Dan Viets

Jefferson City - A prominent attorney in the effort to legalize marijuana filed the paperwork for a statewide ballot issue to legalize marijuana.

Columbia Attorney Dan Viets said he has represented dozens of clients who had been charged with using marijuana for various medical conditions.

Viets said the ballot issue proposal would limit to doctors the power to prescribe marijuana when medical conditions warrant.

"Right now under Missouri law, doctors can prescribe hundreds of dangerous and addictive, deadly drugs," Viets said. "No one has ever died from cannabis. And that's not true of aspirin. That's not true of most pharmaceutical medications."

Endorsing the petition campaign is the former head of the Missouri Veterans of Foreign Wars.

Tom Mundell told reporters in Jefferson City about how he had seen marijuana help veterans overcome the horrors of war.

"They had found that this was the Holy Grail to them; that they had found something that had relaxed them, that had actually started an inner healing," Mundell said.

The measure would earmark for veterans programs tax revenue generated medical marijuana sales.

Also speaking at the announcement was a Columbia registered nurse who said marijuana had helped her deal with chemotherapy for breast cancer.

In an effort to ease the effects of chemo, which she called the worse experience in her life, she chose to try what she had heard from patients -- smoke marijuana.

"I could not believe how it it helped with my nausia, helped with my appetite and it helped clear my head from all the of chemicals the doctors were shoving in there and I'm not talking about the chemo. I'm talking about the psychiatric drugs that they gave me because I was depressed," said Sheila Dundon. "Anyone who has a cancer diagnosis, has two surgeries, chemotherapy and radiation is going to be depressed. So drugs don't take care of everything."

If supporters gather enough signatures -- about 160,000 -- the proposed constitutional amendment would appear on the November 2016 ballot. As a constitutional amendment rather than a change in law, a higher percentage of signatures from six of Missouri's congressional districts is required.

If approved, Missouri would join 23 other states that have legalized marijuana for medical treatment.