New Jersey’s medical marijuana program has up until now been a program in name only.
The program was written into law years ago and approved by former Gov. Christie, who then sought to knee cap the program like Tonya Harding. The restrictions placed on the medical marijuana program by a politically ambitious and, at the time, ascendant conservative served to render the program next to useless.
He placed severe restrictions on the types of ailments that qualified for the program and even stricter limits on the number of dispensaries where patients fortunate enough to meet the governor’s definition of ‘sick’ could acquire their prescribed medication.
If you’re opposed, morally or otherwise, to recreational marijuana I completely understand. I think it’s misguided given the ubiquity of other perfectly legal brain altering substances, but to each their own. But, to deny sick people access to a medication that may help them so you can impress the conservative voting base is downright immoral. For years the former governor kept medical marijuana out of the reach of people who could have used it to achieve some measure of relief.
Thankfully, Gov. Phil Murphy has lifted those restrictions and opened up the medical marijuana program to a far more diverse range of ailments and psychological conditions where marijuana has been proven to be of some benefit. The fact that people had to suffer needlessly for years when there was a state approved program that could have helped is reprehensible and now, thankfully, corrected.
