Political Quotes

“I thank you for your concern about addiction and all the problems. This is an ancillary problem that deals with that. I thank you for your concern about that. I thank the chairman of the committee and the ranking member. This has been years in the making. I thank them for bringing this across the finish line. I thank my cosponsor from across the aisle. The gentleman from Oregon is absolutely right. He and I will disagree, probably the most two people can disagree, about recreational marijuana. We agree 100 percent that we need to do this research and that we need this bill. Now, because of the discussion about COVID and the vaccines and therapeutics for that, Americans realize how medical research has to be done and how important it is to be done. They expect purity, safety, and efficacy for anything that has a claim of a medical product. Now, unfortunately, because of the public policy we have had in place with marijuana and its scheduling, this simply couldn't be done. The unfortunate consequence is that legislatures in general across the States, and, unfortunately, this legislature last week, took a ready- fire-aim approach: Let's go ahead and legalize it, even for recreational use, without a medical basis. But I am only going to talk about medical marijuana. We need good studies. Understandably, because of current scheduling, we can't do it. I get it. I did research, as a physician, on drugs.…”