Lt. Gov. Tim Griffin is all for looking after voters when it comes to partisan elections, but maybe not so much when it comes to medical marijuana.
Griffin famously pitched a fit and said it was affront to voters when Democrats used House rules to legally compose a majority of the House Revenue and Taxation Committee.
But now consider medical marijuana, comfortably approved by voters Nov. 8. Two-thirds of the states now have approved legal marijuana in some form and public support generally is even higher than the vote for the Arkansas constitutional amendment. But 40/29 has a report on Griffin’s questions about legal pot.
Griffin trots out the old jobs fig leaf. Good jobs require a drug-free workforce, Griffin says. What, workers aren’t allow to take prescription medication, even. No pain relievers? But here’s his real kicker from a 40/29 ttranscript:
I can tell you, the whole issue of it being a felony, I mean it’s still, mariuana is still illegal under federal law and just because a state passes something doesn’t make it legal under federal law. It only makes it legal under state law. But as we know, federal law trumps state law, so there are a lot of unanswered questions.
Some Republicans have held out hope that a Trump administration would reverse Obama administration policy and begin busting marijuana users again, no matter how sick. It could happen, I guess, though the tidal wave of public sentiment argues against it. Gov. Asa Hutchinson has promised a good-faith effort to comply with voters’ wishes and work is underway by his administration to establish the regulatory scheme necessary. (I should add that a gold rush of would-be entrepreneurs and high-dollar lobbyists is also underway to carve off a piece of anticipated profits.)
A resistance to the amendment would be what Tim Griffin might call in another context an “affront” to voters. But he’s always been long on hypocrisy. He disqualified himself from being a representative of voters when he worked to toss legal voters — including many enlisted service men — off the voter rolls in Florida in 2004 to help George W. Bush.