Great news for cannabis activists in the South!
A bill to legalize the use of medical marijuana in North Carolina has passed its first reading in the NC General Assembly. This is slightly surprising because, as many of you know, the NC Government has been in the news a lot lately for being, well, crazy conservative in their policy-making.
The bill would open up the option of medicinal marijuana for people suffering from Chron’s, cancer, and anorexia. While that’s an unfortunately short list, it could hopefully be added to once the bill is passed. One step at a time!
“It’s logical. It makes sense,” said Representative Kelly M. Alexander, a Democrat. “It really boils down to the fact that there’s evidence that medical marijuana helps in a number of cases like PTSD and [side effects of] chemotherapy.”
“There is concern that people will use the law to get [prescriptions unethically], but that concern already exists in the prescription of medicine pill mills,” says Robert Capecchi, depurty director of state policies at the Marijuana Policy Project “In addition, marijuana is non-lethal and lacks the life-ending side effects that certain prescription medicines have.”
This decision comes months after Governmor Pat McCrory signed a law allowing limited use of MMJ for treatment of seizures, most likely a forced response to media hype surrounding documentaries like Sanjay Gupta’s “Weed.”
“It’s illogical for the government not to legalize marijuana because we could earn money from taxing it, and we could spend less taxpayer money imprisoning kids who were caught with marijuana. All that does is ruin someone’s life and waste taxpayer money,” says Duke University freshman Emelina Vienneau.
Hopefully, we’ll be seeing a new MMJ law in North Carolina soon. This could pave the way for more legalization initiatives in the South.
