Cruel Hoaxes

A bill to allow medical marijuana was killed in the Connecticut House yesterday.

A freshman legislator, Penny Bacchiochi of Somers, brought the 151-member House chamber to silence when she said that no anti-nausea medications would help her husband when he was suffering from terminal bone cancer. After an operation, he became a paraplegic and suffered intense pain.

"A courageous doctor took us aside, and he told us that my husband needed to try marijuana," said Bacchiochi, 41. "It was obtained at great legal risk to my family, but it worked, and it worked wonders. And it gave him back some quality of life. I will always remember how my husband suffered, and I will always remember if this legislature had passed a bill like this, he would have suffered less."

But the bill went down by a vote of 79-64. "I consider this a cruel hoax," said a leading opponent of the measure on the House floor, parroting the famous words of former Drug Czar Barry McCaffrey on the subject.

It looks like federal anti-drug propaganda already works pretty well at the state level, even without this.

Comments

[James Merritt]

The "cruel hoax" -- perpetrated for more than three decades, now -- is that there is anything constitutionally sound about the Controlled Substances Act at all, that the Federal government has any legitimate power under the constitution to dicate or criminalize the individual decisions that people make about what to eat, drink, smoke, or othewiwse ingest, or the otherwise harmless activities that other individuals undertake to provide those ingestibles for willing customers.

The reason that people don't sweep away the drug warriors in the congress and white house is, I believe, the same reason that there is no call to impeach the President over the Iraq war, and that the war and its result will likely improve the chances of his re-election, rather than insuring his defeat. Simply put: once the mob gets an idea in its collective head that a particular end is desirable, the means are irrelevant. For the drug war, the idea was "we need to stop drugs, period." For the Iraq war, the idea seems to have been, "Saddam is an evil dictator who is somehow responsible for 9/11." I don't even think that the apparently bogus "weapons of mass destruction" charge carried as much weight with the public (and good thing, as the failure to find WMDs could then serve to enrage the public and create a backlash against Bush). If the public perceives that the desired end is being addressed (whether or not it really is), those addressing it can get away with bending and breaking rules all the way up to the Constitution. We've seen it, over and over again over the past several decades. That's life in the real world.

The brief, plainly-written US Constitution stands among the best ideas ever produced by Statecraft. It is not, however, self-enforcing. The people have to know it and enforce it, through vigorous insistence on respect for and protection of their rights, and especially through their actions in the ballot box. If we don't put into office people who solemnly promise to respect and uphold the Constitution, if we don't promptly dismiss those who don't scrupulously follow through on that promise, then the whole system degrades and, eventually, fails altogether.

Is that what people really want?

[Thoth]

Ow! My joints ache when it rains. Where, O, Where can I legally get some pot to ease my 34 year old, pain-riddled body?

[Jon H]

Thoth: try some morphine.

Oh, wait, that's actually addictive. Better ban it from medical use.

[joe]

Cowards.

[Croesus]

Thoth,

Its not so humorous when you have MS.

[trainwreck]

I suppose voting yes could be construed as a vote to support terrorism by some.

[Thoth]

Thank you Croesus, you have helped me with my point. Who decides what injuries/illnesses qualify the pothead to use "medicinal marijuana"?