Newsgroups: alt.drugs
Subject: DEA vs. Ore. Med. MJ Bill
From: [Floyd Landrath] at [f69.n105.z1.fidonet.org] (Floyd Landrath)
Date: Thu, 2 Dec 1993 20:50:52 GMT


                       AMERICAN ANTI-PROHIBITION LEAGUE
                         4017 SE BELMONT ST., BOX 103
                         PORTLAND OREGON U.S.A. 97214
                                (503)235-4524

                       Floyd Ferris Landrath -- Director

Source: 'High Times', Jan. '94

                   DEA SABOTAGES OREGON MEDICAL MARIJUANA BILL

   by Lori Tobias

   In the spring of 1993, Oregon state sentaors killed a bill that would 
have permitted use of marijuana for therpeutic purposes -- after a DEA
officer promised serious punishment for anyone prescribing or 
administering the drug.
   The bill, sponsored by [the now late] Senator Frank Roberts on behalf
of constituent Laird Funk, would have required the Board of Pharmacy to
establish a registry of patients under a doctor's care who use 
marijuana for therapeutic pruposes, and authorized a five-year study
to consider reclassification of marijuana from its current status
as a drug with no medicinal value.
   Funk reports that he and his supporters were successful in convincing
the Senate Health Care and Bioethics Committee that the plant does have
medicinal qualities.  Despite disagreements on how the drug would be
supplied, the bill was passed on to the powerful Jucicary Committee.
But that was as far as it was to go this time.
   Although fromer US Attorney Sidney Lezak testified that the bill
was not likely to incur federal wrath, the Committee members were swayed
by the testimony of James Hicks, public information officer with the
Seattle office of the DEA, who threatened that docotors and 
pharmacists acting under the new law would lose their licenses to
prescribe or dispense prescription drugs.
   A motion to table the bill subsequently passed, and for the moment the 
issue is dead.
   Funk, however, has no intention of giving up the fight.  In fact,
he says great progress has been made.  "We got recognition that this
is medicine.  One of the legislative aides said to me, 'You made 
marijuana respectable to talk about again.'"
   And, as an added bonus, Funk says, "Everyone got to see the 
antimarijuana contingency at its most grotesque."