|
Sep. 24, 2007 - Late last week, Congress passed a measure involving the FDA
that did not include a dangerous amendment that could have undermined the 12
state laws that are protecting medical marijuana patients from arrest and jail.
The FDA bill's passage marks the defeat of the greatest threat the medical
marijuana movement has ever faced.
The threat was in the form of an amendment that was authored by U.S. Sen. Tom
Coburn (R-Okla.) and attached to the Senate version of the FDA bill back in
April. The House thankfully omitted Sen. Coburn's amendment from its version
of the FDA bill, and the final bill that President Bush signed also did not
include Sen. Coburn's amendment.
This victory is the result of MPP's tireless work on Capitol Hill -- and your
calls, e-mails, and faxes to your members of Congress. Also important were the
behind-the-scenes calls from major MPP allies to key members of Congress.
The defeat of Sen. Coburn's amendment feels really, really good. He is perhaps
the number-one opponent of medical marijuana in the U.S. Senate; for example,
last year he told MPP's lobbyist that "marijuana is not a medicine, and
the doctors and scientists who say it is one are smoking it themselves."
Sen. Coburn's amendment was a thinly veiled attempt to undermine the medical
marijuana laws in 12 states -- Alaska, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Maine,
Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington --
by placing them under the authority of the FDA (in addition to the DEA), while
not providing the same approval process for marijuana as for other drugs seeking
FDA approval as prescription medicines.
If the Coburn amendment had become law, a federal agency could have sued, say,
the Oregon government for the purpose of persuading a federal judge to shut
down Oregon's medical marijuana ID card program that has done so much to protect
more than 10,000 patients in the state.
MPP and its allies on Capitol Hill successfully worked with members of the
House and Senate to remove the offending provision from the final version of
the bill -- making new legislative allies in the process. The House passed the
final FDA bill on Wednesday, and the Senate passed it on Thursday.
Again, this success would not have been possible without your support -- in
the form of contacting your legislators, and in the form of financial contributions.
Influence in Congress is not easily gained.
Just today, the FBI released its annual Uniform Crime Reports, which documented
that our nation just hit a new all-time high for marijuana arrests in the U.S.
-- 829,627 arrests by local and state police (not the feds) in 2006 alone. That's
one marijuana arrest every 38 seconds. Click
here to read news coverage of this report.
Thanks for your support.
Sincerely,
Rob Kampia
Executive Director
Marijuana Policy Project
Washington, D.C. |
