* McHenry County State’s Attorney Patrick Kenneally writing in the Tribune…

Cannabis dispensaries in McHenry County will now be the first in the country to warn customers through in-store signage of the mental health dangers associated with cannabis use, which include psychosis, depression and suicidal ideation.

Dispensaries will also be required to scrub their marketing and websites of any suggestion that their products have medical benefits. They agreed to these consumer protections as part of a settlement with the McHenry County state’s attorney’s office in lieu of a consumer fraud action. Dispensaries that have refused to warn consumers will face litigation.

Since Illinois’ legalization of recreational marijuana in 2020, the defining feature of the dispensaries’ sales strategy has been marketing cannabis as medicine and the antidote to many maladies, including depression, anxiety, insomnia, post-traumatic stress disorder, attention-deficit disorder, immune disorders, chronic fatigue and inflammation.

In furtherance of its strategy, dispensaries have appropriated the scientific lexicon to create their own fraudulent field of medicine, such that one no longer does a “bong rip” but rather receives a specific “dose” measured to the milligram by the cashier. (Or, should I say, “dispensary health care professional”?)

It goes on, and on, and on.

* From the Illinois Compassionate Use of Medical Cannabis Program Act…

The recorded use of cannabis as a medicine goes back nearly 5,000 years. Modern medical research has confirmed the beneficial uses of cannabis in treating or alleviating the pain, nausea, and other symptoms associated with a variety of debilitating medical conditions, including cancer, multiple sclerosis, and HIV/AIDS, as found by the National Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Medicine in March 1999.

(b) Studies published since the 1999 Institute of Medicine report continue to show the therapeutic value of cannabis in treating a wide array of debilitating medical conditions. These include relief of the neuropathic pain caused by multiple sclerosis, HIV/AIDS, and other illnesses that often fail to respond to conventional treatments and relief of nausea, vomiting, and other side effects of drugs used to treat HIV/AIDS and hepatitis C, increasing the chances of patients continuing on life-saving treatment regimens.

(c) Cannabis has many currently accepted medical uses in the United States, having been recommended by thousands of licensed physicians to at least 600,000 patients in states with medical cannabis laws. The medical utility of cannabis is recognized by a wide range of medical and public health organizations, including the American Academy of HIV Medicine, the American College of Physicians, the American Nurses Association, the American Public Health Association, the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, and many others.

As I told subscribers yesterday, it looks like McHenry County dispensaries wouldn’t even be allowed to post that excerpt from state law inside their buildings now without facing a lawsuit for fraud.

* From the governor’s office…

Legalizing adult use cannabis has always been about justice, safety, and equity in Illinois. The failed war on drugs has destroyed families, filled prisons with nonviolent offenders, and disproportionately disrupted Black and Brown communities. That’s why, in Illinois, we focused on righting some of our historic wrongs by expunging criminal records and reinvesting a portion of the revenue back into communities hardest hit by the failed war on drugs. The Governor is disappointed to learn that the McHenry County State’s Attorney prefers focusing on spreading disinformation instead of tackling the issues that keep actually keep residents safe.

* Associated Press…

(T)he federal Health and Human Services Department has recommended taking marijuana out of a category of drugs deemed to have “no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse.” The agency advised moving pot from that “Schedule I” group to the less tightly regulated “Schedule III.”

* From Rep. Kelly Cassidy, House Speaker Pro Tempore Jehan Gordon-Booth, and former Sens. Toi Hutchinson and Heather Steans…

When we first set out to legalize and regulate cannabis for adult use, we were immediately labeled the “marijuana moms” as we each had kids ranging from toddlerhood to adulthood. And we embraced that label, acknowledging that youth use of cannabis has shown to decrease in effectively regulated markets. We also faced our fair share of outlandish “chicken little” arguments from opponents to legalization such as the southern Illinois sheriff who claimed legalization would require drug sniffing dogs to be euthanized. Recently McHenry County State’s Attorney Patrick Kenneally decided to join the disinformation brigade.

In the mid-1930’s, then Federal Bureau of Narcotics Commissioner Harry Anslinger infamously vilified cannabis as a catalyst for violence, and unscientifically attributed half of violent crimes in minority communities to the consumption of “marihuana.” He spent decades misdirecting federal enforcement powers to promote fear over scientific evidence, and successfully prohibited cannabis throughout the nation. As his primary basis for doing so, he loosely associated the cannabis plant to unverified acts of violence, immoral behavior, and even “satanic music” – such as jazz.

Now nearly a century later, Kenneally takes another swing from the Anslinger playbook. In an announcement that he will force state-licensed cannabis dispensaries in McHenry County to post unscientific warnings to consumers about cannabis, Kenneally claims “half of the county’s recent homicides involve cannabis or cannabis-induced psychosis.” Like Anslinger a century before him, Kenneally’s connection of cannabis consumption to these tragedies is unexplained.

In a meandering editorial, Kenneally carelessly conflates cannabis use with the most complex societal issues that our own Illinois researchers, institutions, and community leaders work collectively every day to further understand and improve upon. To the McHenry State’s Attorney, the tragedies of violent crime, addiction, mental illness, and suicide can be narrowed down to one oversimplified, unbelievably obvious common denominator – they’re all a bunch of pot users.

At best, Kenneally misleads weekend editorial readers. At worst, he continues an unfortunate tradition in American history of using hyperbole to vilify cannabis use and possession, including for medical purposes.

The timing for Kenneally to issue an editorial calling medical cannabis “elaborate dupery” was poor, to say the least. Just days before his op-ed landed, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) officially recognized the medical benefits of marijuana following an evidence-based review, recommending to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) that marijuana be rescheduled as a Schedule III substance, because it has a medical utility and low potential for abuse.

As legislators who have investigated this topic substantially ourselves, we don’t need to wait for the full federal scheduling report and findings to understand an integral part of the utility of medical cannabis. We have seen and heard the human experiences in our own offices: Late-stage cancer patients restored to a quality of life. Debilitating seizure disorders become a distant memory. Our own Illinois veterans pleading for relief from the side effects of pharmaceutical drugs, and an alternative, legal pathway to medical cannabis following active combat.

During this time, we have watched the nation’s registered medical cannabis patient population grow to exceed 5 million, now spanning 38 different states from coast to coast and in between. As the number of positively touched lives increases, we have witnessed public support for medical cannabis now hovering at 90%, covering all demographics and across party lines.

Further, as legislators who have worked collectively for the better part of a decade to build a strictly regulated, consumer protection-focused medical and adult-use cannabis industry in Illinois, we take particular umbrage with the assertion that the state has “warned no one and done nothing” about the potential public health impacts of cannabis.

In fact, since the inception of Illinois’ strictly regulated medical cannabis program in 2013 mandatory product labels and dispensary signage are required to conspicuously warn patients and purchasers that:

Cannabis is only for registered medical patients or adults 21 and over; cannabis can impair cognition and may be habit forming; cannabis should not be used by pregnant or breastfeeding women; this particular cannabis product causes intoxication, the effects of which may be delayed for up to 2 hours, among several others.

We further mandated child-resistant containers, strict prohibitions against marketing or advertising to minors, independent lab testing of all products for safety, labeling of potency and serving sizes, real-time inventory controls and electronic tracking of cannabis to prevent diversion, and electronically scanned age verification at all dispensaries, to name a few.

We also make no apology for the economic and reinvestment dollars into Illinois communities. Our state’s legal cannabis industry now produces over $500 million annually in state and local tax revenue for the benefit of Illinois, surpassing alcohol tax revenue. For the first time in the state’s history, tens of millions of dollars in sustained funding are being reinvested into Illinois’ most historically disinvested communities every year. The revenues go to build youth recreational centers, support anti-violence programs in partnerships with local law enforcement, job training programs, and fund mental health and substance abuse clinics, as a few examples. In addition, a significant portion of the revenue supports training and DUI enforcement. SA Kenneally’s vague claim about increased DUIs could be because there is adequate training and resources to enforce against intoxicated driving now.

The State of Illinois will continue to follow the science in making regulatory considerations. The law was built for regulators to update its consumer safety protocols accordingly. In doing so, we will remain careful not to compel government speech on private businesses in violation of well-established First Amendment protections, simply because certain businesses may not see the world from our eyes, nor use our selective reading of publicly available literature to accomplish the same.

We stand willing to work with anyone from anywhere in our great state to address consumer safety, public safety, public health, and child development. We will not, however, stand idly and allow others to point myopically to cannabis to nonsensically explain away highly complex, multi-faceted societal problems.

Footnotes at the link.