Legalized Marijuana Demanded Oregon Protesters Ignore Legislature’s Hard-Line Stance

Ignoring the Legislature’s hard-line stance against drugs, a few dozen protesters urged lawmakers to legalize marijuana for medicinal use during a rally Wednesday at the Capitol.

About 60 people showed up for the rally, many of them in wheelchairs or slumped over crutches, to tell how pot helps ease the pain of people with long-term illnesses.

“Why can’t we get past this hurdle of marijuana?” asked Stormy Ray, an Ontario woman who is confined to a wheelchair because of multiple sclerosis. “Marijuana is natural. It won’t hurt me.”

Dr. Phil Leveque, a retired pharmacologist from Molalla, said mainstream society has denied the therapeutic qualities of marijuana, which he called one of the most widely used medicines in the country.

“My generation has been brainwashed that it’s a dangerous material,” said Leveque, 70. “I think alcohol and tobacco are probably a hell of a lot more dangerous than marijuana.”

Some demonstrators wore marijuana leaf T-shirts and carried signs with slogans like “Marijuana is medicine” and “Pot smokers are not criminals.”

A bill sponsored by Rep. George Eighmey, D-Portland, would allow doctors to recommend marijuana prescriptions for certain patients. But the bill has all but vanished in the House Judiciary Committee, led by Republican Rep. John Minnis, a Portland police detective.

Instead of relaxing marijuana laws, lawmakers seem intent on going the other way, having passed a bill in the House that recriminalizes possession of less than one ounce of the weed.

Sandee Burbank, a Wasco County resident who organized the rally, said legislators, like many people, aren’t reacting to the issue based on facts but because of the stigma attached to marijuana.

“A lot of people say that we’re trying to get medical marijuana so everybody can just get high,” she said. “We’re here trying to deal with an injustice. We’ve used logic, we’ve used truth, we’ve used facts. But they don’t want to listen.”

Minnis said he’s not opposed to a debate on the medical marijuana bill. He just thinks there’s not enough time left in the legislative session to discuss the complex issues involved.

Minnis said if medicinal marijuana was approved by the Food and Drug Administration and sanctioned by the medical community, he would consider Burbank’s argument.

“The fact is, the medical community is not advocating this,” Minnis said. “The marijuana legalization movement is the only one that is advancing it.”