Not at all---what's difficult to defend is Walters' claim that "sick and dying people are being used as a political prop to legalize marijuana", which is no more true of marijuana than of Oxycontin.
Sick and dying people ARE being used as a political prop to legalize marijuana. To wit:
Richard Cowen, 1993 director of NORML ( excerpted from a speech given at a conference celebrating the 50th Anniversary of the Discovery of LSD): "The key to it (full legalization) is medical access. Because, once you have hundreds of thousands of people using marijuana medically, under medical supervision, the whole scam is going to be blown. I mean what we know is that marijuana prohibition is the greatest fraud ever perpetrated on the American people...
The consensus here is that medical marijuana is our strongest suit. It is our point of leverage which will move us toward the legalization of marijuana for personal use, and in that process we will begin to break down the power of the narcocracy to wage a war of terror over things.
And so I think that we have the beginning with medical marijuana, then the legalization of personal use, and then we are in a position to take on the narcocracy on all of its abuses across the board, including obviously LSD and the psychedelics and the inhumane treatment of hard drug addicts as well."
Keith Stroup, 1979 director of NORML, told Emory University students that "NORML would help reclassify marijuana as medicine for chemotherapy patients "as a red herring to give marijuana a good name."
Kevin Zeese, President of Common Sense for Drug Policy, co-founder of the Drug Policy Foundation (which he has described as the "elite of the counterculture"), former Executive Director and Chief Counsel of NORML, has stated "the legalization question is not really a question open to political debate at this point in real political terms. And we've gotta be looking at issues we have today that can be won. The medical marijuana issue, no doubt, is one."