People who turned out for a town hall meeting sponsored by Del. Scott Garrett, R-Lynchburg, asked him half a dozen questions Tuesday night, and two of them were about the criminal status of marijuana.
Ed McCann Jr. of Lynchburg asked Garrett if he would cosponsor a bill to decriminalize marijuana possession in small amounts.
McCann said just more than 600 people in Lynchburg are charged with simple possession of marijuana each year, and that imposing fines instead of jailing people would reduce the costs of prosecution and keeping people in jail.
“I am not a supporter of legalizing marijuana,” Garrett said.
McCann said he wasn’t asking that marijuana be legalized, but he wanted the punishment reduced to fines instead of jail time.
Garrett said, “My sense is that people would say, ‘Scott, you say you are just decriminalizing it, but what you really are doing is arguing that it should be legalized.”
Gavin Proffitt, a home-schooled high school senior, asked Garrett if he would support a bill to make medical marijuana easier to prescribe and use for several purposes.
Del. Harvey Morgan, R-Gloucester, is expected to sponsor a medical marijuana bill next year, and Proffitt argued that it could be used to treat nausea caused by some cancer-treatment drugs.
Garrett told Proffitt that medical marijuana “is not the cure-all or answer-all” for cancer patients, although scientific evidence shows marijuana can help some people dissociate themselves from pain, and can reduce pressure in the eye caused by glaucoma.
But those effects don’t happen for everyone, Garrett said.
“I can’t honestly tell you I think most people in Lynchburg and Amherst County would want me to spend a lot of time there” working for more medical use of marijuana, Garrett said.
Another question from the crowd involved legislation in Texas that would limit pat-down searches in airports by Transportation Security Administration agents.
Garrett said he wasn’t familiar with the Texas legislation and blamed Osama bin Laden for the level of airline-travel security. Garrett said he might support the concept of limiting pat-downs, but public safety could be weakened if the bill were to pass.
“Osama bin Laden has done some really bad things to a whole lot of people,” Garrett said. “Unfortunately the aftermath of a lot of the work he did is create these huge impositions on our personal freedoms, on our safety, and on our costs” for travel today compared to pre-2001."
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