On Nov. 3, Maine voters will be asked to vote on proposed changes to the state’s marijuana laws.
If Question 5 passes, it would be legal for nonprofit dispensaries to grow and sell marijuana to patients with prescriptions. The dispensaries would be regulated by the Department of Health and Human Services.
The law would also expand the list of ailments that qualify for a cannabis prescription. Those afflicted with Hepatitis C, Crohn’s disease, and Alzheimer’s would be eligible for a prescription as well as patients whose pain has not responded to other medications for more than six months.
Maine is one of 13 states to allow medical marijuana. In 1999, a referendum vote made it legal for patients with chronic diseases to grow up to six plants. The vote passed by a wide margin at nearly 62 percent of the vote.
The problem with the current laws is that some patients are simply too ill to grow their own cannabis, says Wendy Chapkis, director of the department of Women and Gender Studies and author of Dying to Get High.
“The idea that somebody who is terminally ill with cancer is going to be out gardening is really optimistic,” she said. “Really what it means is that people have been forced out on the black market.”
Dr. Dora Anne Mills, the head of the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention is one of the handful of public officials who have spoken out against the measure, which so far has no organized opposition. She says the drawbacks of using cannabis for medical use far outweigh it’s benefits.
“Marijuana you can’t dose,” she said. “You take a pill and it has X number of milligrams of the active ingredient. Just like you can’t dose a cup of coffee. A cup of coffee can have 10 mg of caffeine or 100. Likewise with marijuana, you can’t dose a cigarette.”
“Medical marijuana is a misnomer,” she said. “There are no clinical trials I know of that show that marijuana is more effective than known prescription medications.”
But Chapkis says research on medical marijuana was blocked by the federal government until about ten years ago.
“For over ten years, the DEA just refused to give the cannabis so that scientists could do the studies,” says Chapkis.?
“One of the things that’s troubling is that public health officials don’t know of the really massive amount of scientific data now on the use of cannabis for various kinds of symptom relief,” she says. “If you start to undermine the prohibition of cannabis, even for medical use, I think there was anxiety that it would begin to undermine the war on drugs. To justify this multi-million dollar gerontocracy and this huge police apparatus really requires the criminalization of cannabis.”
Despite research espousing benefits of medical marijuana, Mills says recent advances in pharmaceutical technology have produced drugs that are vastly better than cannabis.
“Now there are tremendously effective medications; real medications without the horrendous effects of marijuana,” she said.
Both Mills and Roy McKinney, the head of the Maine Drug Enforcement Agency have decried the potential societal impact of making marijuana more widely available.
“Not that everybody who uses it is using it as a gateway to something else, but if you have it around in a community in large amounts you’ll have young people using it as a gateway,” said Mills.
McKinney was unavailable for comment Friday afternoon, but he told the Morning Sentinel last week that allowing a third-party distribution network of marijuana vendors could lead to misuse.
Chapkis, who studied cannabis distribution networks in California, said this argument was tenuous.
“You can look at other states that have medical marijuana laws and distribution like California and it has not lead to an increase in the number of underage people using cannabis recreationally,” she said.
One of Mill’s chief assertions on marijuana is that it isn’t the “non-toxic herb” that proponents of Question 5 like Chapkis say it is.
“There’s a lot of things that are natural that are harmful to you, including arsenic and radon. I don’t recommend you take arsenic because it’s natural.”
The debate over Question 5 seems to be the least contentious of the referendum questions on the ballot for Nov. 3. While there are more than a dozen organized groups involved in Question 1, the proposed repeal of recently enacted gay marriage legislation, the only group currently raising and spending money for Question 5 is a group called Maine Citizens for Patients Rights.
The Women and Gender Studies and Sociology Departments are presenting the film “Waiting To Inhale,” at 7 pm Wednesday, Oct. 21 at Talbot Hall on the Portland campus. There will be a discussion following the film. For information on the film, go to http://www.waitingtoinhale.org. The event is free and open to the public.