Zilos

Patients might prefer pot to popping pills, but they won’t be doing that legally in South Dakota.

The House Health and Human Services Committee deferred a bill that would have legalized the medicinal use of marijuana to the 41st day of the legislative session, effectively killing it.

Rep. Gerald Lange, D-Madison, introduced the bill, which lacked any co-sponsors. Lange said that he introduced the bill at the request of one of his constituents who is suffering from a debilitating disease.

“There are certain debilitating medical conditions such as cancer, glaucoma, and human immunodeficiency viruses. There are various other diseases that are rather untreatable by contemporary medical practices,” said Lange.

“In other words, there’s a nausea effect of a lot of medicines where marijuana doesn’t cause the same kind of side effects.”

Lange said that he wrote the bill to limit the patients who might use marijuana to only those whose doctor believes that the use of pot outweighs the health risks associated with the drug. The bill also mandated that anyone who was prescribed the marijuana had to register with the Department of Health.

“So, this is kind of a control on the usage of this normally illegal drug,” said Lange.

Charlie McGuigan, from the attorney general’s office, said his office was in opposition to any bill that would “legalize marijuana in any form, whether it’s medical marijuana, industrial hemp or any other concoction that would give credence to this substance.”

In South Dakota, explained McGuigan, marijuana is not a scheduled controlled substance, but possession of it is illegal. Under federal law, it is a scheduled controlled substance.

“The federal government has determined that it has no medical use and is highly addictive,” said McGuigan.

McGuigan said that according to the bill, a patient would be able to have “an adequate supply” of marijuana on hand, 5 ounces.

“Depending on how you roll it, that could be as many as 280 joints,” said McGuigan, who added that if a patient smoked one joint a day it would be nearly a year’s supply. He said he don’t know of any prescription medicine that a patient would receive that much of at a time.

Dan Mosteller, superintendent of the South Dakota Highway Patrol, said that he opposed the bill because legalizing marijuana was no better than attempts to legalize industrial hemp—subterfuge for a larger agenda in the nation, legalizing the use of marijuana.

“It’s no coincidence that all these people are working together because the agenda is the softening or the legalization of marijuana in this country,” said Mosteller. “These types of movements, in my opinion, are merely a smoke screen…to legalize or soften the drug laws in this state and other states in the union.”

In his rebuttal, Lange told the committee that whether anyone liked it or not, this was one way that people were taking charge of their own medication.

“This is a wave that is coming,” said Lange. “This bill is very restrictive. It is not a slippery slope.”

Lange quoted the New England Journal of Medicine and the National Institute of Health, both promoting the research and use of medical marijuana for the treatment of individual with serious, debilitating illnesses.

Rep. Bill Thompson, D-Sioux Falls, spoke in favor of the bill during committee discussion, relating the story of his wife’s grandmother who used marijuana while battling liver cancer. Thompson was the only member of the committee to vote against deferring the bill.

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