Dr. Dan K. Morhaim’s decision not to seek re-election for a seventh term in the House of Delegates for the 11th District is a loss to the state legislature and to compassionate approaches to health care.
In his quarter-century in Annapolis, where he’s represented Pikesville and Owings Mills, Morhaim has helped pass a bunch of health care legislation – and stumbled once, when he failed to disclose his work as a consultant for a company trying to open a medical marijuana dispensary in Maryland.
His colleagues reprimanded him for that – even as many of them knew the humanitarian instinct that had simultaneously prompted Morhaim to back legislation making marijuana available for medicinal purposes.
“My commitment to social change continues,” Morhaim, 69, said in a Facebook post on Sunday, “and I will be pursuing new opportunities to make a difference in the fields of health care and the environment.”
He’ll leave the House as the longest serving physician in the history of the General Assembly. He also leaves behind some gestures of common sense and compassion, which were tied to his medical work.
For years, Morhaim remembered an old man in the emergency room at Sinai Hospital who was fighting cancer. The man kept trying to describe the nausea that accompanied treatment, trying to get Morhaim to understand, until he finally said, “I get these waves of nausea that are so bad, and a couple of puffs of marijuana take it away. And I just want you to know that.”
“He was trying to get something across to me,” Morhaim remembered one day several years ago, “but he didn’t want to just say, ‘Hey, Doc, I smoke marijuana.’ Even in that state of sickness, with his dehydration and his nausea, he had to be careful how he said it. And that was real motivating for me.”
It motivated Morhaim to introduce a bill lessening penalties for seriously ill patients who use marijuana for medicinal purposes. It was one of the earlier gestures across the country to ease such penalties.
“This isn’t about opening the door to marijuana abuse,” Morhaim said at the time. “This is a rational way to deal with drug laws, and to give sick people some relief.”
And it was about remembering an old man in an emergency room, struggling to tell how he found that relief without putting himself into prison.
Morhaim also authored a book, “The Better End,” published by the Johns Hopkins University Press, a common-sense offering written in a gentle bedside manner to help guide the dying and their families through some of the mysteries they face at the end of a life.
A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books. His most recent, “Front Stoops in the Fifties: Baltimore Legends Come of Age,” has just been re-issued in paperback by the Johns Hopkins University Press.
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