opinion

Webb: Hey Indiana, your neighbors have weed. Get some, too.

Marijuana’s gonna be legal in Illinois. It’s just a matter of when.

That’s according to state Sen. Heather Steans, who’s been pushing a recreational weed bill at least since earlier this year. She hoped to get it passed by 2018, but said on Thursday that her timetable has shifted.

“I don’t think it’ll be this session. It’ll be 2019, is what our hope is,” she said. “(2018) is an election year, which makes it more challenging to get it passed.”

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Couple that with Kentucky. On Wednesday, Secretary of State and Mitch McConnell Mortal Enemy Alison Lundergan Grimes announced that she’s forming a task force to push for the legalization of medical marijuana. If she’s looking for a zippy slogan, here’s one for free: Choose Grass, Bluegrass.

“Too many Kentuckians are suffering from debilitating physical and mental illnesses,” Grimes told the Lexington Herald-Leader. “Most have lived with the effects of these illnesses for years. We must do more to relieve their pain and suffering, and there is significant evidence that cannabis is beneficial for these individuals, especially veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress.”

Michigan passed a medical marijuana bill in 2016. Ohio did, too, and Illinois has had medicinal weed since 2013.

That leaves one state in our area mired in the past. It’s shaped like a Christmas stocking and contains a suspicious amount of pork tenderloin.

Indiana is likely still years away from any kind of marijuana legislation. We barely tolerate CBD oil – a non-THC extract that can treat everything from pain to epilepsy.

Even after state legislators legalized the stuff in April, excise police continued to sweep into stores and confiscate it. That’s a lot of wasted effort to keep a non-psychoactive substance out of the hands of parents hoping to treat their children’s seizures.

Indiana Sen. Karen Tallian told me this spring that she’s introduced medical marijuana bills for the last seven years, only to see them crumble each time. She remains optimistic, even calling it “destiny” that our state will one day adopt some kind of medical pot operation.

It has its supporters. Tallian is a Democrat, but plenty of powerful Republicans stand behind it.

Sen. Jim Merritt, an avowed fighter of the opioid epidemic, thinks medical marijuana would be an effective way to treat pain. And Rep. Jim Lucas already pledged to offer his own medical weed bill in the next session.

But Lucas told the IndyStar the state is a “minefield” for marijuana legislation. And Tallian had an even more colorful way to put it.

“There are a lot of people here in the Senate who are just either very afraid of the idea or truly believe that, you know, it’s the gateway to Hell,” she told me this spring.

You’ll hear all kinds of excuses as to why Indiana won’t pull the trigger on marijuana.

It’ll lead to increase in impaired driving (hi, alcohol!)

We shouldn’t legalize one drug while we’re in the guts of a heroin scourge (marijuana is a painkiller and could actually lessen opioid dependence.)

It’s the gateway to Hell (the real gateway swirls behind the Chipotle in the Atlanta airport. Everyone knows that.)

There are even some public officials who still claim marijuana is a gateway drug. A lot of them, shockingly, hail from the government-run National Institute on Drug Abuse: an organization tasked with backing the federal government’s absurd designation of pot as a schedule-one narcotic.

And as far as exacerbating the heroin crisis, well, that could be nonsense. Writing for the New York Times last year, Colleen Barry, co-director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Mental Health and Addiction Policy Research, said she and other researchers found that opioid overdose deaths plummeted by as much as 25 percent in states which legalized medical marijuana.

Granted, she said, more research was needed, but that’s a startling statistic.

And it’s another bullet point on a growing list of reasons why we should follow the leads of our neighbors. There are dangers, of course. But marijuana is just like anything else. With proper oversight and regulations, the benefits would far outweigh the dangers.

If we stripped away our pre-loaded fears and looked at the issue with clear eyes, we’d legalize medical marijuana next year. Then, once a system is in place, we would sign off on recreational use as well. It would improve state health, finances and tourism.

We won’t, of course. We won’t even legalize Sunday sales of alcohol. Trapped in the amber of 1980s drug attitudes, Indiana is doomed to drag its feet on any progressive measures.

It’s time to snap out of it. It’s fine to be old-fashioned. But it’s not OK to be stubborn.

Contact Jon Webb at jon.webb@courierpress.com