This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2016, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
Of course not everything that would follow action by the Utah Legislature to allow the medicinal use of marijuana would be positive. There are few chemicals, natural or artificial, in the human environment that do not, when badly or excessively used, have serious, even fatal, downsides.
But there has been more than enough evidence presented to convince any compassionate person — or institution — that medical cannabis offers some of us real relief from unimaginable levels of human suffering. Relief that is more effective, with fewer side-effects, than can be had from legal medications.
The likely, even inevitable, misuses or abuses should not be enough to stop the trend — already legal in 23 states and tacitly accepted by the federal government — of allowing the use of the naturally occurring substance for specified maladies under the supervision of a physician.
That is why members of the Utah Legislature should follow both the head and the heart and pass the Medical Cannabis Act, submitted by Sen. Mark Madsen and approved Friday by a Senate committee, that would allow the practice in Utah.
Which happens to mean that the Legislature should also respectfully decline to take the advice of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — of which the vast majority of lawmakers happen to be members — to kill the bill.
The church — or, more accurately, the collection of human beings who run the church — has just as much right as anyone else to weigh in on this and other controversial matters. But, when it does, it bears the same burden as any other interest group. Its arguments have to stand up to scrutiny, to meet standards of both logic and humanity, in order to carry the day.
In this matter, the church's case is not convincing.
The number of good and decent people — not habitual drug abusers or casual scofflaws — who have demonstrated the often startling benefits of medical marijuana for people suffering from chronic pain, debilitating diseases and crippling seizures is now impossible to deny.
The side-effects, meanwhile, are all too often exaggerated. No less an authority than the National Institute on Drug Abuse declines to label marijuana a "gateway drug," noting that few users go on to get hooked on harder drugs. And the number of fatal overdoses is so small as to amount to zero.
Meanwhile, the socially accepted alternative to medical marijuana — opioids — is highly addictive, often fatal and has been shown to encourage abusers to jump to heroin when their prescription medications are unavailable or insufficient.
The Legislature would also be doing the LDS Church a favor if it politely ignored its counsel on this subject. If the church gets the blame for stopping Madsen's bill, a great many Utahns, LDS and otherwise, will resent its outsized influence and its ability to, in effect, force the whole of the state's population to live as the church would have them live.
The fact that LDS officials do not penalize their members for using medical marijuana in states where it is legal smacks of rank hypocrisy. So does the fact that the church's welcoming view on immigration, based on its humane concern for keeping families together, stands against a position that will force families to atomize so some of their members can become medical refugees in more enlightened states. Both positions undermine the church's social and moral authority in the wider world.
Madsen, an LDS Church member and grandson of late LDS Church President Ezra Taft Benson, was openly frustrated last week by the church's decision to interfere in the legislative process, especially its unwillingness to so much as discuss the matter with him. That's understandable.
But the problem is not that the LDS Church is wrongly active, in this or any other matter. The problem is that, in the case of medical marijuana, it is actively wrong.
Madsen's bill should be approved.