles are right, then the Obama Administration may have opened the door to states ignoring laws that they find onerous to their citizens.  EPA regulations and Obamacare were cited by the delegates as examples.

Delegate Gary Howell (R) Mineral later noted "civil society depends on rule of law.  You can't just have the president and his political aides pick and choose what to enforce.  Then we have a government of men, not of laws, which John Adams saw as a prime threat to liberty."  He also SAID that the inconsistent enforcement could set a precedent where states can legally defend their own interests.

It should be noted that no court or statute has ever refuted the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions penned by James Madison and Thomas Jefferson.  If the federal government violates the Constitution, according to Madison in the Virginia Resolution, "necessary and proper measures" must be taken to protect the people's rights.    Madison never specified what those ought to be.  At the very least, it would seem that Virginia, Kentucky, and West Virginia can refer to these works as grounds of legal argument.

Post Script:  Full disclosure.  I support legalization of medical marijuana.  Frankly those who support it should take more issue with the Obama Administration's non enforcement than with either enforcing or getting rid of the law.  By not enforcing the law, Obama is allowing businesses to grow.  Those businesses will always be subject to legal extortion by the federal government because the law can always be held over them as a Sword of Damocles.

Medical Marijuana

This is another one of those posts that comes with a caveat of "opinions expressed here do not necessarily reflect the opinions of everyone at Potomac Highlands Conservative, etc. etc. etc."

However, with that caveat in mind, the time has come to consider the positives of introducing some form of marijauna for medical use.

In 2003 almost five million people reported using opiate pain medication for "non medical purposes" according to a National Institute in Drug Addiction study. (In comparison, experts believe that two million people have a cocaine addiction.) Now this number has certainly A) risen sharply in the past six years and B) was underreported to begin with because a lot of people do not like admitting to this kind of behavior. Opiates include darvocet, percocet, oxycontin and other pills derived from opium.

For anyone, opium based drugs are highly physically addictive. All too many people have a predisposition towards addiction that makes them highly vulnerable to the "high" created by these medications. Mix a vulnerable person, physically or emotionally, with a highly concentrated opiate such as oxycontin and you are sure to get an addict nearly every time.

Enter marijuana. As a medication or social drug, marijuana has a much lower physical addiction rate. Certainly the high can create emotional dependence in many cases, but that is much easier to break than the physical dependence created by opiates. Marijuana when properly used has almost the same pain killing effect as most of the opiate drugs. Getting a similar benefit with a much lower rate of desperate addiction is a strong argument in favor of legalizing marijuana for medical use. As far as abuse is concerned, misuse and addiction to opiates is rampant already. Any measure that could stem the tide of normal people growing addicted in the course of taking a legitimate prescription is a bonus for society.

Medical marijuana gives us a potential alternative to the highly addictive opiates, but the problem does not stop there. We need to reign in some of these "pain clinics" that have as much concern for their patients as Mexican drug cartels do for their customers. Doctors that knowingly hand out pills to addicts for no real medical purpose at all need to be treated in the same manner as crack or meth dealers. Their degrees and nice clothes do not make them any better than any other drug dealer. Some highly addictive drugs need to be used only in cases of terminal illness or the most severe and debilitating conditions, the kind of real pain problems that would preclude a normal life anyway.

Medical marijuana is only part of the solution to runaway pain pill addiction in this country, but it is an important step towards keeping good people from sliding down that path in the first place.

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One last thing. Those of you that support this and have rallies and meetings that end up on TV, here is a public relations hint. Get rid of the long hair and beards. Wear a button down shirt, maybe even a tie. It does not help the cause of medical marijuana to have on television the Jerry Garcia look alike contest. Now I used to have a lot of friends that looked like this, maybe still do. However, seeing these people wandering around in the background of TV coverage does not advance the movement. Not trying to be mean or discriminatory, but just take it as food for thought.