Karen Cyphers: Sensible pot laws are needed, but amendment is flawed

How many examples can you think of where Florida law is unnecessarily complex? Where loopholes — intended or not — undermine a goal? Where a fix ends up worse than the problem?

For instance, take casinos. It took years of patchwork lawmaking to create the identity confusion Florida has today with gaming regulations. You can gamble here, but not there; on these machines but not these… you know.

For casinos, the message of our current law is absurd. It goes something like this: “Gambling creates social problems, so here’s some hoops you need to jump through to do it legally, and then have at it.”

Overnight, we could achieve the same inconsistently applied standards for people who want to consume marijuana.

The parallels between Florida’s gaming hodgepodge and the proposed marijuana amendment are strong.

Going half-in on gaming means two things: certain institutions benefit wildly from an artificial monopoly, while an unregulated fringe market is allowed to exploit, scam, and so on.

Writing half-baked marijuana laws would be no better.

The proposed ballot amendment relies on a thin pretext of caring for the sick.

But that’s not what the amendment is actually written to do. In reality it would allow anyone of any age to doctor-shop until finding one that agrees that your “condition” meets some arbitrary threshold.  Just ask young adults in California how that works.

Two things would happen, just like with casinos: first, a few new retailers would prosper; and second, the greater flow of weed around town would allow old-fashioned pot dealers (the unregulated fringe market) to benefit, too.

Meanwhile, recreational users without a prescription for marijuana to treat alleged back pain or depression would be subject to jail time. That doesn’t make sense. It is begging people to lie and use the health care system in costly and fraudulent ways.

There are a few ways around this. One, decriminalize marijuana for recreational use and unclog our court systems of non-violent offenders; or two, write an amendment that narrowly and clearly defines what a “debilitating” disease is and offer a formal process for exceptions.

It says something that after many meetings, the Financial Impact Estimating Conference still can’t offer a clearer assessment of the amendment’s impact than “indeterminate.” That’s because an unknowable number of people would qualify, and an unknowable new set of industries would place their stakes in the ground.

Attorney General Pam Bondi said that the amendment was written to “hide the ball” from voters, and she’s right. The title and summary of the measure presume a narrow set of conditions for which it would be legal, when in fact the measure is quite broad.

Floridians deserve a more rational, scientific and compassionate marijuana policy than we now have.  There is no doubt in my mind that marijuana has been improperly defined as a Schedule I substance, which means the federal government sees no medicinal use for it. It is time to rethink that. (Particularly since marijuana’s main ingredient is used in FDA approved drugs already, legal in all 50 states.)

But just as marijuana proponents lament the inconsistency of current drug laws, they should fight for new laws that are honest, consistent, and without haphazard loopholes.