South Carolina

[palmspringsbum]

Posted on Tue, Jan. 16, 2007


S.C. lawmaker proposes legalizing medical marijuana use

JIM DAVENPORT
The State

COLUMBIA, S.C. - A state senator whose first wife suffered a painful death wants the state to legalize medical marijuana use.

Sen. Bill Mescher of Pinopolis says the issue has been on his mind for about 20 years. "My first wife died of lung cancer - a long agonizing death," the Republican lawmaker said.

A doctor said marijuana might help ease the pain and nausea from chemotherapy, but South Carolina law wouldn't allow it, Mescher said.

People won't let dogs die with that kind of suffering, Mescher said. "It's been on my mind ever since," he said.

Mescher isn't optimistic about the bill's chance given the drug's reputation. "But it's a benign, benevolent help for people in agony or excruciating pain," he said.

Dr. Capers Hiott, a Wedgefield ear, nose and throat specialist, was the Legislature's doctor of the day Tuesday. He has his doubts about medical marijuana use.

"It would have to have tight controls," Hiott said. "I don't know that we're to the point it can be controlled."

And he's worried that people will begin advocating for using other currently illegal drugs to relieve pain. "There are a lot of things out there that can make you happy," Hiott said.

The South Carolina Medical Association hasn't taken a position on Mescher's bill, said Todd Atwater, the group's chief executive officer.

"There are physicians on both sides" of the issue, but the association hasn't gone through its formal process of coming up with a position, Atwater said.

The American Medical Association has adopted policies that call for more research into medical marijuana use and for administering marijuana's active ingredient without smoking it. Until the research is completed, the AMA advocates keeping it classified as a tightly controlled and dangerous drug that should not be legalized for sale or possession.

The Washington-based Marijuana Policy Project says 30 states have medical marijuana laws. Since 1996, 11 states, including Alaska, California, Hawaii and Maine - have enacted laws that remove criminal penalties for people who grow, possess or use marijuana with a doctor's approval.

[palmspringsbum]

Legislative action for the week of Jan. 14-20

Fox Carolina


The second week of the legislative session:

<span class=postbold>KING DAY:</span> Legislators had Monday off, but that didn't stop the NAACP from continuing to push the Legislature to remove the Confederate flag from the Statehouse grounds. Those calls at the rally this year were joined by U.S. Sens. Chris Dodd of Connecticut and Joe Biden of Delaware, both Democrats. The two presidential hopefuls say the flag should go.

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<span class=postbold>STATE OF STATE:</span> Gov. Mark Sanford gave his fifth State of the State address Wednesday as he begins his second term. The Republican called on legislators to restructure state government, give tax breaks and toughen the state's DUI laws.

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<span class=postbold>RESTRUCTURING:</span> The Senate Judiciary Committee approved several bills aimed at streamlining the statewide ballot by converting elected constitutional offices into jobs filled by a governor's appointee. Sanford supports the legislation and says governors need more executive branch control.

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<span class=postbold>CLOSED MEETINGS:</span> Republican House leaders quickly pushed through a change in House rules that will allow the GOP caucus close its doors to the public. Leaders have been trying to close the Republican caucus meetings for years, saying party members should be able to meet out of public earshot in public buildings.

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<span class=postbold>PAYDAY LENDING:</span> State Rep. Alan Clemmons introduced a bill that would cap payday lending operators to no more than 36 percent annual interest and fees of no more than $5 for every $100 borrowed. The industry says that formula would drive out businesses.

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<span class=postbold>MEDICAL MARIJUANA:</span> State Sen. Bill Mescher is pushing a bill to legalize medical marijuana use. The Pinopolis Republican said he saw his wife die a painful death from lung cancer 20 years ago and doctors told him marijuana may have given her comfort. The Washington-based Marijuana Policy Project says 30 states have medical marijuana laws.

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<span class=postbold>EDUCATION SUPERINTENDENT:</span> Comprehensive tax reform should be part of effort to improve public schools, new state Education Superintendent Jim Rex says. "We have to have a more fair, equitable way to fund our schools," he told a Senate committee. That will involve looking at the entire tax structure, he said.

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<span class=postbold>SALES TAX:</span> The House approved a bill that lets Beaufort County begin collecting a sales tax in May although it missed a state deadline after voters approved the increase in November. The legislation erases the deadline and lets the county begin collecting $152 million for road projects.

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<span class=postbold>MCCAIN VISIT:</span> U.S. Sen. John McCain stopped by the Statehouse on Tuesday. House Speaker Bobby Harrell said he's endorsing McCain's expected bid for the White House in 2008.

<small>Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.</small>

[palmspringsbum]

General Assembly considering bill to legalize marijuana

WIStv Columbia, South Carolina

<img src=/bin/icon_video.gif> Video

(Berkeley County) February 14, 2007 - Should patients with cancer or similar diseases be allowed to legally use marijuana to ease their pain? That issue has made its way into the chambers of the General Assembly.

Senator Bill Mescher is a Republican in the Bible Belt - so it may surprise you to know that he's spearheading a bill to legalize pot for medical reasons.

He's made it his mission because of Shirley. She was Mescher's high school sweetheart and his wife of more than 36 years. She never smoked, yet died an agonizing death from lung cancer. He tells WIS, "One doctor said it might ease her pain if we had marijuana. I didn't do it. I regret that all my life."

Under the bill patients would be allowed to grow up to six marijuana plants for their use - if they didn't want to grow it, their caregivers could for them without being penalized.

"No we should not relax these laws," says John Ozaluk. Ozaluk is with DEA, "We have tractor trailer loads of marijuana coming into the state. We know that through investigation and through seizures. We know that there's a high demand for marijuana in the state of South Carolina."

It's a demand for the drug that Ozaluk says has nothing to do with medicine.

But Mescher argues, "There will always be some abusers. I don't care what you have, there will be someone who abuses it. I'll take that. We've got laws to take care of abusers. I'll take that to give people relief."

Ozaluk predicts problems from legalizing marijuana, "The air traffic controller who wakes up with a pain that morning in his neck or his shoulder. Who goes in to work that day, because he wants to self medicate, uses marijuana - not only put himself at risk going back and forth to work, but each and every person who's on a plane that day that he or she has landed."

Mescher doesn't agree. He hopes South Carolina will join 11 other states that have similar laws already in place, so people like his first wife can get some relief, "That's the reason I'm doing it. I don't care about political fallout. I'm past worrying about that."

A Senate subcommittee took no action on the legislation Wednesday. Lobbyists on both sides of the issue talked to state legislators. Testimony included a former lawmaker who says marijuana can ease patients' pain and a man who lost his son to drugs.

"The other message being sent is the danger of trying to normalize drug use through medication, it sends the wrong message to our kids," says Steven Steiner of Americans for a Drug Free Youth.

But Rep. Don Murphy says, "This is a group of people who with their doctors' approval, make decisions like this, especially at end of life. It's appropriate for doctors and families make these decisions and not bureaucrats hundreds of miles away."

Rep. Murphy is a former Maryland state legislator. Maryland is one of 11 states that currently allow medicinal marijuana use.

South Carolina legislators are expected to take the bill up again at their next meeting. That date has not been set.

Reported by Kara Gormley

Updated 8:10pm by Chantelle Janelle

[palmspringsbum]

POSTED ON FEBRUARY 27, 2008:

The War on Drugs is insane, but there's no end in sight

<span class=postbigbold>Prohibition Is the Problem</span>

The Charleston City Paper
By Will Moredock
<blockquote>
"The Drug War has arguably been the single most devastating, dysfunctional social policy since slavery." —Norm Stamper, Retired Chief of Police, Seattle
</blockquote>In the long history of human folly and futility, America's War on Drugs has surely earned a special place of honor.

Not satisfied that America was fighting a no-win war in Vietnam, in 1971 President Richard Nixon declared a War on Drugs, creating the Special Action Office for Drug Abuse Prevention. Nearly 40 years and hundreds of billions of dollars later, we are still fighting that war, with no end in sight. And the casualties keep piling up. The first, of course, was truth, as Aeschylus reminded us long ago. Other casualties have been our civil liberties and our trust in our government and leaders.

Another casualty came to my attention recently when I opened my e-mail to find a message from Skip Johnson, announcing that South Carolinians for Drug Law Reform was shutting down.

Johnson is a retired newspaperman, so he loves a good fight and he knows a few things about tilting at windmills. "My hero is Don Quixote and my saint is St. Jude," he said last week with a wry chuckle.

He and Sharon Fratepietro organized SCDLR in Charleston four years ago — though that may be overstating it. There was never any membership roll or dues. Meetings were somewhat irregular.

"The problem was that people didn't want to put their name on a list as being a member," Johnson said. "They said, 'What if my boss finds out? What if my wife finds out?' That's the kind of fear we were dealing with."

SCDLR may be out of business, but Johnson's still hard at work. He can cite dates, names, and statistics in his soliloquy against America's disastrous drug policies.

"The first thing you need to understand," he said, "is that the drug war is a war against black people. Black people are 13 percent of the nation's population, but they represent approximately 25 percent of all drug arrests, 50 percent of all drug convictions, and 75 percent of all drug incarcerations."

States with large black populations have used drug laws to control and disenfranchise their black populations, Johnson said. "Look at what happened in Florida in 2000. More than 20,000 black people in Florida were disenfranchised from voting because of drug convictions, most of them for possession and distribution of marijuana. These 20,000 nonviolent citizens were denied the right to vote. If they had been allowed to vote, George Bush would not have carried Florida and would not be president today ... That's how the drug laws are used in this country."

The War on Drugs has spawned a huge prison-industrial complex, Johnson said. Companies that build and run prisons lobby for longer sentences and support legislators who support their agenda. It is a vicious cycle that corrupts the democratic process, enriches a special interest industry with public money, and incarcerates millions of non-violent people in this country. Today, Charleston County is preparing to spend millions of dollars on a new jail to house its burgeoning inmate population. Johnson believes that the jail will be overcrowded on the day it opens.

America calls itself the Land of the Free, yet its drug laws have made this country the largest jailer in the world. At the end of 2006, 7 million people — one in every 32 U.S. adults — were behind bars, on probation or on parole, according to the Justice Department. Of that total, 2.2 million were incarcerated. About half of those inmates were serving time on drug-related charges. The People's Republic of China ranks second with 1.5 million behind bars, though China has over four times the population of the U.S.

Conservatives wail that Americans are surrendering our freedom to economic and environmental regulation. Yet, I have rarely heard them complain about the War on Drugs, about the doors that are kicked down, the citizens harassed and arrested, the property seized, the constitutional protections infringed in the name of protecting us from drugs.

Johnson does not regret his battle for enlightened drug laws in South Carolina. He still speaks at civic clubs and has spoken out against building the new county jail. He testified before state Senate subcommittees in favor of a needle exchange program and medical marijuana. Of course, our beloved state has neither today and is not likely to in the near future.

Ultimately, the solution to the "drug problem" is to legalize them all and control their sale and use, as we do tobacco and alcohol, Johnson said. That will take the profit out of drugs and with it the romance of the "gangsta" culture.

"Prohibition is the problem," he said. "It didn't work with alcohol, and it is not working today. I don't know why people can't see the logic of it."

[palmspringsbum]

I particularly like this comment to the above article (published in Charleston, South Carolina) by Séamus in Atlanta :

... What we see in The War on Drugs is an atavistic artifact of Puritanism. The Puritan ancestors who established the rigid backbone of our nation fled Merry (Bloody!) Olde England because they could not commune with The Established Church there. In essence Anglicanism is a motor vehicle of Roman Catholic manufacture, however with an English transmission, power steering and an English coat of paint.

The Puritans, Divinely favored with an escape, attempted a blessed-however-brief sojourn in The Netherlands, but they found themselves much too straight-laced for the local Dutch liberal laxity and permissiveness, so they high-tailed it to America. [Has anyone been to Amsterdam? Interestingly, the Dutch today have legalized certain drugs within certain legal boundaries.] The Puritans hadn’t been there long, until (true to the spirit of the demon-ridden 17th Century) they started their own witch hunt in Salem, Massachusetts. True to the Puritan prototype, America has been blessed with periodic witch hunts ever since: The Civil War, Prohibition, McCarthyism come to mind. The War on Drugs belongs among these.

The active principle of marijuana, Δ9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), after a long, bitter battle for absolution and recognition, finally was approved by FDA. It was sponsored by Unimed Pharmaceuticals, still (I believe) a branch of Solvay Pharmaceuticals, Inc. It has proved itself as an agent to combat the intractable nausea and malaise of certain AIDS or cancer patients. Some similar patients in California and other places had been smoking the weed with intriguingly good results. Derivatives of THC have been under investigation as analgesics in laboratories since the mid-1980’s.

Agreed, some drugs are benign and others diabolical. But make no mistake: the overriding shibboleth is that non-legal drugs, like demon moonshine, are unregulated (read: not subject to taxation). The government exploits the Puritan ethic. Whether “drugs” be right or wrong, the Puritan ghost still haunts our American dreams, or at least our American government. As Alan Watts pointed out, the compelling and overriding fear of the Puritan superego spoilsport is that SOMEBODY, SOMEWHERE might be having A GOOD TIME!

The fact is it is a Witch Hunt and it is establishment of state religion to force someone to go 'into recovery' and have 'treatment' for smoking a joint.

It's long past time someone, a lot of someones, started making the case.