Quinn & Ryan: Leading Ill. governor candidates indicate support for medical cannabis reform
Submitted by anonymous on February 1, 2010 - 7:42pm
Illinois’s gubernatorial primaries will be held on Tuesday, February 2, and the two major-party front-runners have indicated that they support medical cannabis reform.
Please carefully consider the candidate’s position on protecting patients before casting your vote. You may even want to consider volunteering for or donating to compassionate candidates.
In response to an Associated Press questionnaire, former Illinois Attorney General Jim Ryan, the leading Republican candidate and himself a cancer survivor, said he could support a "narrowly drawn" bill giving patients access to medical marijuana. "It can provide needed relief for patients with various afflictions," Ryan said.
For his part, Democratic Gov. Pat Quinn said he would consider signing a medical marijuana bill. "In general, I believe that people who are seriously ill deserve access to all medical treatments that will help them," he said.
Among the Republican candidates, Bill Brady voted against medical cannabis in the state Senate last year. Other Republican candidates who support medical marijuana reform are Adam Andrzejewski and Dan Proft. Gov. Quinn’s Democratic challenger, Comptroller Dan Hynes, dodged the question and said he opposes legalizing marijuana. One of his spokesmen, however, has clarified that Hynes opposes legal access to medical marijuana as well. You can read more about the candidates’ stances here.
Several House and Senate candidates also have primary races on Feb. 2. You can find out how your senator voted on medical cannabis here and whether your House member co-sponsors medical cannabis here.
The Illinois House of Representatives began the second half of its 2009-2010 session on Wednesday, and one of the items on this year’s legislative agenda is SB 1381, the Compassionate Use of Medical Cannabis Pilot Program Act. But no matter how we do in the legislature, we will need support in the governor’s office to make this bill into law. It’s therefore vitally important that the next governor Illinois elects supports giving patients legal access to the medicine that they need.
Please vote on February 2 and encourage your friends and family to do the same by passing this alert on to them.
Thank you for supporting the Marijuana Policy Project and our efforts to make Illinois the 15th state to protect medical cannabis patients from arrest and prosecution.
Despite all the evidence
Looks like Quinn wins on the Dem side. The likely Republican governor primary winner Bill Brady joined local Dem Senator Mike Frerichs in opposing medical cannabis in the Illinois Senate last year, so Republicans may want to cross the ballot if they care about this issue. Green governor candidate Rich Whitney support medical cannabis, plus an end to the drug war, period.
Since surveys show two-thirds plus support from voters no matter how the question is put to voters, smart candiates are increasingly finding support for medical cannabis legislation the way to put themselves in the mainstream, while adding to their outsider street cred.
Meanwhile, from that conservative state just to our east...
<!--PRINTER FRIENDLY ARTICLE--> February 1, 2010
Sheila Kennedy
Despite all the evidence
I'll admit to being one of the multitude of fans who have made shows like "NCIS'' and "CSI'' such hits. It isn't that I don't recognize how unrealistic they are; no publicly financed lab could afford such cutting-edge equipment even if someone invented it. But I love watching the search for hard evidence, and the characters' willingness to abide by what that evidence shows even when the result is to exonerate some really unattractive suspect.
Wouldn't it be nice if those we elect to make policy were similarly devoted to evidence-based decision-making?
In the real world, unlike the televised version, policymakers routinely disregard research that doesn't match their ideological preferences. I'm not talking about a couple of studies where the results are ambiguous, or subject to conflicting interpretation. I'm talking about policies where the evidence is copious and expert consensus compelling. Global climate change is one such area; our incredibly expensive drug war is another.
Some years ago, I got a call from a teacher in Northern Indiana who wanted to arrange a public forum on the pros and cons of our punitive drug policies. In private conversations, the chief of police, a local judge and the prosecutor had all told him that prohibition simply doesn't work. Not one of them, however, would repeat those sentiments in public. My students who are police officers consistently tell me that alcohol, which is regulated but legal, is a much greater problem than marijuana, because people are more aggressive when they are boozed up than when they are zoned out.
The fiscal consequences of our current policies are staggering. In 2005, an economics professor at Harvard reported that replacing marijuana prohibition with a system of taxation and regulation similar to that used for alcohol would produce combined savings and tax revenues between $10 billion and $14 billion per year. Estimates from a variety of sources are that marijuana prohibition costs U.S. taxpayers nearly $42 billion dollars a year in criminal justice costs and lost tax revenues. This is just from marijuana prohibition -- not efforts to control harder drugs.
It's estimated that the money spent annually on the drug war would pay for a million additional teachers.
Then there are the opportunity costs. Indiana used to have a robust hemp industry. Hemp is an enormously versatile and useful product that cannot be smoked or used as a recreational drug, but our indiscriminate policies outlaw its growth. They also prohibit use of marijuana to alleviate the side effects of chemotherapy.
Other states have begun to rethink these policies. Fifteen states have legalized medical marijuana. Oakland, Calif., has begun assessing a sales tax on marijuana sold in marijuana dispensaries.
I recently had a call from a group hoping to convince the Indiana legislature to revisit policies on medical marijuana. The caller asked what the evidence showed.
I told him that the evidence conclusively demonstrated two things: that the drug war is costly and counterproductive, and that in politics -- unlike television -- evidence is irrelevant and ideology rules.
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