Ohio dodged a bullet on ‘legal’ pot
Ohio voters last week voted down legalized recreational marijuana use, but the state also may be taking a first step toward exploring the medical research and ameliorative capability of marijuana extracts. The campaign to vote Ohio into the “legal” cannabis club – along with Colorado, Washington and the District of Columbia – may have failed by a two to one margin, but it revealed a deep vein of support for medical marijuana use.
I believe my home state made the right decision, for several reasons. While there was plenty of rhetoric about the state “legalizing” marijuana use, technically, it can’t – not as long as federal law insists that marijuana is a Schedule I narcotic under the federal Controlled Substances Act. This is considered the most dangerous of five classes of controlled substances by the U.S Drug Enforcement Administration. LSD, Ecstasy and heroin are all classified in Schedule I, which are considered to be of no medicinal value and present the gravest profile for abuse. For comparison’s sake, methamphetamines and cocaine are found in Schedule II.
Over time, various organizations have petitioned the DEA to reclassify marijuana to a less serious schedule. The first petition, originally made in 1972, was rejected in court after 22 years of legal and administrative proceedings. A second petition was filed in 1995 and rejected in 2001. A third petition was filed in 2002 and rejected in 2011. A fourth petition, filed in 2011 by Washington state Gov. Christine Gregoire, is still pending before the DEA.
Meanwhile, the federal government does not currently enforce the law in states that have acted to decriminalize possession, and Congress last year asked the feds not to prosecute for medical use in states where that is permitted.
Ohio’s Issue 3 actually had no language describing marijuana possession or use as legal. Instead, it would endow growing rights to 10 specific plots of land, listed by real property descriptions. It also would grant marketing rights to up to 1,100 licensed distributors. Home growers could produce up to 4 ounces for themselves annually, but could not sell it.
As The Columbus Dispatch reported:
A core of about two dozen wealthy investors, including former NBA star Oscar Robertson, two descendents of President William Howard Taft, and boy-band member Nick Lachey, contributed about $25 million to the Issue 3 campaign.
This core group consists of the owners of the 10 plots of land and their affiliated investors, who tried to convince Ohioans to grant them a marijuana-production monopoly. The constitutional monopoly was not a popular idea, although a similar structure was what allowed four casinos to be built in the state in the last few years. But gambling, by itself, is not a federal crime.
To make sure the argument was not lost on the voters, the Legislature cobbled together its own constitutional amendment, Issue 2, which passed. It specifies that no future initiatives could create monopolies, oligopolies or cartels that benefit private persons unless the voters vote affirmatively in a two-step process. To circumvent the restrictions, voters in future elections would face two separate ballot questions: one to exempt the cartel or monopoly from the anti-monopoly provision and then another to approve the scheme itself.
The local media have been full of “try again” sentiments from Issue 3’s supporters. But the political class, including House Speaker Cliff Rosenberger, R-Clarksville, would rather limit the next step to medicinal marijuana. During the Issue 2 and Issue 3 campaigns, letters from parents who lost children and other relatives to drug abuse or at the hands of marijuana-impaired drivers have been a staple of the state’s newspapers.
The evidence from Colorado, particularly as compiled in a September report from the Rocky Mountain High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area on the first year of that state’s experiment with legal recreational use, suggests there’s good reason to proceed with caution. The report was based on information from 34 different federal, municipal and state agencies, charitable institutions and companies, including McDonalds and Starbucks.
One immediate cause of concern is how to police marijuana-intoxicated drivers. As Erie, Colo. Police Chief Marco Vasquez recently described it:
‘We have what they call drug recognition experts and so we’ve trained up almost 300 in the state of Colorado and those are the people that will come in, they are the experts that will look at the different indicators to try to determine what else they may be impaired with.’
Once they have a reasonable amount of evidence they need to test for it. That’s where it gets complicated. Right now they rely on voluntary blood tests until the state patrol figures out if an oral fluids test, where saliva is collected, really works.
‘Right now we are just doing a pilot program to try to determine are those devices, is that technology effective and reliable enough that we may ultimately be able to use them for prosecutions,’ said Vasquez.
The level set for impaired driving in both Colorado and Washington state is 5 nanograms of THC per milliliter of blood. But many toxicologists will not certify an impaired condition at that level, and even the National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration offers that “it is inadvisable to try and predict effects based on blood THC concentrations alone, and currently impossible to predict specific effects based on [saliva] THC-COOH concentrations.”
According to the RHIDTA, while the overall number of traffic deaths in Colorado has fallen from 535 in 2006 to 488 in 2014, the number of deaths where operators tested positive for marijuana rose from 37 to 94. Thus, as a percentage of total traffic fatalities, marijuana-related fatal accidents grew from roughly 7 percent to nearly 20 percent.
Over the same period, the rate of hospitalizations statewide tagged as “likely related” to marijuana rose from 267 per 100,000 visits to 524 per 100,000 visits. The average number of annual drug-related suspensions (counting all drugs) in Colorado schools rose 34 percent from 3,864 for 2004 through 2009 to 5,167 for 2009 through 2014.
Ohio would stay fairer to its culture by moving to the medicinal question first. It now appears that question will be answered sooner rather than later, based on what our citizens and lawmakers think they have learned from the recent campaign.
