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Fort Lauderdale Attorney Jim Lewis Wants to Make Us (Legal) Potheads!

Well maybe I'm not reading that quite right, but my eyes are a little puffy at the moment and I've still got some residuals from last night's Dylan concert:

Relatively unknown as a candidate in the race to become Florida?s next Attorney General, Fort Lauderdale attorney Jim Lewis has announced he?s calling for Florida to take a step beyond simply decriminalizing marijuana for medical use, saying in press release Tuesday that he will seek the legalization of marijuana (in what is widely considered to be the state that ranks number one for highly potent, indoor-grown pot) should he be elected.

Jim even has some "science" and stuff to support his wacky views:

He added that studies have shown marijuana isn?t physically addictive and there are no documented cases of people dying from marijuana abuse. ?I think some of the people using drugs like Oxycontin are using them because marijuana is illegal, and I think we?d be saving some lives,? he said.

A report by the Florida Medical Examiners Commission in July found that 5 percent of all deaths in 2009 were attributable to prescription drug use, far outnumbering those caused by illegal substances, and that Oxycodone, the generic version of the Purdue Pharma brand name prescription pain-killer OxyContin, was the cause of 1,185 state deaths in 2009, a 26-percent increase from the year before and a whopping 249-percent increase from 2005.

What say you, dashing Dan Gelber or "law and order" Pam Bondi?

Guess we can ask them both at the DCBA luncheon tomorrow (btw, what happened to Jim's invite?)

Full post as published by South Florida Lawyers on October 07, 2010 (boomark / email).