Lawmakers Advance Medical Marijuana Bill

By Eva Moore
Despite objections by police, Baptists and victims’ advocates, a bipartisan group of South Carolina state senators unanimously signed off on a bill that would legalize medical marijuana, advancing it for review by the Senate Medical Affairs Committee.

In his 39 years in law enforcement, said SLED Chief Mark Keel, “I don’t know of any other proposal … that I think has the opportunity to negatively affect the state we live in than this.”

Rather than authorizing medical uses, Keel said, in states that legalize recreational pot, “what has been created is a legitimized form of recreational marijuana.”

“This is not legitimate medicine,” Keel said.

But Sen. Brad Hutto, a Democrat from Orangeburg, suggested Keel was being unhelpful.

“We’re fooling ourselves if we think what we have now, which is absolute prohibition, is working,” Hutto told Keel. “What we’re trying to do is say to people who want to be law-abiding citizens and get treatment for their children … that you don’t have to be a criminal to do that.”

And Sen. Tom Davis, a Beaufort County Republican who sponsored the bill, repeatedly compared medical marijuana to prescription opiates.

“Any system we have is going to be abused,” Davis said. “The system we have now where doctors prescribe Oxycontin, etc., is abused.”

The bill would allow doctors to prescribe marijuana for illnesses including cancer, HIV, glaucoma and many more, or “an injury that significantly interferes with daily activities as documented by the patient’s provider.” It would create a seed-to-sale electronic tracking system and require state licensing of growers, processors and dispensaries.

Nearly half of states allow medical marijuana use. A handful allow the recreational use of marijuana.

“Whether we go in last, or we go in second to last, or we go in with our feet dragging, it’s coming,” said Sen. Ray Cleary, a Republican who chairs the subcommittee.

But the bill’s opponents brought familiar arguments against marijuana.

“Marijuana is a gateway drug which leads users to go on to other drugs which could destroy their life, or even end their life through overdose,” said Mark Hendrick with the South Carolina Baptist Convention’s Office of Public Policy.

“Following your logic, should we ban alcohol?” Davis fired back.

And Laura Hudson, director of the South Carolina Crime Victims Council, said she’s reviewed files of children who died because their parents smoked pot.

“You’re not going to hear from the children who die … about how parenting under the influence affects them, because they’re dead,” Hudson told the senators. “When parents use marijuana, they don’t care; most of them sit on the couch and watch TV. They don’t make a good living … They don’t monitor any kind of needs having to do with food, because they’re eating it.”

The diverse panel that advanced the bill included notoriously right-wing Sen. Lee Bright, who found an opportunity to briefly rail against an unrelated topic: the rainbow Doritos that Frito-Lay released in honor of gay pride.

The senators asked law enforcement, DHEC and other state agencies to help them improve the bill in the coming months. It will come before the Senate Medical Affairs Committee when the Legislature returns in January.