Steve Barnes

Monday morning’s mail brought a letter from a friendly acquaintance in Jerusalem (the one in Conway County) and a clipping of a recent column, one in which I mentioned a late friend in California.

Struggling against multiple infirmities and having exhausted, to no avail, all the conventional pharmaceutical palliatives his doctors had prescribed, he finally acceded to his daughter’s pleading and began munching the muffins she baked upon (legally) obtaining a special ingredient. Yep, that. And for the first time in months my pal, at age 90, was able to get a decent night’s sleep.

“I see you’re on board,” my correspondent teased.

Well, yes. And, no. Just — I don’t know.

What I know and don’t know about marijuana — its medical and recreational applications, and whatever its potential as a “gateway” drug — could fill an Ozark valley. Regardless, we of a certain generation have witnessed an almost seismic shift in public perceptions of the leafy psychoactive, from the fear-and-abhor to a legalize-and-regulate tolerance keyed to its advertised clinical benefits.

Its abundance, the ease with which (I am told) it can be acquired, long ago prompted police to essentially ignore individual users, the better to concentrate on importers and wholesalers, and on heavier, more demonstrably lethal dope. (Arresting, transporting and booking any offender takes an officer off the street for an hour, minimum.)

State Rep. Doug House (R-North Little Rock), who was tasked by Gov. Asa Hutchinson with overseeing regulatory legislation after voters in 2016 approved medical marijuana, told me a few months after taking up the mission that he’d learned more about the substance that he ever dreamed “and more than I wanted to know.”

As did Hutchinson, House opposed legalization and accepted the Governor’s assignment with a wince, but has stayed at it; and in the years since he has been the General Assembly’s marijuana go-to man (on policy, that is). Having helped implement the wishes of the electorate, House remains skeptical, or at least uncertain, of the benefits awaiting it.

His is a “deep-seated reservation,” he told me, and “Biblical.”

Still: “If we don’t give (medical patients) access to marijuana, they’re going to get it on the street, maybe with some stuff they don’t know about added to it. Or they’ll try another drug — meth, or maybe heroin. I’d rather have (marijuana) controlled and relatively safe.”

Now this same Doug House, as wary as before, proposes to turn to the voters again, not to restrict medical marijuana but to triple the number of ailments for which physicians may lawfully prescribe it. Amendment 98 specified 18 maladies from cancer and AIDS to arthritis and Alzheimer’s disease. House would have the General Assembly put before voters an amendment to the amendment that would add 39 additional afflictions including Parkinson’s, anorexia and emphysema.

He acted, House says, after countless letters and endless phone calls and extensive literature from physicians for and against medical marijuana, and from a greater number of individuals beseeching an expansion of the code to cover their sicknesses. (Initially, House would have removed glaucoma from the list of cannabis-treatable diseases, believing it better addressed by drugs developed since 2016, but patients and providers persuaded him to leave it be.)

House’s legislation debuts simultaneously with the announcement by the state Department of Finance and Administration (specifically, it’s Alcohol Beverage Control Board, per the constitutional amendment) that the 32 authorized medical marijuana “dispensaries” in eight “zones” lack only the required permitting fees before commencing cannabidiolic commerce.

Fayetteville and Fort Smith, Mountain Home and Clinton, Little Rock and Pine Bluff and Texarkana and points in between: It will be but a short drive for those with prescriptions to obtain a substance yet illegal under federal law. It is a short drive even now, before the first Arkansas outlet has opened, though Mr. Hutchinson has actively discouraged crossing state lines to obtain marijuana from either a certified dispensary or a, well, non-certified dealer.

The narcs, state and federal, will leave the Arkansas shops alone unless their proprietors get greedy or their customers get goofy. They will watch the doctors and count their scripts.

No matter that all but a handful of states have either “decriminalized” marijuana or authorized it, or its derivatives, for medical purposes; House remains uneasy.

“If it helps sick people, great,” he says. “But there is a social cost. And that’s what concerns me.”

And me, as I suspect of a lot of other Arkansans, who are on board, but not.

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