A groundbreaking ceremony was recently held for the memorial honoring Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., to be built on the National Mall in Washington, DC. Many celebrities had assembled, and a number gave moving speeches. Among them was the famed Oprah Winfrey. Like so many of her time, Dr. King inspired her to obvious greatness. Part of her journey, she said, was motivated by the saying, "Excellence is the best deterrent to racism or sexism." I'd like to generalize it to more correctly read, "Excellence is the best deterrent to bigotry."

As I have written earlier (http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v02/n000/a314.html?284187), bigotry based on one's chemical composition is becoming alarmingly endemic in our culture. Every day, someone loses his/her job or educational opportunities simply because of marijuana. After all, over 700,000 people are arrested each year on marijuana-related charges. This clearly presents a problem for medicinal cannabis patients: People who desperately need income to cover medical and living costs, yet equally require their herbal medicine to function. Sure, there are legal alternatives some would argue, but forgotten in this bigotry is that legal alternatives, too, possess debilitating side effects.

Because little of this bigotry is founded in scientific fact - bigotry rarely is - what really results is discrimination. Legal discrimination. The denial of employment, education, or other benefits of society based on unproven negative stereotypes defines discrimination, something Dr. King obviously found abhorrent.

Possibly the worst examples of the widening discrimination against medicinal cannabis patients belongs to two components of acute care: pain management and organ transplants. More and more pain patients are subjected to contracts that disallow the use of cannabis while being prescribed opiates, even though patients who concomitantly use cannabis have been shown to require fewer of these pain relievers.

Most egregious is the denial of organ transplants. Patients can be dropped from transplant waiting lists for testing positive on drug tests for cannabis. Nothing can justify this.

The bigotry institutionalized against us keeps many of us hidden. We're rightfully afraid that, if we expose ourselves, we'll face bigotry's blunt hand as exercised by the criminal justice system or carried into our workplaces or classrooms.

We need to fight the demon bigotry in a way that Dr. King would have inspired: smartly, peacefully, and with excellence. Our shield and our sword against bigotry is excellence. Always doing, giving, and being the best we can. The logic is simple: At our best, we dispel the stereotypes and myths that unjustly color our realities. The great irony is that, for many of us, cannabis is what helps us be our best.

Inspired again by Dr. King, our goal becomes clear. To paraphrase his famous speech, "I have dream that I will one day live in a nation where I will not be judged by the chemistry of my body, but by the content of my character." If it is excellent, bigotry will cease to exist.

Mary Jane Borden
President, OPN

P.S. Because OPN exists to advocate for medicinal cannabis patients, we pledge to do everything we can to end the bigotry that is increasingly becoming institutionalized against us. We need your help. Please join in this quest for our rights by joining OPN. Attend one of our weekly meetings (http://www.ohiopatient.net/v2/content/view/435/160/). Volunteer for a project (including Stop Chemical Bigotry - more info to come) (http://www.ohiopatient.net/v2/content/view/53/75/). Or donate (http://www.ohiopatient.net/v2/content/view/227/127/) so that we can continue to educate the public, the government, and businesses in Ohio about cannabis and those who use it, knowing that through our own excellence we will deter chemical bigotry.