Update: August 16, 2013
On Friday, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie sent back the medical marijuana bill to the state legislature, saying he wanted two changes made if he was going to sign it. The two changes include making edible forms of marijuana available only to qualified minors and requiring a pediatrician and a psychiatrist to sign off on a child’s prescription.
Currently minors are required to obtain three recommendations from a physician, a pediatrician and a psychiatrist. The only edible marijuana that is allowed is dry-leaf and lozenge options, but the new bill would add edible oils to the list of legal forms of medical marijuana in the state.
See our original coverage below:
“Please don’t let my daughter die, Governor,” Brian Wilson said, talking to New Jersey’s Republican Gov. Chris Christie Wednesday at the Highlander Restaurant in Scotch Plains, NJ, where the Republican governor was in town to accept the support for his re-election campaign from the city’s Democratic Mayor Kevin Glover.
Christie was in town to have a meet and greet potential supporters, but was instead confronted with one of the state’s most well-known medical marijuana advocates, Brian Wilson, whose 2-year-old daughter Vivian suffers from a severe and potentially deadly form of epilepsy called Dravet syndrome.
Pleading with Christie, Wilson, who was reportedly visibly shaking, asked the governor if he planned to sign a bill to make it easier for minors to participate in the state’s medical marijuana program. The legislation Wilson was referring to was bill S2842, passed by the state Senate earlier in June, which would make it easier for young patients to obtain medical marijuana and would expand the list of approved strains of the drug.
Christie responded to Wilson’s question by saying, “These are complicated issues.
“Listen, I know you think it’s simple. It’s simple for you, it’s not simple for me. I’ve read everything that you have put in front of me and I’ll have a decision by Friday. I wish the best for you, your daughter and your family and I’m going to do what I think is best for the people of the state, all the people of the state.”
Reducing the number of recommendations a child has to receive from doctors will make it easier for children like Vivian to enroll in the state’s medical marijuana program, and expanding the list of approved marijuana strains and edible forms of marijuana would allow the use of a liquid form of marijuana that has been proven effective in other states.
Medical marijuana was legalized in New Jersey in January 2010, and registration for the medical marijuana program first opened in August 2012. However, no children have qualified for the program. In Colorado and California, marijuana has been shown to help reduce seizures and has allowed Dravet syndrome patients to cut back on the amount of other prescription drugs they have to take.
Advocates say the drug would not only help children with Dravet syndrome, but would help children who suffer from a range of medical conditions, from cancer to autism to attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.
As Mint Press News previously reported, under New Jersey’s medical marijuana laws, an adult only needs one recommendation from a doctor to be able to buy marijuana from a dispensary. Children, on the other hand, need recommendations from multiple physicians, including a pediatrician and a psychiatrist.
In June, Wilson reported he and his wife Meghan had thus far been unable to obtain legal medical marijuana for Vivian, despite obtaining recommendations from Vivian’s neurologist and pediatrician. The Wilsons reported they were having difficulties convincing a psychiatrist the drug would help their daughter.
Talking to local media in June, Wilson said he believed the stigma associated with marijuana use was making it hard to find a psychiatrist who was willing to sign off on Vivian’s medical marijuana paperwork.
The New Jersey bill would also legalize medical marijuana in a wider variety of edible forms. Unlike many adult patients, pediatric medical marijuana patients often ingest marijuana by taking a capsule or by consuming marijuana that has been mixed with food.
Fighting for Vivian
On Wednesday, Wilson said he left the family’s beach vacation when he heard Christie was going to be in town, even though he had previously been told the governor would not have time to meet with him privately.
“Every day that he waits not only is Vivian suffering, everyone else in New Jersey who’s waiting for this is suffering,” Wilson said.
Vivian, who has been the face of the bill to ease the requirements for pediatric medical marijuana patients in the state was not in attendance Wednesday. Wilson said his daughter wasn’t there with him because she is very sick and is on the verge of a seizure.
After Wilson’s brief but intense interaction with Christie, many of the event’s attendees inside the restaurant made it a point to shake Wilson’s hand and express their support for him and his family. Outside of the restaurant, medical marijuana advocates held signs and shouted at Christie to sign the bill to save children like Vivian.
One woman holding a sign that said, “Vivian’s dad is here, talk to him,” shouted, “I’m Vivi’s grandma, please please sign the bill.”
Lefty Grimes, an advocate for the Wilson family, also urged Christie to sign the bill. Christie responded to him, telling Grimes what he told Wilson, that his administration was looking at the bill and would make a decision by Friday.
But as pointed out by Assemblywoman Linda Stender (D-Union), a sponsor of the measure, “This legislation has been sitting on his desk for over 50 days while these families plead for relief for their children, not knowing whether he’ll even sign the bill or not.”
Christie’s long opposition
Since Vivian’s bill, as the legislation was referred to, passed the state Senate in June, Christie has publicly expressed his concern about expanding the state’s medical marijuana program, which has been called one of the most, if not the most, restrictive medical marijuana program in the U.S.
When asked about the bill during a monthly “Ask the Governor” radio program at the beginning of August, Christie said “I know that parents are concerned for the health of their children. I have to be concerned about the health of every child. They can be assured that whatever I do with the legislation, it will be because I believe the solution I have proposed … is what is in the best interests of all of the children in the state.”
But in an editorial earlier this month, the New Jersey Star-Ledger published an editorial saying that the state’s residents who have a need for medical marijuana “should feel no guilt whatsoever about breaking the law” if they have to buy the drug off the black market, and called the state’s medical marijuana program a scam.
In its editorial, the Star-Ledger also wrote that the state’s medical marijuana program is a “mess” and provides “only false hopes and extra expense to desperate people already struggling to afford their own treatment.” The editorial also criticized Christie for ignoring the state’s needs to “ease the bottleneck of patients and add real competition to lower prices for medical marijuana” by granting licenses to more dispensaries in order keep up with the demand for and lower the cost of the drug.