Analysis by Kyle A. Lohmeier
I smell toast. Anyone else? No? Just me? Figures. I did just finish reading all about the newly released poll results and rules for doctors under Ohio’s “medical marijuana law,” which isn’t just the worst medical marijuana law ever written by human hands, it’s possibly the worst law, period, ever. The ostensible, if not stated, purpose of Ohio’s “medical marijuana law” is to prevent anyone ever using marijuana legally within the state for any reason whatsoever. In keeping with that goal, the state government sent a survey out to Ohio’s some 3,000 licensed physicians and asked for their input. The results of that poll and the corresponding rules were released yesterday.
Of those 3,000, 45 percent said they were unlikely to recommend medical marijuana. According to an article on Cleveland-dot-com, many of the doctors responding said their patients weren’t asking them about medical marijuana, but when they do they want to know about its benefits and side effects. The article goes on to say that other doctors were worried about patients abusing marijuana and “a few weren’t aware Ohio’s law had passed.”
So, the only thing the survey proves is that doctors are piss-poor legal gatekeepers standing between Ohioans and a plant humans have a symbiotic relationship with. I’m guessing the real reason patients aren’t discussing medical marijuana with their doctors is because most Ohioans know their doctor still can’t actually prescribe them marijuana. The majority of Ohioans who want to use marijuana for whatever ailment, or none at all, are already part of Ohio’s multi-million-dollar marijuana black market and don’t need their doctor’s permission, or meddling for that matter.
As if the doctors themselves weren’t effective enough at getting between Ohioans and a plant that grows wild on at least five continents, the new rules the state announced yesterday will make them a veritable wall of obstruction. To even be able to recommend marijuana to a patient, a doctor would first have to have completed an approved two-hour education course so they can identify the twenty maladies for which marijuana can be recommended, and along they way they’d learn all about the medical characteristics of marijuana. In two hours.
Any doctor willing to go through that hassle, of the only 55 percent in the state so inclined to begin with, (roughly 1,650 physicians) must then be willing to submit an annual report describing the effectiveness of marijuana on each patient. It’s no secret that doctors spend half their lives, literally, filling out compliance forms and other paperwork as it is, so, I’m sure Ohio’s additional paperwork requirement to recommend a plant that’s never killed anyone will further discourage many of those 1,650 potentially-interested doctors from taking the class and recommending pot to patients. Far easier to just carry on prescribing Big Pharma’s FDA-approved poisons to people; particularly given how the leggy pharmaceutical rep stops by the office with freebies.
Add to these new rules the previously announced ones that limit the number and size of cannabis farms to such a degree that supply would always be short – and made the application and license fees for operating such a farm prohibitively high – and it’s obvious that this law is a complete and total sham. It’s only intended purpose, and the only thing it did effectively, was head off an effort by grassroots organizers to put a real marijuana legalization law on the 2016 ballot, where it just might have been passed by the will of the people and made marijuana legal and unregulated. Such would have been a nightmare for the state government and its cronies. So, they rammed through a terrible law that will keep marijuana effectively illegal forever – thus protecting the cronies who run the “marijuana diversion programs” every first-time offender is offered when they’re arrested for possessing pieces of a plant; as well as preserving the state’s intrusive power into people’s lives.
Government doesn’t exist to serve people, government exists to serve itself; it feeds on power and control, and is addicted to both. This law places all the power and control over a plant squarely in the government’s hands. And, they wouldn’t have it any other way.
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