August 31-September 6, 2017
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Smoke on the Water HOW WILL MEDICAL CANNABIS IN ARKANSAS AFFECT MEMPHIS AND THE MID-SOUTH? COVER STORY BY TOBY SELLS ILLUSTRATION BY GREG CRAVENS
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r. Tammy wants you to call it cannabis. Not weed. Not pot. Not dope. She doesn’t even want you to call it marijuana, really. She, and a growing number of others nationwide, want you to call it cannabis, like everyone in America did before the 1910 Mexican Revolution. She wants doctors to take weed (sorry) back from Cheech and Chong and dorm-room walls. She wants to put it in the medicine cabinet, where she says it belongs. When Dr. Tammy Post (aka “Dr. Tammy” or even “The Naked Doctor”) took the stage at a cannabis symposium two weeks ago, she looked every bit the part of a cannabis-prescribing West Coast physician — blonde hair, gleaming white smile, standing trim and fashionable in a skirt and heels. But Dr. Tammy practices in Rogers, Arkansas, which could be considered, maybe, the west coast of Beaver Lake. “I thought it fitting I got to speak at 4:20 [p.m] today,” Post said, rising a laugh and a few hoots from an audience at the Medical Cannabis Patient Health Fair and Symposium in Fayetteville. But that glimpse of cannabis humor was the only one she really gave in an earnest 20-minute talk in which she focused on the cultural stigma surrounding cannabis, a nono so engrained that patients won’t ask for it and doctors won’t talk about it, she said. “When I was growing up, [marijuana] was bad,” Post said. “How many of y’all have heard about Reefer Madness? How many of y’all are conditioned to believe that it’s a gateway drug, that it was the devil, and that if you smoked it, you were going to hell?” Her questions raised a chorus of agreement, even from a crowd gathered at a cannabis symposium. But the fact that there was a crowd, a stage, a speaker, and even a cannabis event in Arkansas at all showed how far that state and its people had come from the “devil’s-weed” stigma of cannabis’ complicated past. Next year, patients in Arkansas will be able to drive to dispensaries, hand over their prescriptions, and walk away with a bag or a bottle of legal, medical cannabis. It’ll be the culmination of a process nearly six years in the making — and a cultural watershed moment for the Bible Belt. Right now, patients, growers, and dispensary owners are lining up to make it all happen. Applications to participate in any of the three facets of the cannabis market are due to state officials next month. It’s expected that about 30,000 to 40,000 Arkansas patients will sign up to get legal cannabis. In Tennessee, a task force is set to explore medical cannabis on the equally red state to the east of the Mississippi River. Republican lawmakers pulled a medical cannabis proposal during the Tennessee General Assembly session earlier this year, but the legislators agreed to form the task force, which will soon travel the state to introduce the idea and hear from Tennesseans. In the meantime, many here — and around the country —will be watching the Arkansas experiment to see if it could be a proving ground for other holy rollin’ Southern states to green light the green stuff.
HOW DID IT HAPPEN IN THE NATURAL STATE?
Initially, few thought medical marijuana legislation had a shot in hell in Arknasas. For one thing, the Natural State loves Jesus: 77 percent of Arkansans believe in God, and 79 percent of those are Christians, according to a recent survey by the Pew Research Center. So, it was no surprise that social conservative groups took a strong negative stand when medical cannabis was first on the ballot in Arkansas in 2012. The Family Council, a conservative think tank based in Little Rock, launched a multi-pronged attack against the measure, calling it a “backdoor effort to legalize marijuana across the state of Arkansas.” Groups fought the 2012 measure all the way to the Arkansas Supreme Court, which ruled in September (just before the November vote) that the marijuana measure could be placed on the ballot. The 2012 measure failed at the ballot box, but only by a slim 49 percent-51 percent margin, which gave hope to cannabis proponents. The cannabis question simmered in the state for four years. Then, in 2016, a flurry of lawsuits, two competing ballot initiatives, think pieces, op-eds, court rulings, political wrangling, and a lot of general hand-wringing produced an initiative that went on Arkansas’ November ballot, the same one in which voters pulled the lever for either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump for president. Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson, who led the federal Drug Enforcement Agency under President George W. Bush, opposed any cannabis-legalizing legislation in his state. He said it was “not best for patients” and that the U.S. Food & Drug Administration — not Arkansas voters — should decide. “We don’t vote on cancer cures, and we should not set a new pattern of determining what is good medicine at the ballot box,” Hutchinson said at the time. Still, there was plenty of support for medical cannabis. The Arkansas Medical Marijuana Association (AMMA) was established to organize legislative efforts. Patient groups, such as Arkansans for Passionate Care, provided patient stories to extoll the virtues of cannabis in pain management and as an effective alternative to opioids.