(Syndicated to Kansas newspapers May 11, 2015)
In one of the most unpredictable debates in the Legislature this session, or in years, the House approved on an 81-36 vote a tightly regulated system for legalizing medical marijuana for treatment of seizure disorders or epilepsy.
Medical marijuana? In Kansas?
Yes, and there were heart-rending speeches from lawmakers who actually saw babies—babies—who had more than 100 seizure attacks in a day, their little bodies shaking uncontrollably, while their parents held them closely, wondering whether their children would die.
Can you imagine that being your child or grandchild or a neighbor’s child? If the cure was panda meat or Lesser Prairie Chicken wings, there would be no reluctance to legalize whatever you had to do to save that child the pain.
But marijuana?
Yes, there is probably still some medical research that says it isn’t necessary to use a non-high producing element of marijuana to end those seizures, or that there are other solutions. And, maybe that’s right. But those babies are still having seizures, and whatever you can do to stop them, well, you do it.
There probably isn’t a better vote-mover than babies.
But marijuana, that’s a hot button in conservative Kansas, and it draws pictures of folks in tie-dyed T-shirts and long hair dancing, and that’s not something many Kansas lawmakers are interested in legalizing.
They call it a foot-in-the-door for full-scale legalization of pot and expanding the tight list of maladies for which it can be prescribed. Back sore? Sprain your wrist? Just get a prescription for medical marijuana. High-inducing pot works better than those non-high pills? Well, just another expansion of availability of marijuana.
That’s not something that lawmakers are enthused about in Kansas…except if there is money involved. That care of babies wasn’t the big issue…it was an amendment to a bill that reduces the criminal penalties for possession of small amounts of marijuana. Upside there? Less casual pot users in state prisons saving the Department of Corrections—and taxpayers—as much as $671,000 in the upcoming fiscal year and about $1 million the next year. Oh, and more room in prison for thieves and people we all want locked away.
And, there’s that last amendment to the bill to start studies on growing hemp—and we’re talking about hemp for rope, for livestock feed, for plastics, for home siding and roofing and paint and a lot of other non-high producing industries.
Oh, and for the farm community, growing hemp takes less increasingly scarce water than corn or soybeans or other higher-margin but more expensive-to-produce agricultural products.
Let’s see: Comforting babies, saving money on prisons, finding a new crop for farmers to grow. H’mmm… This gets interesting.
Is this foot-in-the-door business realistic? Probably.
But the change from marijuana for medical care to marijuana that makes you dance better is a big step, one that this Legislature won’t consider, and one that legislatures in the future will either consider or not. You can’t bind a future legislature.
Who’d have thought that Kansas—Kansas after all—would legalize liquor by the drink, or mail-ballot elections?
This might be the bill to watch that will show whether the Kansas Senate will pass and the governor will sign one of the most outside-the-box bills it has seen recently.