Utahns have now become well-versed in the Legislature’s message to patients: Use opiates and risk death, or use medical cannabis and risk jail time, fines, or losing your children to state custody.
Sick Utahns have courageously come forward in the past few years to share their stories. Some have spoken to the tremendous benefit cannabis has brought them when used legally in another state, or illegally here in Utah. Others merely express the hope to try. All of them have that right, even if the law doesn’t currently recognize it.
But the Legislature has refused to act, which is why voters will soon have the opportunity to sign a petition to place the issue on the November 2018 ballot. According to a recent poll, 75 percent of voters are ready to change the law to protect patients from legal repercussions for trying to improve their health using cannabis.
Despite the strong sympathy from a majority of Utahns, many still oppose this decriminalization of cannabis medicine. The siren song of “caution” has seduced some of them, arguing that reform should be slow and incremental. But if the law criminalizes sick people, compounding their physical suffering with emotional and legal distress, why should this injustice be only slowly overturned?
Anything short of widespread decriminalization for patients is tantamount to support for the status quo — in other words, continued support for treating patients as criminals. Especially in a conservative state where most residents claim to favor a limited government, that makes no sense.
We also hear people pleading for FDA approval, telling taxpayers to help fund more research projects while scientists satisfy themselves — a process taking many years, if not decades, before a comprehensive set of conditions have been studied sufficiently to satisfy regulators.
Nobody opposes more research (except, perhaps, the federal government which lists cannabis on Schedule I). The very patients who are risking criminal action would love more scientific understanding of the product that clearly helps them. But any research initiative should be done concurrently with decriminalization; patients should not be told to sit on the sidelines while the scientific method slowly moves forward.
And then come the sky-is-falling opponents — the ones who often point to misleading statistics and out-of-context circumstances from recreational states. (Never mind the fact that they consistently ignore the over two dozens states that legalized medical use where patients are getting help without controversies as in Colorado.)
Oddly, many of these same people (almost all of them self-described conservatives) vociferously oppose gun control laws where proponents use these same misleading tactics to call for restricting or banning firearms. No matter what alleged atrocity involving guns you might point to, these people will stubbornly defend the individual right to keep and bear arms — aggregate trends be damned.
If only they were consistent. If they were, they would see that they are guilty of doing the same thing on the issue of medical cannabis, pointing to purported problems and concerning statistics to mount their opposition to medical cannabis.
But this argument — keeping cannabis illegal because some people might abuse it — is completely absurd. Put differently, these people are saying that law-abiding sick people should be treated as criminals merely because other people (actual criminals) are abusing the substance and potentially harming others. There’s no justice in that position.
We have worked diligently in recent years to share the suffering of patients so the Utah public can understand this legal predicament, and the efforts are paying off; a strong majority of Utahns stand ready to support changing the law. And the decreasing minority of opponents — including prosecutors, police officers, and politicians — are becoming more transparent in their prohibitionist platitudes.
The idea that those who suffer among us —t hose who wish to avoid using deadly opiates — should be fined, jailed, or otherwise punished for trying to be a functioning family member, employee, and contributing member of society, is not simply unfair or unjust. It’s irrational.
And no matter what flowery or fearful language the opposition wraps itself in, most Utahns are seeing through the irrationality. They are sick of living in a state that prohibits its sick citizens from using a naturally grown plant their physicians might recommend.
Patients are not criminals — and the law needs to change to reflect that reality. That is the rational position.
Connor Boyack is president of Libertas Institute, a free market think tank in Lehi.