Pubdate: Wed, 15 May 2013
Source: Burlington County Times (NJ)
Copyright: 2013 Calkins Newspapers. Inc.
Contact: https://phillyburbs-dot-com.bloxcms-ny1.com/contact/
Website: http://www.phillyburbs.com/news/local/burlington_county_times_news/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/2128
Author: Terry Stern

NO COMPASSION INVOLVED IN NJ MARIJUANA LAW

I have a story that might, these days, evoke a small bubble of 
annoyance, a tiny percussion of pique at the callousness of public officials.

The word "compassionate" is being bandied about with great vigor in 
New Jersey. The state passed its Compassionate Use Medical Marijuana 
Act. Well, it wasn't just passed. It was passed in 2010. We're just 
now getting around to actualizing our compassion. Well, some of it.

This law compassionately charges cannabis patients $200 in advance to 
register in order to become eligible to buy cannabis from the state. 
Non-ambulatory patients - the homebound - who must authorize someone 
to make purchases on their behalf are shown even more compassion with 
an additional $265 fee to register and background-check an agent. 
This cost, compassionately, recurs every two years. By the way, the 
law is not this "compassionate" with other prescription medical 
treatments like oxycodone and methadone.

The law requires doctors to register publicly in order to prescribe. 
Patients with physicians who demur have to find one willing to stand 
up, which a good number are willing to do. A good number are not.

But the law also requires a year's worth of a clinical relationship 
between a patient and registered physician before prescribing 
privileges begin. Again, we may note that this is reserved only for 
recipients of cannabis. No pharmaceutical receives this level of 
interest from the state.

I say without confidence that we have one dispensary of medical 
cannabis for the entire state. I am confident we used to have one. 
Recently, there has been chatter online from patients who've been 
suddenly cut off from supply and have not received expected telephone 
contact from the dispensary. They are wondering if it has been closed for good.

Even when it was working at its best, the dispensary was routinely 
out of stock and had a long waiting list for new patients. There are 
plans to open two more dispensaries in September. Thus, in total and 
sum, almost four years after passage of the law, plans will finally 
be in place to operate almost half the program.

In the meantime, a 54-year-old cancer survivor, who has been on the 
dispensary's waiting list for four months, has a New Jersey state 
medical cannabis ID card, has survived multiple surgeries and chemo 
treatments, is in constant pain, and is, in fact, the very essence of 
the patient for whom this law was enacted, has been arrested for 
possession of less than a gram of cannabis found by police in his car 
in a public parking lot in North Jersey. He is facing fines and 
felony imprisonment.

Patients using medical cannabis are among the sickest in the nation. 
They have turned to cannabis because nothing else works as well, as 
cost-effectively and with as few, unwanted side effects.

Insouciantly allowing gross cruelty to be enforced upon the 
chronically ill because of an unwillingness to distinguish between 
usages shows a petty, misapplied moral sense. Cannabis is very 
serious business to the 730,000 Americans who need it medically every day.

I wrote a strongly worded opinion to Gov. Chris Christie speaking 
directly to each of these points. The governor forwarded my email to 
John H. O'Brien, director of New Jersey's medical cannabis program. 
O'Brien responded as we now have come to expect bureaucrats to respond.

Because it was easier, he converted my sharp, negative appraisal of 
the foundational morality of the program, a charge to which he did 
not know how to reply, into an expression of concern over public debt 
and pot-stoned school kids, worries to which he was totally prepared 
to respond. Will he count me among those who think the law is too 
progressive when the time comes to generate statistics of popular 
response? It would not surprise me, but it would discomfit me, at 
least until I ... ah, yes, there it is ... my pimple pop of pique.

Terry Stern

Pennsauken
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