Not buying excuses on marijuana

The pretense that we need to better understand the ramifications of legalizing medical marijuana is a smoke screen to cover the risk of offending our social conservative electorate, in my humble opinion.

What are the real issues? Exposure of our youth to pot, hardly. If you ask high school students if they can find some pot, they will either tell you where or who to ask, assuming they answer truthfully.

I, or my insurance company, pay about $150 per ounce for Crestor. I doubt that medicinal pot will be any cheaper, although illegal pot probably is.

Iowans are suffering and 81 percent of our population think we should do what we can to help them. I believe that we have a serious deficiency of guts in our state government, legislative and executive. The fact that the head of the governor's Department of Drug Control Policy feels that “Good laws take time, good laws take a lot of research and thorough review” (“Lawmaker: Bipartisan support for medical marijuana,” March 22) does little to assist the people crying for help. The fact that this probably will become a campaign issue is probably a good thing. However, once the elections are over, what do we do, wait?

Gordon Taylor

Anamosa