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TIME HAS COME FOR MEDICINAL CANNABIS IN PA.

We want to take a moment to discuss the growing controversy in Pennsylvania over the legalization of cannabis for medicinal purposes, and all the human wreckage it could create.

So give us a minute to get into the right frame of mind with an Adderall, and a maybe a few Oxycodone along with a Percoset we stole from our buddy's mother's medicine cabinet after she had her knee replacement.

We trust you see where we're going with this.  The fact the legal medical cannabis represents a controversy defies all sense when we have so many problems with ease of access and subsequent abuse of narcotics cocktails.

But the state General Assembly seems more concerned with nitpicking.  According to WITF in Harrisburg, a Senate committee reacted skeptically to the notion during Tuesday hearing based on - wait for it - the lack of U.S.  research in a country that makes the drug difficult to research.

This is the kind of mindset that must change if we are to open a market for a drug that can help a lot people, a mindset that's already banished in 21 states and the District of Columbia.

Senate Bill 1182 -The Compassionate Use of Medical Cannabis Act - would create an oversight system within the Departments of Health and Agriculture under which a special strain of cannabis could be purchased and used from licensed care centers, according to a legislative memo circulated by state Sens.  Daylin Leach and Mike Folmer.  The cannabis itself would be high in Cannabidiols ( CBD ), its antiinflammatory and antioxidant components, and very low in Tetrahydrocannabinols ( THC ), the psychoactive component that gets you high.  It would be ingested and not smoked.  Oversight comes from your doctor, and the state officials charged with making sure the dispensed cannabis meets the statutory requirements for buzz-free efficacy.

That doesn't sound very recreational to us.  So much for love beads and Lava Lamps.

We'll just have to be merely satisfied with stopping seizures in children and easing the lives and treatments of diabetics, cancer patients and post-traumatic veterans.  It would also be nice to avoid forcing parents into choosing between criminal activity and relocation to more enlightened states to provide their sick children with a treatment that can help them.

This issue suffers from a disconnect between what people remember of their own experiences with marijuana, and the model presented in this legislation.  There's no feel-good munchies folk guitar happening here.  We're talking about sick people - some desperately, terminally so - getting access to something that can help them or, even better, helping them escape a black market that already allows them to do so.

It's humane and sensible and supported by a lot of people.  The entrenched opposition in our state government ought to consider what it means to do something positive for people they serve who could really use a break.