Peter Komendowski’s Partnership For A Drug Free Iowa Surely Has A Price When It Comes To Compassion Caring

Peter’s “Keep Iowa’s medical cannabis program within safe limits” article published November 4th, uses the “marijuana industry” as some boogeyman, as if CANNABIS isn’t a legitimate multi-million dollar industry in Iowa for good cause.

I’ve suffered great financial loss to make my position on medical cannabis known. Now that we have definitively won the debate and cannabis has been determined as good for society, Peter says people like me became advocates for a paycheck. Ironic, when you think about it.

Peter tries to pretend that patient stories are being used for profiteering business people, an offensive dismissal of the hundreds of patients – some now deceased – who risked lives, careers and reputations to stand up for what they believed to be righteous and wholesome. An offensive dismissal to the heartfelt pleas of genuinely needy Iowans in order to protect an outdated value system by a public servant, Peter appears to be using his position to impermissibly disagree with higher authorities and qualified medical professionals who, also serving as delegated public servants on taxpayer funded advisory boards, have worked hard for years to build a safe, legal medical cannabis program here in Iowa.

Clearly, Partnership for a Drug Free Iowa is not to be taken seriously.

Up until recently, well-funded “drug policy” organizations headed by people like Peter have gotten away with accusatory half-truths as intellectual cover for the “prison industry.” Now, as laws finally reflect both reality and popular opinion — Michigan became the first Midwestern state to legalize yesterday and it won’t be the last — we can finally replace that horrific civil rights affront that is the prison industry with a medical cannabis industry endorsed by local business leaders right here in Des Moines. Is that not a good improvement, replacing prison guards with doctors?

I’m no Governor but I’d rather be making money then spending it.

The legalization of cannabis would mean the prison industry would lose massive amounts of money. While Schedule I requirements currently forbid organizations like Peter’s from reviewing or even tolerating, much less supporting, any positive research behind Schedule I narcotics like cannabis or LSD (which is why we never see these so-called public servants show up at public cannabis board meetings), President Trump appears poised to remove that restriction after the midterm elections tomorrow. By law, Peter is required to oppose any cannabis legalization efforts or research studies so long as cannabis remains Schedule I.  This makes Peter’s work very hard to make use of when it comes time to closely scrutinize the science being used to justify why Iowa passed medical cannabis into law over four years of deliberations — especially since other state organizations, armed with more access to a larger database of research, oppose Partnership for a Drug Free Iowa’s untenable position.

Drug policy originally was not based on what was good for America, although that was the selling point. Drug policy was based on power first and foremost, science be damned, to be used primarily as a means for social control, enabling the silencing of those who held opposing ideas and values — such as the pot-smoking anti-war protestors during Vietnam, or the civil rights marchers during Dr. Martin Luther King’s time. As both private prisons and pharmaceutical corporations profit models are now seemingly threatened here in Iowa, as medical cannabis, people like Peter would like you to not rethink your positions or review the updated science in 2018. People like Peter, instead of admitting they were outright wrong, grasp at straws to defend their outdated, morally dubious positions. In light of over 30,000 pages of science that we personally submitted to the State of Iowa 10 years ago during public hearings – in a time when doing such advocacy work lost us jobs, and got me personally disowned from my entire family – Peter will still try to tell you ten years later that cannabis oil is not, even as I type this, saving children’s lives right here in Iowa. He’ll actually tell you that cannabis oil is not going to help people with Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s. He’ll tell you cannabis is not going to make your arthritic Grandmother be without pain in her joints for hours without getting her high like pharmaceutical narcotics. No, this cannabis is, as always, much too dangerous. Nothing much changes when you’re legally hog tied from reviewing the actual science.

When someone’s alleged “service” relies on imposing their unscientific viewpoints through violence and force instead of compassion and persuasion, we tend to label them as “bad guys.” If you’re a bad guy politically, we inevitably pull your funding – most of the time. If Peter wants to try and avoid taking a positive role in the new medical cannabis program and wants to instead scapegoat the “cannabis industry” as something terrible and dangerous then he may do well to remember where it is exactly that his money comes from and what purpose it is supposed to serve. While doing his job now requires him by law to spread lies and stoking fears, cannabis may not be Schedule I much longer. And, when it finally comes time to get honest with the public, Peter may find that he is antiquated and ancient.

So, without federal law to hide behind as an excuse to ignore science any longer, and with his organization being at odds with Iowa’s superior medical advisory boards having been delegated the role of making drug policy that actually works instead of enabling criminals and drug dealers to flourish, Peter may try to remain content to continue avoiding the discussion of WHY Iowa has determined cannabis is not bad for society any longer. Once it comes time to review the effectiveness of Partnership for a Drug Free Iowa, however, the people who work for Peter may find that they have been given only a small fraction – less than 5% — of the science from around the world When you’re flying blind, you’re bound to crash, and when Partnership for a Drug Free Iowa finally returns to Earth and gets grounded, we’ll wonder just what kind of substances they were taking to begin with as we permanently cut their public funding and give it to someone else who is willing to do the real work instead of just pretending.