Getting ready to speak to the Nebraska Medical Cannabis Commission Monday, I went looking for my own condition on whatever list decides who this law is for. There is no list. That changed what I planned to say, and it's the reason this post exists before I've said a word in that room.
I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1998. My wife lives with diabetes. Preparing my three minutes for Monday's public comment, I checked whether either condition was actually covered by Nebraska's medical cannabis law — the kind of homework this whole site exists to do before publishing a claim, applied to my own life this time.
Most states that legalize medical cannabis print a list of qualifying diseases. Nebraska's voters didn't write one, and a 2025 bill to add one — a 15-condition list from the Nebraska Medical Association — failed by ten votes and died. The actual statute just asks a licensed practitioner to judge, in writing, whether cannabis's benefit outweighs its harm for a patient's condition. Full writeup, with the statute quoted directly and the bill's whole history: Who Actually Qualifies for Medical Cannabis?
Neither MS nor diabetes was ever named on that failed 15-condition list either. Not targeted — just never mentioned, same as under the law that's actually in effect today.
It would have been a cleaner story if the law shut us out — a wrong to point at, a fix to demand. It doesn't. What's missing instead is a working path: a practitioner willing to sign, and a supply chain that, as of the Commission's own August minutes, still has nothing on a Nebraska shelf for that signature to reach. That's a slower, less dramatic problem than an unfair rule, and it's the true one.
So the three minutes I plan to read Monday don't ask the Commission to change anything about medical cannabis. They ask for one number, or an honest admission that nobody's counting it — how many Nebraskans actually hold a valid recommendation. Not a verdict. A count.
"So here is my plea, not a question. I am asking you plainly: if this Commission has ever counted how many Nebraskans hold a valid practitioner recommendation, or how many practitioners have written one, please publish that number where every one of us can see it. And if no one is counting, please say that too — because that is still the truth, and the truth is all any of us is asking for."
"It's a puzzle, it's a riddle, I'm just playing the fiddle" — that's how it started feeling once I'd said the plea out loud a few times. Not a complaint. Just what asking a government for a plain fact actually feels like from the outside. So it became a poem too.
What would it take
for a number to be no more than a number?
Not a verdict. Not a victory.
Just the truth, on a page,
where a Nebraskan can go and look.
What would it take
for someone to count
how many hands finally got
what seventy-one percent of us
asked for in November?
If the count exists — publish it.
If it doesn't — say that too.
Either one is the truth,
and the truth was the whole ask,
from the start.
We the People of Nebraska
are not asking you to decide anything today.
We are asking you to tell us
what you already know,
or admit that nobody does.
That is what it would take.
A number, or an honest zero.
Nothing more. Nothing less.
This page has been about one meeting, one plea, one number. The reason any of it is worth writing down is bigger than that room. We all have a voice. Use it. Write the letter, show up, ask the plain question in public and put your name on it. And if you don't like what you see once you've looked — that's what the vote is for.
Nothing below this line exists yet, on purpose. This post was written and published before the meeting, same as the questions post that came before it. What actually happens Monday — whether the plea gets read, what the Commission says back, whether a number ever gets published — is a separate, later entry, dated the day it's true.