USM students are the nurses, programmers, politicians and environmental activists of the future.
But while struggling to pay for their 15-credit semesters though, they are the wait-staff, work study students, and minimum wage slaves of today.
Oh yeah, and drug dealers, can’t forget those drug dealers.
While interviewing students last Friday to gather opinions for our Question of the Week feature, I noticed overwhelming support for ballot question five, which if passed, would allow for a distribution and retail infrastructure to be developed to aide patients with the necessary prescriptions to more easily obtain their medicine.
One student (who, I should note, was removed from the Q of the W to protect their identity) called us back over after answering our question, and gave us a knowing look I’ve come to recognize after a living in Portland for a year and a half.
“Do you guys smoke?” she asked – right in the middle of the Luther Bonney lobby, mind you.
After running down our individual preferences, she carefully proceeded to offer to sell us weed, good stuff from the sounds of it, grown outside in northern Maine, $45 bucks a bag. If I had been in the market, I might have taken her up on it, but she had already altered my perception as much as I needed that day.
Granted, this is a college campus, a liberal safe-haven for drug culture as much as for academics, but something about being offered drugs by an innocuous-looking co-ed made me realize something. While the decision to further relax medical marijuana laws in Maine will be decided at the polls in November, one thing is clear right now – Maine, Portland and Gorham especially, is a place where people enjoy to partake in some herbal therapy – just ask those who spent last weekend camped out on a man named Harry’s farm in Starks (For the rest of you, that’s the annual Harvest Fest – Maine’s original marijuana festival in western Maine.)
So why shouldn’t we allow easier access to pot for patients suffering from serious medical conditions? Sure, there are problems that could arise from the proposal to improve Maine’s pot-distribution infrastructure, but is it really fair that while I am getting offered eights in Luther Bonney, someone with cancer or AIDS has to painstakingly grow their own medicine, or search the black market for herb in the midst of a illness?
Question five would also lengthen the lists of medical conditions that could be treated with cannabis, stopping just short of ushering in a California-level laxness that allows prescriptions for everything from anxiety to hangnails (alright, that last one is not quiet true, although under Cali’s system is notoriously easy to find a sympathetic physician to prescribe the ganja).
While the medical effectiveness of the drugs is disputed by some, one thing is for sure. They are a heck of a lot of people using marajunana for “off-label” uses – as the federal government has yet to classify “failure to sufficiently enjoy the Planet Earth series and Doritos” as a medical condition.
I recognize that we are in a liberal section of a liberal state here, and I don’t think this is a viable nation-wide solution, but in Maine, I think the time has come to take a hard look at the laws that govern the use, possession, and cultivation of marijuana, and ask if they make any sense.
Entrenched drug company interests, and a federal government reluctant to renege on decades worth of rhetoric are the only logical explanation for why cannabis is still such a vilified substance in America.
It’s my belief that within 40 years, laws governing marijuana will be completely different than they are today, but meanwhile, thousands of people are suffering needlessly, putting unnatural chemicals into their body, and dealing with lousy side effects while a safe, natural alternative is pushing through the topsoil all over Washington and Aroostook counties.
This should not be construed as The Free Press’s opinion on Question five. This is just the opinion of one Mainer whose own experiences have taught him the pros and cons of marijuana use, and is tired of an archaic bureaucracy deciding what is best for the individual, especially one that is unable to distinguish “getting high” from “getting medical care”.
Thanks for reading,
Matt Dodge