Today, at age 54, Timmons is mostly bedridden and rarely sees the outside of his Garland home. What he lacks in physical ability, however, he more than makes up for with his ardent support for legalizing marijuana for seriously ill people.

In fact, he has become the poster boy for the medical marijuana movement in Texas. One organization has named a model law to set up a medical marijuana industry in Texas the Tim Timmons Compassionate Care Act. An Internet search quickly yields videos of Timmons smoking pot and daring politicians and cops to come arrest him.

“I would love [Texas Gov.] Rick Perry to be the guy who arrests me,” he said. “It would cost the state of Texas $500,000 a year to take care of me in prison.”

Timmons and a small coterie of medical marijuana advocates are under no illusion that the Texas Legislature, which convenes in January, will join more than a dozen other states and pass a law legalizing pot use for chronically ill people. Also Online

But the issue is hot across the nation, appearing on at least three statewide ballots on Tuesday. In California, where medical marijuana already is legal, voters will consider a proposition to legalize recreational use. Ballots in South Dakota and Arizona feature propositions on legalizing marijuana for medical purposes.

“You know Texas and Oklahoma will be the last two states to do anything,” Timmons said.

Because while medical marijuana has become a punch line in places like California, where authorities struggle to keep fly-by-night operators from selling weed to anyone and everyone claiming the slightest pain or anxiety, it is a serious matter to Clemens.

The freshman Democrat from Lake Worth is sponsoring House Joint (no pun intended) Resolution 1407, which would establish the framework for medical marijuana in Florida.

“Seven people die from prescription pain medicine in Florida every day. No one ever died from using cannabis,” Clemens said.

“Why is there this stigma about that one drug? People are suffering. If there’s a more natural way to ease that suffering, why wouldn’t we do that? The truth is, there is no good reason.”

If passed, HJR 1407 would put the question of medical marijuana to voters as an amendment to the state constitution.

Specifics about how the legal cannabis would be grown and sold would be worked out after the vote.

But the language of the bill stresses things like debilitating medical condition, a bona-fide doctor-patient relationship and a role for the primary caregiver in determining if a person would qualify for medical marijuana.

It is patterned after laws in Colorado and New Mexico, two of the more than one dozen states that have already approved medicinal use of cannabis in one form or another.

This page has been part of it. On Feb. 20 we came out for regulation and taxation of cannabis for adult use, which HB 1550 would do through the state liquor stores. That The Seattle Times would say this lowers the risk for public officials to say it. At the hearing Wednesday at the House Ways and Means Committee, chaired by Rep. Ross Hunter, D-Medina, you could feel the change.
united-statesThere were no Cheech and Chong jokes. This was serious business.

The first three presenters were Seattle City Attorney Peter Holmes, Seattle City Councilman Tim Burgess and Professor John McKay of Seattle University School of Law. All favored an end to prohibition.

The bill’s sponsor, Rep. Mary Lou Dickerson, D-Seattle, presented Hunter’s committee with an estimate that in the next biennium her bill could raise $441 million for the state. That would be welcome, just as the liquor revenue was welcome when Prohibition was ended during the Depression. But no estimate is reliable, and revenue, in any case, is not the main reason for doing this.

McKay, who was U.S. Attorney here during the Bush administration and who enforced the law against marijuana sellers, said prohibition has failed to stop people from growing, selling and using. He said the policy has put this into the hands of violent criminal gangs, just as liquor prohibition did in the 1920s.

Burgess, a former police officer, said prohibition has helped make the United States “the world’s biggest jailer.”

None of these arguments is new. They have been made and ignored for years. Now people begin to listen. If the Legislature does not act, the people may this year by supporting Initiative 1149, which would remove penalties for adult use without imposing the regulatory system in Dickerson’s bill.