Michael O’Donnell’s prescription for medical marijuana law is shamefully shady | Opinion
You’d have to be pretty high to let Michael O’Donnell anywhere near rewriting state law to legalize medical marijuana.
And on Thursday, the state Senate Committee on Federal and State Affairs tabled a marijuana legalization bill being pushed by O’Donnell in his capacity as a lobbyist for Kansas Natural Remedies.
The senators did the right thing, because the bill would have been an unmitigated disaster for medical marijuana in Kansas. But they did it for the wrong reasons, more about that in a minute.
For those who haven’t been keeping track, lobbying for the hemp grower is one of several jobs O’Donnell has had since 2020, after he resigned his position as a Sedgwick County commissioner, one step ahead of an ouster proceeding that would have removed him from office for political corruption.
On behalf of his client, O’Donnell’s been the driving force behind Senate Bill 555, a purported “conservative alternative” to allow Kansas citizens to have limited access to medical marijuana, a right they’d already have if they lived in any of 40 other states or the District of Columbia.
On the street, fake drugs sold to uniformed and unsuspecting buyers are called “turkeys.”
S.B. 555 is a turkey.
Like most things O’Donnell involves himself with, S.B. 555 is sleazy, cheesy, and designed to primarily benefit FOD’s (friends of O’Donnell), rather than the people it purports to be helping.
The bill would establish a so-called “pilot program” that would run for five years and place every facet of medical marijuana — from growing the plants to processing them to distribution — under the control of four companies selected by the Kansas Department of Health and Environment.
In 2022, I wrote about a terminally ill cancer patient in Hays who was raided — on his deathbed in his hospital room — for spreading marijuana extract on bread and eating it to relieve his pain.
At the time, I made this prediction: “Lawmakers will legalize medical marijuana just enough to get themselves off the hook for having a total ban, but then over-regulate it and make it so expensive and hard to get that relatively few people who could benefit will actually be able to have it.”
S.B. 555 would do that — while still making untold millions of dollars for the four favored companies with KDHE contracts.
Under the bill, growing your own would remain prohibited. So would smoking it or using edibles — which is how most medical patients use marijuana to alleviate their pain, as an alternative to taking debilitating and addictive prescription opiates.
All marijuana grown for medical purposes would have to be grown indoors in windowless facilities, and I doubt it’s a coincidence that the company O’Donnell’s lobbying for bills itself as “Kansas’ Premiere Indoor Hemp Cultivator.”
At Thursday’s Senate hearing, the star witness for the proponents was Samuel Jones of Kansas Natural Remedies. Opponents were primarily law enforcement folks, represented by Kansas Bureau of Investigation director Tony Mattivi, and others opposed to marijuana in general.
The missing voices were advocates for real marijuana reform, and patients like Greg Bretz, who can’t testify on Senate bills, because he died three weeks after the great Hays hospital raid in his room.
But practically every group supporting medical marijuana in the state joined Wednesday in a statement roundly condemning S.B. 555.
Here are some excerpts:
The medical cannabis ‘pilot program’ introduced by Michael O’Donnell creates a monopoly by only allowing FOUR companies in the entire state to participate. – Amanda McHenry Brubaker, president, Honk for Hemp
It is time Kansas enact a medical cannabis program that protects public health, takes into account lessons from other states, and that will pass this legislative body. Unfortunately, SB 555 is the result of an effort by a select few individuals who created a program with the intent of ensuring they not only had a place in the market, but that they controlled it. – Kelly Rippel, founding president, Planted Association of Kansas
It (S.B. 55) lacks even the faintest glimmer of recognition of the need for racial equity, for community building, or of the devastatingly inequitable impact of decades of our state’s War on Drugs-era laws criminalizing cannabis. — Micah Kubic, Executive Director, ACLU of Kansas.
But those weren’t the reasons cited when the committee tabled the bill until next year.
There was only this, from Sen. Renee Erickson, a Wichita Republican: “Through this (hearing), it has become abundantly clear to me that this is not the conservative, restrictive control pilot program it’s being characterized as.”
The Legislature still just doesn’t get it.
About 67% of residents polled last October in Fort Hays State University’s Kansas Speaks survey said they’d go beyond medical, and support legalizing recreational use as well.
Kansas wants medical marijuana, without the conservative, restrictive control.
And they certainly don’t want it the Michael O’Donnell way.
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