Sen. Sixto Igisomar (R-Saipan) is also looking to decriminalize the personal use of marijuana as the first-term senator wants to shift his focus from legalizing the medicinal use to personal use of marijuana since it is more cost-efficient.<\/p>\n
Igisomar is the author of Senate Bill 19-06, which is proposing to legalize the medicinal use of marijuana in the CNMI. The bill, however, has been temporarily shelved as Igisomar is looking to make some revisions on the measure.<\/p>\n
Igisomar said he is working to include comments that were gathered during public hearings and the initiatives that he received from pro-personal use groups in the CNMI.<\/p>\n
If personal use of marijuana is decriminalized, it would allow people\u2014especially patients that are being treated for ailments like glaucoma and epilepsy\u2014to carry less than an ounce of marijuana. Medicinal marijuana supposedly reduces nausea and vomiting of patients undergoing chemotherapy.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut anything above that would earn you a citation. If you\u2019re caught with one pound, that\u2019s trafficking. If we clarify these things, there\u2019s a possibility that it might work because you could plant marijuana at home,\u201d said Igisomar.<\/p>\n
He added that shifting to personal use would provide more access to people who are sick and in great need of using marijuana. The only concern he\u2019s looking into is how to prevent the uncontrolled selling of medical marijuana.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re looking into making sure we can allow somebody to have a marijuana plant at home so long as they are not trafficking. It is more practical than having a medicinal law legalizing it,\u201d said Igisomar.<\/p>\n
\u201cI want it to be practical and at the same time cost-efficient where sick people can have continuous and easy access to cheap medicinal marijuana.\u201d<\/p>\n
He said that his medical marijuana bill would allow somebody to have marijuana for medicinal purposes. \u201cBut we come to realize that there\u2019s really no other way that they could access that even if we legalize it.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cUntil the marijuana goes through processing in a laboratory and ends up in a pharmacy. That\u2019s the challenge that we saw. We were thinking a simple legalization but by the time we analyze on how the application would be, it turns out that it may not work at all,\u201d said Igisomar.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo, I did not want to take that chance, continuing to push for something that would be futile in the end and not work. People who are suffering and are sick, for them to be allowed to use marijuana, have the best opportunity for personal use and decriminalization.\u201d <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Sen. Sixto Igisomar (R-Saipan) is also looking to decriminalize the personal use of marijuana as…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":48,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[26,67,1411],"class_list":["post-230766","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-news","tag-cnmi","tag-people","tag-senate-bill"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/230766","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/48"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=230766"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/230766\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=230766"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=230766"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=230766"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}