By
Richard Halstead, Marin Independent Journal
A longtime member of the Marin Healthcare District board wants to
allow patients to openly use medicinal cannabis at Marin General
Hospital.
“I want to have Marin General be the first hospital in
California to openly and transparently allow patients to use medical
cannabis,” said Dr. Larry Bedard, a retired emergency medicine physician
who used to work at Marin General.
Bedard’s activism isn’t
limited to medical marijuana, which California legalized in 1996. He
also has helped to write the rebuttal to the argument against
Proposition 64, which will appear on the Nov. 8 ballot.
Proposition 64 would make the recreational use of marijuana legal
for adults age 21 and older in California; adults would be allowed to
grow small amounts at home for personal use. The initiative would limit
the sale of non-medical marijuana to be regulated as licensed businesses
that only adults 21 and older would be permitted to enter.
According
to the state’s legislative analyst and its director of finance,
legalization would result in tens of millions of dollars in reduced
costs related to enforcing certain marijuana-related offenses and
hundreds of millions of dollars in additional state and local tax
revenue related to the production and sale of marijuana. But they say
most of these funds would be required to be spent on substance abuse
education, prevention and treatment.
Bedard said he is passionate about legalizing marijuana because
he believes people of color are suffering disproportionately under
existing law.
“Four times as many blacks and Latinos get arrested
as whites with virtually the same use rates,” Bedard said. “If you want
to reform the justice system, this is by far the easiest and most
effective way.”
He also believes that adults should be able to
choose whether they want to use cannabis or alcohol, which he considers
to be far more harmful.
“As an emergency physician, I know that marijuana is safer than alcohol,” Bedard said.
He served on a California Medical Association task force on
marijuana that led to the association recommending the legalization of
cannabis.
Bedard has already sent his resolution proposing
inpatient use of medicinal cannabis at Marin General to the hospital’s
managers, his fellow board members and other interested parties.
“I
think it is a fantastic idea,” said Frederick Mayer, a retired Marin
pharmacist who heads Pharmacists Planning Services Inc., a nonprofit
pharmacy education organization.
Mayer said hospitals in Israel
have pioneered the use of cannabis for palliative care.
He said in some
cases marijuana can be substituted for the more dangerous narcotics used
for pain management, which are leading increasingly to addiction
problems.
Marin Healthcare District board member Jennifer Rienks, however,
said she still has “a lot of questions” about Bedard’s proposal.
“At this point, I really need to hear more about it,” Rienks said.
In
his resolution, Bedard acknowledges that Marin General administrators
are “concerned that the federal government could/would retaliate by
lifting the hospital’s Medicare provider number and the state could
withhold Medi-Cal funding.
”
But he says such fears are overblown
since a federal budget amendment authored by California Reps. Dana
Rohrabacher, a Republican and Democrat Sam Farr prevents the government
from using federal funds to penalize patients, physicians and hospitals
that are complying with state law.
Bedard said he isn’t proposing that patients be allowed to smoke
marijuana at the hospital, where smoking is banned. He said Israeli
hospitals have inhalation units where cannabis is administered.
The
argument against Proposition 64 was written jointly by California
Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein; Doug Villars, president of the
California Association of Highway Patrolmen; and Duane Dauner, president
of the California Hospital Association.
In their con argument,
they state that legalization of cannabis would result in more traffic
fatalities, permit the growing of up to six marijuana plants near
schools and parks; increase drug cartel activity; allow marijuana
smoking ads on television in prime time and result in pot shops
proliferating in poor neighborhoods.
Greenwood Village police Chief John Jackson, past president of
the Colorado Association of Chiefs of Police, is quoted as saying that
filings in which the Colorado Organized Crime Control Act was used in
conjunction with a marijuana charge increased from one in 2007, before
marijuana was legalized in Colorado, to 40 in 2015 after cannabis became
legal.
Jackson said he and other law enforcement officers made no concerted effort to lobby against legalization in Colorado.
“We just didn’t think it would pass,” Jackson said. “We woke up the next day, and we were shocked to see that it had.”
The rebuttal to the con argument was written by Bedard,
California Rep. Ted Lieu, a Democrat, and Marsha Rosenbaum, director
emerita of the San Francisco office of the Drug Policy Alliance, a drug
law reform advocacy group.
In their rebuttal, they state that
nothing in Proposition 64 makes it legal to show marijuana ads on TV;
that impaired driving has decreased in states with legalized marijuana
and crash risks hasn’t increased; that states with legalized marijuana
have less youth marijuana use; and that Proposition 64 would allocate
new funds to develop legal standards under direction of the California
Highway Patrol for measuring driver impairment.
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