It’s one of the easier political and cultural questions of a troubled political and cultural time.
Should a person suffering pain and illness that might be eased by the use of marijuana according to a physician be allowed upon the formal written recommendation of that physician to acquire and use marijuana?
Why, yes, of course.
In late 2015 a poll of Arkansas attitudes by Talk Business and Politics along with Hendrix College found that 84 percent — 84 percent — said yes to that question.
Some people thought that an aberrant finding — that support for medicinal marijuana is substantial, yes, but not that substantial. Actually, though, the general question, absent any devilish details, comes down to whether you’d try to help a person with disease and pain if you had the opportunity. In that context, the 16 percent opposition — the cruelty constituency — seems high.
Our compassion tells us to help those who hurt. Our culture tells us the doctor knows best. Our reason tells us mind-altering substances have long played a vital medicinal role in helping the afflicted. Our reason further tells us that of course there are risks of abuse in such substances, but that these are risks — indeed practices of abuse of crisis proportion — that have long proliferated in conventional pharmacology. It’s a problem broadly transcending a little marijuana as medicine.
Arkansas voters nearly approved medicinal marijuana at the ballot in 2012. A proposal went down to defeat 48.6-51.4, primarily — by the calculation of Little Rock lawyer and main advocate David Couch — because it included a grow-your-own provision for areas isolated from a licensed dispensary.
He sensed that voters — mothers, principally, filled with compassion for all but worry for their children — found that grow-your-own provision an open invitation for too-easy abuse.
So it’s beginning to appear from petition signature totals that we’ll have two chances on the ballot in 2016: Couch’s again, absent the grow-your-own provision, and that of another group that includes the grow-your-own provision for patients or caregivers in limited qualities in defined areas not near a licensed dispensary.
There’s one other basic difference in the proposals, beyond how to tax transactions and allocate and earmark the proceeds. One provides for not-for-profit dispensaries. The other would make the establishments matters of profit-seeking.
Marijuana is not a matter of standard pharmacy practice, meaning one of a simple doctor’s prescription for a bottle of marijuana tablets at the drugstore. So an independent production and distribution system is necessary. That means authorized and regulated cultivation fields, authorized and regulated dispensaries and doctors’ “letters of recommendation” that qualify for authorizing-use licenses from the Health Department.
One of the proposals allows limited grow-your-own marijuana along with nonprofit dispensaries; the other prohibits grow-your-own and sets up profit centers. People probably come down — and this is a mere guess — on the sides of prohibiting grow-your-own and keeping the distribution system nonprofit. In that case, neither proposal is pristine.
So nothing is perfect in this world.
In the end, the political complication — the details of how to set up a system, and whether a grow-your-own provision is a poison pill — is more vexing than the policy one.
Is this state ready to honor a doctor’s letter to try to help people who are hurting?
Do you actually have to ask?
I’m thinking a lot of people will vote on this second go-round for both proposals so as to enhance the chances of extending mercy.
What we have here is a bit of a movement. And a movement that got nearly 49 percent in 2012 is a decent bet to get 50.1 in 2016.
Some say that will complicate the issue and defeat both — that less is more. There is a poll purporting to show that, but it comes from supporters of one of the competing proposals and was released for the purpose of trying to get the other to go away.
Others say it will compound the opportunity and perhaps lead to passage of both, in which case the one getting the higher majority would prevail, apparently. There is a constitutional provision saying that, in such cases, the “measure” getting the most votes wins. But Couch’s proposal is a constitutional amendment and the other is an initiated act, and, normally, a constitutional amendment would easily prevail over a simple act. So a double victory at the ballot in November could produce litigation.
Some suggest that the presence of two differing proposals to reach the same end ought to invite Arkansas voters — if the citizen-initiative process is to work properly — to become learned and discerning about the devil inevitably found in details.
I think the key difference, whether the law will contain permission in limited case to grow your own in limited amounts, is a political issue more than a policy one — that Couch removed it from the 2012 measure because he believes it cost him votes, not because of the rather certain prospect that somebody back up the woods is going to grow more than he should and use it for more than medicinal purposes.
The excising of a grow-your-own provision is a reasonable political decision for a medical marijuana proposal standing alone on the ballot. It’s not really a compelling policy difference between two proposals appearing on the ballot at the same time.
John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers’ Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.