His fight for marijuana reform started in the funeral home. Now, NC may do it.
When asked why he’s so passionate about marijuana legalization, Rep. Kelly Alexander, of Charlotte, will start by telling you about his funeral business.
The line of work has made him more familiar with death — and the road to it — than most people. Some of the most striking moments are those when people come out of a medication-induced fog, only to tell him that they’re losing control of their own minds.
Alexander believes marijuana is often the best way to ease the pain of death, and, just as important, the best way to maintain clarity of mind as the end of life draws nearer. Throughout his 13 years in the state legislature, he’s proposed bill after bill hoping to make the medication legal.
This year, it might actually happen.
Alexander had no direct hand in Senate Bill 711, which would legalize medical marijuana in North Carolina, but he’s championed a movement in Raleigh that is just now getting some legs under it. His bill this year, House Bill 576, which would fully legalize marijuana, has essentially no chance of becoming law. As he looks on while the Senate bill gains steam, though, Alexander can’t help but feel optimistic.
On Wednesday, the bill was approved by the Senate Finance Committee and will head now to the Health Care Senate Standing Committee. It moves forward with considerable bipartisan support, boasting three Republican co-sponsors and four Democrats.
With marijuana bills in the past, “you pretty much knew you might get a public hearing, but you wouldn’t get serious consideration,” Alexander said. “This year, we’ve got serious consideration.”
Marijuana moves from the fringes
Alexander sponsored his first marijuana bill in 2009, which would have made the substance legal for medical use. The next year, he sponsored another, this one hoping to amend the criminal sentences for possession, making a person only liable for a simple infraction if caught with less than an ounce.
Both bills failed to become law, and Alexander has sponsored several more since then. It’s garnered him a reputation as one of the cause’s most consistent advocates, among people in Raleigh and among his constituents.
“Of all the issues that I’ve been associated with, this is the one issue that I can be standing in a line at the Post Office and a little old lady will walk up to me and will just spontaneously ask, ‘What’s going on with marijuana now?’” he said.
As the Senate bill headed to committee this week, Alexander reflected on the failed bills of the past, and on how difficult it had been to get the conversation going. He remembered how other proponents of medical marijuana, some of them veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder or other ailments of war, would try to get appointments with their elected officials who were opposed.
“They would hide from them,” he said.
House Bill 576, which Alexander sponsored this year, would not only legalize recreational marijuana, but also create a process to expunge previous marijuana arrests from a person’s criminal record. The Senate bill, meanwhile, would only allow people with certain medical conditions, like cancer, HIV and glaucoma, to consume marijuana with the permission of a doctor.
Senate Bill 711 is no sure thing. Although it cleared the Finance Committee on Wednesday, it will still have to win the approval of the General Assembly. Still, its success so far is reflective of a changing perception, particularly among conservatives.
On June 30, Senate majority leader Kathy Harrington, a Republican from Gaston County, said during a committee hearing that she changed her mind about medical marijuana after her husband was diagnosed with multiple myeloma. He has been undergoing cancer treatments.
“If you had asked me six months ago if I would be supporting this bill I probably would have said no,” she said. “But life comes at you fast.”
That change of perception fueled by personal experience is typical, Alexander said. Throughout his years in the legislature, he said he’s known lawmakers who — only in private — would tell him that they had relatives who had cancer and would use marijuana illegally to treat their pain or increase their appetite.
Publicly, though, it was a different story.
As states across the country legalize marijuana outright, or legalize it medically or decriminalize it, opponents are left to grapple with the fact that “the sky is not falling in Colorado, the sky hasn’t fallen in California or Washington state,” Alexander said.
With those examples to lean on, the issue has gained prominence in political circles where it had previously only seen daylight on the fringes.
Support from Mecklenburg
Marijuana reform has support from several Mecklenburg County lawmakers along with Alexander, including Sen. Jeff Jackson, Sen. Natasha Marcus and Sen. Mujtaba Mohammed.
In an email, Marcus said Senate Bill 711 was “very restrictive and could be better, but I understand we need a compromise that the conservatives can be comfortable supporting too.”
Mohammed agreed that the bill is restrictive, but said the fact that it has gotten serious consideration in the Senate is “very exciting” and “a long time coming.” One of his long term goals — decriminalization — would do more to impact the everyday lives of more people in his district, he said.
Between 2010 and 2018, Black people in North Carolina were 3.26 times as likely to get arrested for marijuana possession as white people, according to a report from the American Civil Liberties Union, even though a similar proportion of both groups report using marijuana regularly.
Decriminalization would make marijuana possession an infraction, not punishable by jail time and not something that would appear on a background check. (It would make possession, essentially, nothing more serious than a speeding ticket.)
“People in my district,” he said, “are significantly impacted by that. They really want to see that.”
Still, he said of this bill: “It’s a start.”
Memories of a colleague
Earlier this week, Alexander was reminded of a former colleague who had cancer. As the illness progressed, they told Alexander how the pain killers were impacting every aspect of their lives: their ability to think, to concentrate, to interact with people — even their ability to go to the bathroom.
“It was a whole litany of things that the opioids and other painkillers that were legal, that they were being prescribed, were doing to make the end of their life kind of a living hell,” he said. Marijuana “couldn’t have stopped the inevitable, but it could have made the progress along that path a lot more dignified.”
That colleague has since died. While other aspects of marijuana reform resonate with Alexander as well — racial disparities in law enforcement and potential tax benefits, for example — he reflects most emotionally on the people he’s known who have approached death through a fog of pain killers, with no other legal option available.
Those memories have made the opposition even more frustrating, particularly when dealing with what he called “misinformation” about the drug’s medicinal potential.
“Even though they were alive, they really weren’t present with you,” he said of some people using opioids as they neared the end of their lives. “They want to maintain clarity for as long as possible, and marijuana is a medication that allows them to do that. It allows a person to have as much dignity as humanly possible up to, essentially, the last moment of their lives.”
This story was originally published July 21, 2021 at 3:27 PM with the headline "His fight for marijuana reform started in the funeral home. Now, NC may do it. ."
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