The semester’s third Honors College Town Hall meeting opened budding dialogue on the nation’s most hotly contested plant.
The Town Hall featured a panel of three – including two UA students and Patricia Todd, District 54’s House Representative for the state of Alabama – discussing marijuana legalization and how it can affect communities.
Olympia Karageorgiou, president of Students for Stable Drug Policy, represented one of the student voices on the panel. She advocated that legalizing marijuana was the sensible route for society.
“People who smoke marijuana are not violent offenders,” Karageorgiou said, “for a student’s ability to learn at this institution to be taken away from them for having [or using] a small amount of marijuana is a little bit unreasonable.”
Todd, an outspoken advocate for legalization in the state, claimed that her stance was informed by her own experiences with the drug. She said much of the opposition from other state representatives and officials was due to misinformation or lack of experience, going on to say that state lawmakers were “totally ignorant” about marijuana.
Todd claimed that the path to full legalization starts with legalizing the medicinal prescription of marijuana.
“We know marijuana has medical purposes,” Todd said. “We have proven over and over and over again that it has properties that can help with PTSD, seizure disorders, depression, and it should be readily available for anyone with a doctor’s prescription.”
Ben Jackson, SGA President Lillian Roth’s Chief of Staff, was the second student voice on the panel and took the stance of contrarian. Jackson stressed the need for intellectual honesty in the legalization discussion, and was for the decriminalization of marijuana, but against full legalization.
“Legalization makes some assumptions about the drug that we really aren’t certain about yet in terms of its impact,” Jackson said. “We’ve been ignoring this drug for 50 years in the United States and I think we need to take a more honest, intellectual look at what legalization means for us.”
After the panel, Todd discussed her optimism that medicinal marijuana would soon be legalized.
“We’re going to get there because there’s so much data we have from medical use,” Todd said, noting the research being done at The University of Alabama at Birmingham on medical marijuana.
Due to the passing of a recent bill in the Alabama legislature, research has been undertaken at UAB, looking into the medical possibilities for marijuana, as a result of a recent bill passed by the Alabama legislature.
“I think we need more clinical trials- we’ll probably expand the clinical trial at UAB – but we need more,” Todd said.
Mason Johnston, a sophomore majoring in psychology and political science, said the lecture helped him expand his understanding of the arguments against legalization.
“Hearing an actual well thought out logical voice against full legalization was something that really just gave me a much better viewpoint on the issue at hand,” Johnston said.
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Full Article: Honors Town Hall Focuses On Marijuana Legalization
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