Time to get it right

Taking issue with issues

Tuesday, October 23, 2012

— The timing is not so good for this column.

I must write it before Monday night’s third and final presidential debate, though it won’t appear until afterward.

If somebody seriously schooled somebody last night, you know it at this reading, but I don’t at this writing.

So I could hold forth instead-and again-on the right-wing revolution likely to take place November 6 in the state Legislature. Semi-anarchists crow that they are primed to take over the state House and Senate.

They will turn us into what I think I’ll start calling “Oklabama.”

That’s for a state that is half Oklahoma and half Alabama, which would be good for college football, but not humankind.

The new Republican-majority Legislature would answer only to the semi-anarchist Koch brothers’ agent in Arkansas. That’s a young woman named Teresa Oelke in Rogers.

She would become, in effect, our unelected prime minister.

She has ventured into Central Arkansas mainly to argue against regulatory protection from development next to our water supply at Lake Maumelle. She and those Koch billionaires believe personal property rights are more virtuous than potable, plentiful water for the general public.

Oelke also wrote the television commercial saying, absurdly, that Arkansas has become a terrible place. She herself fled Kansas for Arkansas, apparently for what she considered missionary work.

But I need to save powder for later in the stretch. This Oklabama theme and the faux virtue of dirty water-you’re likely to behold pronouncements on those subjects in this space as we move toward November 6.

So I will take this convenient opportunity today to write instead about the two biggest issues on the state ballot.

Issue 1 is a constitutional amendment to impose a half-percent sales tax for a decade for bonded debt for four-lane highway improvements. I’m for it, even as I hold my nose.

Even though I’d like to take away the Highway Commission’s constitutional independence, mainly over that Broadway Bridge behavior and other exercises of arrogance, I understand that Issue 1 might be the last chance in a long time to raise any government money to improve Arkansas.

These Koch semi-anarchists intend to put government out of business. So if you want decent roads, you’d best arrange for them now.

Oelke has attacked even legislators who voted merely to give you the right to vote “yes” or “no” on this proposal.

In her prime ministry, potholes will be as prevalent as dirty water.

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Issue 5 would allow marijuana for medical relief in some cases. I’m utterly torn.

I hope you can find marijuana if you suffer severe and chronic pain that is otherwise unrelieved and that marijuana might ease. I overwhelmingly favor decriminalization of sale and use in such cases.

And I am contemptuous of these church-lady types who have put out a racist television commercial against this proposal that shows a black man with guns readying marijuana for consumption.

Now that skin color has been conspicuously introduced to this debate by the disgraced Arkansas Family Council, I must observe: Every person I ever remember seeing who was smoking marijuana was white.

But I also am sensitive to a friend’s plea to resist Issue 5.

His accomplished teenage son died of a drug overdose. This friend says his son’s pattern of eventually fatal drug usage included marijuana and that, in fact, his system at the time of death bore evidence of marijuana.

He thinks more marijuana in circulation is not a good thing for certain vulnerable kids.

If this merely was a doctor’s specific prescription for a specific marijuana product that was produced and distributed as a controlled substance for certain episodes of pain, then I’d say yes, absolutely. If the extent was merely to make sure no one would go to jail for getting marijuana to a suffering cancer patient, I’d go door-to-door for the proposal.

But the proposal says you need a doctor merely to certify that you suffer from a painful condition that might be relieved by marijuana use. Then you get your marijuana card from the Health Department. Then you, or a qualified caregiver, may get marijuana from a public nonprofit dispensary or, if you do not reside near a dispensary, you may grow a quantity of marijuana on your own.

I am aware that the federal government’s position is to let states allow medical marijuana but to try to keep people from exploiting such a system.

But I also am aware that we give people vital relief with morphine without having dispensaries on street corners where caregivers can walk in and pick up some opium on a doctor’s letter.

So give me a better road while I can get it. And let us keep up a responsible conversation on this medicinal marijuana. We have a couple of weeks to get our decision right.

That’s unless you vote early, which, actually, is my intention as soon as I decide.

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John Brummett’s column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at [email protected]. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com.

Editorial, Pages 13 on 10/23/2012