Editor:
In reading the article “Girod says rural interests top his Senate agenda” (Oct. 15), I was appalled to read that Girod plans to amend Oregon’s medical marijuana law because it “was meant to severely regulate its use to perhaps 500 people.” Say what?
Where in the Oregon Medical Marijuana Act is this limit described? After 10 years of the OMMP’s existence the program is working well, with little abuse and many patients benefiting from pot’s many medical uses. Girod should know, as a medical professional, that the nation’s second largest doctors’ organization, the American College of Physicians (ACP), supports medical marijuana.
What qualifies Girod to tell Oregon patients that they should be required to consume expensive pharmaceuticals when they can grow their own marijuana at a much lower cost?
Girod’s is but another of the ever-dwindling voices hysterically railing against a medicine that has existed in the human pharmacopeia for thousands of years. Marijuana is a medicine that has killed no one, compared to the 100,000 deaths a year caused by pharmaceuticals. The DEA’s own Administrative Law Judge Francis Young said in 1988 that cannabis is “one of the safest therapeutic substances known to man.”
Stick to dentistry, Fred, and leave the pot alone.
Allan Erickson
Drug Policy Forum of Oregon
29559 Clear Lake Rd
Eugene, OR 97402