A societal change in sensibilities needed w/ regard to cannabis use?

Learning about a lawsuit pending against a northwest suburban school district brings up beliefs with regards to marijuana that make me question the line of logic followed by those who seriously talk about “Mak(ing) America Great Again.”

For I have no doubt that many of those who follow the Donald Trump mantra are among those who are mocking a lawsuit against Schaumburg School District 54 (and the state of Illinois) in which parents are upset school officials won’t permit their 11-year-old daughter to use the marijuana prescribed for her by a doctor.

THE GIRL IN question suffers from leukemia, and chemotherapy treatment resulted in the girl suffering from epileptic seizures.

Which is what led a doctor to prescribe the drug that some people of an ideological bent are determined to think of as some sort of “hippie freak” drug leading our society all astray.

In this case, the girl is to receive her cannabis treatment through a patch on her foot. When the patch’s dose of THC is inadequate to control her seizures, she gets cannabis oil drops containing THC on her tongue or her wrists.

Except that school officials, citing Illinois law, say they can’t administer such a drug to her, even if she has a medical prescription. I suspect it’s like many other regulations concerning distribution of medication to students on school grounds – school officials most likely don’t want to be bothered.

SO THE END result, according to the Chicago Tribune, is that there are times when the girl in question is incapable of attending class. The lawsuit contends that if something doesn’t change in the school district’s attitude, she won’t be able to continue her education.

A drop-out, at age 11! Not a pretty image.

Which the parents contend in their lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Chicago, puts the state in violation of laws where children are required to attend school through their teenage years.

So what should we do? Just what should we do!

READING THE ANONYMOUS types who like to express themselves on the Internet on any issue, regardless of whether they have anything sensible to say or not, I stumbled onto too many people who want to write off this case as another frivolous lawsuit.

Parents reckless enough to want their child to get a jolt of THC – the substance in marijuana that creates the high sensation that some people find rather pleasing (or mind-deadening).

Personally, I think it’s the latter, and a part of me doesn’t understand recreational use of the drug for that reason. I always want to be in full control of my faculties.

But this has nothing to do with recreational use. It’s about a medical use, even though I know some people’s political leanings make them want to believe there is no such use as a medical use for marijuana.

THEY’RE THE ONES who want to throw up obstacles toward the drug’s use for legitimate relief. They’re the ones who want to have the authority to ignore a doctor’s prescription.

I suppose that in their own warped minds, they want to believe that allowing use of these THC-laced patches or drops somehow sets a precedent for teenagers at the high school to be able to go “smokin’ in the boy’s room” (remember Brownsville Station?) in between classes.

Which really is nothing more than putting politics ahead of medicine. Ideology ahead of sense! If this is the idea of making America “great” again, then it truly comes across as nonsensical.

Here’s hoping the federal courts issue the injunction that would allow a school employee to store the medication on school property (in ways so that others can’t get to it for their own personal use). And that the appeals courts don’t feel the need to meddle on the issue.

  -30-

Hanging on to hang-ups regarding pot

I still recall a moment I observed nearly three decades ago in Grant Park while attending the annual Blues Festival.

Some images just won't wither away

I saw a pair of police officers grab a shaggy guy, pull him aside and take something out of his jacket pocket that appeared to be a plastic bag with some marijuana.

THEY TOOK HIM away. But a few minutes later, I saw him, with an angry look on his face and muttering some choice obscenities. It appears that what the officers did to him was took his pot, threw it into the sewer, then let him go.

That approach violates the sensibilities of many law-and-order types, some of whom have refused to believe this story when I have told it throughout the years.

They want that dreaded “hippie drug” as an excuse for a crackdown – even though many of the people I have known throughout the years who have tried marijuana are far removed in mentality from “hippies” or liberal in any form. It truly is a bi-partisan drug.

Yet the old image lives on, even in these times when official policy is trying to knock down the stigma of marijuana.

MANY MUNICIPALITIES HAVE passed measures making marijuana an offense for which the police issue tickets to people, rather than any kind of criminal charge. It means fines, and not jail time, for the people who get caught in possession of a joint or two.

We also have the fact that the Illinois Legislature and Gov. Pat Quinn altered state law to create the impression that marijuana has a legitimate medical use – mainly in reducing the amount of pain some people suffer from long-running (and incurable) illnesses.

Using marijuana does not cure the illness, but offers some relief in coping with it.

But many just don’t want to accept it.

CONSIDER THAT THE state laws that took effect Jan. 1 are so rigid in how far away from people these cannabis cultivation and distribution facilities have to be from people that many communities are finding that they have very few sites where such a business could exist.

Some are finding that they can’t have these facilities anywhere!

Not that many municipalities are complaining. Some of them are reacting by passing their own ordinances to impose even further restrictions on the way these companies are operating.

We’re certainly not treating this issue as one involving a legitimate medication. We have our old hang-ups.

THEN, THERE’S THE study released Monday by Roosevelt University, whose consortium on drug policy found that Chicago police are sticking by the old idea of arresting people for possession – even in instances where a ticket (and fine) are called for.

Some 93 percent of incidents involving marijuana possession result in arrest, rather than ticket.

The study found that from 2012 (when pot possession was decriminalized in Chicago) to 2013, the number of possession arrests fell only 21 percent.

Chicago Police Department officials say that, in itself, is progress. But the Chicago Sun-Times reported how suburban Evanston (which has a similar ordinance concerning decriminalization of possession) has seen its arrests fall nearly 50 percent.

THE REACTION TO marijuana seems to remain to see a criminal act. It makes me wonder if, in the years following the repeal of Prohibition, there were some police still wishing they could make an arrest for those drinking alcoholic beverages.

Actually, there were those individual patches of the nation that voted themselves dry and kept the concept of prohibition alive for decades to come.

Is that the era we’re in now? Because there is a part of me that believes the approach I saw police take all those years ago might have been the most effective in terms of actually taking marijuana out of distribution.

By putting it into the sewer, however, we run the risk of it getting into the Lake Michigan water supply. Would pot in the water wind up causing our political people to act even more goofy than usual?

  -30-