Minnesota lawmakers on April 17 got one step closer to passing a medi-pot bill that would protect patients from arrest for using pot on the recommendation of a doctor, when the Senate Health and Human Services Budget Division passed the bill out of committee on a 6-4 vote. The bipartisan measure now moves to Finance Committee before heading to the Senate floor for a full vote. (A House version of the measure has already passed three separate committees.)

The measure (Senate File 345), would allow qualified patients who have been issued a “registry identification card” by the state’s commissioner of health to possess up to 2.5 ounces of usable pot, which must be grown by a registered nonprofit organization. The bill also contains a clause prohibiting discrimination in employment, housing, or education, based solely on a person’s status as a legal medi-pot patient, and would enact a reciprocity provision, allowing licensed medi-pot patients from other states legal-user status while in Minnesota.

Senate sponsor Steve Murphy, a Democrat lawmaker (or, DFL – Democrat-Farm-Labor Party lawmaker – to be exact) from Red Wing, has said he decided to push for medi-pot after watching his father spend nine months in excruciating pain, dying from cancer. In response to law-enforcement concerns that passing a medi-pot law would somehow increase marijuana use – even though data collected over the last decade tends to refute that assumption – Murphy was adamant. “It’s not going to happen,” he told members of the Senate Judiciary Committee. “I’m bucking the system on this one because traditional medicine hasn’t worked” for many seriously ill patients.

Buck though he might, Murphy’s bill will eventually bump up against Republican Gov. Tim Pawlenty, who has said he will veto any medi-pot bill because it sends the wrong message to the kiddos – even though, again, there is no credible evidence to support that assumption.

Should the measure ultimately become law, Minnesota would become the 13th state to legalize medi-pot.

This article appears in April 20 • 2007.

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