Jimmy Morrison’s testimony to the Iowa Board of Pharmacy

Testimony transcript from the Iowa Board of Pharmacy hearing in Iowa City.

“My name is Jimmy Morrison, and I’d like to thank — start by thanking all of you for coming, especially the board. I really appreciate you guys doing this review.

I have bipolar disorder, and right here I have a study saying — that says marijuana works for bipolar disorder. Some people may think we should just allow medical marijuana for patients who are terminally ill and who are dying, and I’d just like to say that without medical marijuana, I probably would not be here today due to my bipolar disorder.
What you do when you say that marijuana doesn’t have medical benefit is you say that it’s illegal. You make me a criminal. I’m not a criminal. I don’t break other laws. I don’t do cocaine, heroin, any drugs. I don’t even really drink. But last year I was detained eight times.

Bipolar disorder brings anxiety, and police encounters are obviously not something that helps that. I’ve never been arrested even though I was detained eight times. But I would like to share one story with you.

I was with my brother who did not know that I had marijuana on me. He does know I use it for medical benefits, but we were in an altercation with an officer, and I was detained on my knees with a drug dog looking in my face, and I was Page Break 51 searched while I had to watch a cop hold a gun to my brother’s head for five minutes, and that is an image I will never get out of my head, and so I really hope you understand how serious of a situation this is.

Not only do I have to be a criminal in the police’s eyes, I can’t go to a store to obtain my medical marijuana. Earlier you talked about the different strands of marijuana, and it basically all falls into indica and sativa, but you can’t really determine what that is usually from just getting it on the street. And you also have to deal with the real criminals who are on the street.
And I have another story. I was trying to obtain medical marijuana in a city that I didn’t know anybody in, so I went downtown, met a couple guys, and they took me in a back alley. One of them held me down and threatened to shank me, and the other one repeatedly punched me in the face. They took my wallet, my credit card, my shoes, my socks, my shirt. It was about 40 degrees outside. And they tried to spend $3,000 on my credit card. They’re criminals. Those are the people that I have to get my medicine from.

So one other thing I’d like to share is holy anointing oil. In the Bible it refers to kaneh bosm which has been traced to cannabis, and I have something here that shows that as well. And Jesus used it all the time. If you look in the Bible, when Jesus healed people, he used holy anointing oil which contains six pounds of cannabis.

So that would be possession with intent to deliver, so we like to think we’ve come a long way in the last 2,000 years, and if pharmacide came, we wouldn’t arrest him. We would treat him with open arms. But the fact is if Jesus lived in the United States, he’d be in jail the rest of his life.

So I hope you guys will take some of this into account, and if anybody would like to talk to me, I have a mailing list going, and Iowapatients.org is a website I started, so if you have any questions, please feel free to ask. Thank you.”

Written by Jimmy Morrison