Politics
Nebraska Democratic Governor Candidate Pledges Medical Marijuana Executive Order On ‘Day One’
The Democratic candidate running to be Nebraska’s next governor is promising to issue an executive order to expedite access to medical marijuana on “day one” of her administration if she is elected.
Lynne Walz said it’s “a really sad situation” that the administration of her opponent, incumbent Gov. Jim Pillen (R), has failed to stand up a medical cannabis program nearly two years after voters’ approval of legalization ballot measures.
“Day one, I will sign an executive order…to make sure that people can get medical marijuana with prescriptions from their doctors,” Walz said in an interview with WOWT-TV.
The Democratic candidate also suggested that she would replace Pillen-appointed members of the Medical Cannabis Commission for not getting the program off the ground quickly enough.
“The other thing that we’ll look at is making sure that the people who are on this commission that are slow-walking access to medical marijuana—if they’re not going to do the job that we need them to do, the job that Nebraskans overwhelmingly voted for—if they can’t get that done, then we’ll find other people who will take that job seriously,” she said.
Walz also spoke about a Vietnam veteran neighbor of hers with Parkinson’s disease who “shook uncontrollably” and “had really bad PTSD.”
“He would have really benefited from medical marijuana,” she said. “So, for the governor to hold back on allowing people to get prescriptions from their doctors and be able to access medical marijuana is, you know—especially that, given that 71 percent of Nebraskans voted for it, to not uphold the will of the people and hold that access back from people and patients who really need it—is sad.”
“I’ve traveled across the state, and that is one of the number one issues that people are upset about,” Walz said, “is the fact that they have voted for ballot initiatives and the governor’s not upholding the will of the people.”
Medical cannabis advocates have criticized the governor-appointed medical cannabis regulatory body for advancing rules that would scale back the scope of the voter-approved legalization ballot measures by, for example, restricting the list of qualifying conditions and limiting the forms of products that could be legally consumed by patients.
Other state officials, including Attorney General Mike Hilgers (R) have pursued litigation seeking to invalidate the medical cannabis legalization measures.
