Just back from Bill Clinton’s appearance at the historic Stock Pavilion on the University of Wisconsin Campus. When Gary Storck and I approached, we were directed across the street by the most polite pair of Secret Service agents i’ve ever dealt with, but, as it’s a narrow street, not an unreasonable “Free Speech Zone.”
Our signs referred to Bill’s encounter, as a Candidate, with Jacki Rickert of Mondovi, Wisconsin in 1992. Jacki had been approved for the federal medical marijuana program, but not yet admitted when Bush I closed the program to new admissions in 1989. She caught up with Bill in Osseo on his post-Convention Mississippi River bus tour. After she explained her odyssey through the federal bureaucracy, Bill “I feel your pain” promised “When I’m President, you’ll get your medicine.”
Come the Inaugural, Jacki sent letters, made calls seeking fulfillment of that commitment, but got back only form letters. “if drugs were legal, my brother Roger would be dead.”
Delivering on this promise would not have required action by the Congress, as the Controlled Substances Act does not prohibit medical use of Cannabis, rather, it requires a permit, issued at the discretion of the Secretary of HHS. At the time Jacki was blocked, there were 14 patients receiving medical marijuana from the government’s pot farm in Mississippi. They were grandfathered in. 4 survive, and get monthly deliveries.
As Bill disembarked today, we caught his eye, and I was close enough to shout, “You promised Jacki Rickert you’d get her Medical Marijuana in 1992.”
If I’m correctly reading body language, he turned to State Democratic Chair Joe Wineke, asking “what’s that about?” Joe knows Jacki’s story, he was around for the ceremony last fall on the introduction in the Wisconsin Assembly of the Jacki Rickert Medical Marijuana Act.
Photos at the Wisconsin NORML blog