Arizona State Senator Russell Pearce was the guest speaker at the Mountain View Tea Party tonight. He is clearly a very bright man who demonstrated thorough mastery of the issues facing Arizona.
I was most intrigued by his comments on Ballot Proposition 203, which would legalize medical marijuana in Arizona. I have heard this briefly discussed on KTAR’s Arizona Morning News, but none of the very alarming aspects of this issue that he raised were mentioned there.
One very troubling aspect of this proposition is that it would remove marijuana intoxication as a DUI offense. In other words, a driver could be pulled over and found to be intoxicated with marijuana, and this couldn’t be used to charge him with DUI. Senator Pearce said that he could literally be so stoned as to not know up from down, and that would not be a crime, until he actually killed someone.
Another troubling part of the proposition is that it exempts the smoking of marijuana from any smoking bans. In other words, if my employer prohibited smoking, that prohibition would not apply to marijuana. So someone could smoke a joint in the adjoining cubicle, and no one could do anything about it.
A third troubling aspect of the proposed law Senator Pearce mentioned was that there is no inspection provided for the marijuana. So the marijuana could be laced with all manner of contaminants, and the dispensaries would be exempt from government inspection.
My comments? Come on, those of us who have been around for a while know that calling this “medical” marijuana is totally a ruse. The people who are setting up dispensaries are compiling a list of doctors who will give you a prescription, and all you have to do to get the prescription is claim that something hurts. Just say you have a toothache—you’ll get a prescription. But they’re ashamed to call this what it is, so they go around pretending that this is a medical issue.
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