# Where I Stand on Medical Freedom, Public Health, and Food Integrity _A family court case brought my son to Rapid City in 2018, and I followed him here. I bought a house, built a business, and lived through the COVID years in this town, same as you. I remember what those years did to the kitchen table._ By Zac Martin. Published 2026-06-13. Canonical URL: https://zac4sd.com/blog/medical-freedom-food-integrity Platform pillar: I. Medical Freedom, Public Health, and Food Integrity A family court case brought my son to Rapid City in 2018, and I followed him here. I bought a house, built a business, and lived through the COVID years in this town, same as you. I remember what those years did to the kitchen table. The most personal decisions a family makes, decisions about our own bodies and our own kids, started arriving from somewhere else. From an agency. From an employer reading a federal memo. From people nobody in Rapid City ever voted for. Folks in this town faced a choice between a medical procedure they did not want and a paycheck they needed. Nurses who carried us through the worst of 2020 were told a year later that their own medical judgment no longer counted. Whatever your family decided in those years, the question underneath was the same: who owns your body, you or the state? And this is not only about medicine. Drive a few minutes out of downtown in any direction and you are in cattle country. Beef in this district is a neighbor's livelihood and a family's dinner. When protein grown in a stainless steel tank can slide into the meat case wearing the same name as a steer raised on grass, that is not innovation. That is a con aimed at your grocery cart. I am not running to relitigate 2020. I am running to make sure South Dakota never repeats it, and to make sure the food on your table is exactly what the label says it is. ## One sentence, five commitments My whole position fits in one sentence: the body is the citizen's, not the state's. Everything else follows from it. If District 32 sends me to Pierre, here is what I will fight for: 1. **Oppose every form of medical mandate.** Not some forms. Every form. No medical intervention forced on a South Dakotan as the price of a job, an education, or a normal life. 2. **Protect medical conscience for doctors, nurses, and pharmacists.** Nobody in this state should have to choose between a license and a conviction. 3. **Classify lab-grown protein as adulterated, not meat.** If it came out of a tank, it does not wear the name that ranch families spent generations earning. 4. **Take soft drinks out of SNAP.** A nutrition program should buy nutrition. 5. **Strengthen medical marijuana with real doctor-patient requirements.** The voters created this program. Make it serve real patients the way a medical program should. ## The strongest objections, answered straight Five positions, five fights. These draw fire from every direction, and the questions deserve honest answers, not talking points. Here are the hardest ones I hear. ### "What about the next pandemic?" Public health is a real job, and the state has a real role in it: gather honest information, share it fast, and trust free people to act on it. What the state must never do is force medicine on a citizen as the price of a job, a classroom, or a normal life. We tried coercion. It did not build confidence in public health. It burned trust to the ground, and broken trust is the deadliest public health outcome there is. A government that levels with its people gets cooperation. A government that strong-arms them gets resistance, and earns it. ### "Conscience protection sounds like permission to deny care." Look at what it actually protects: a doctor, nurse, or pharmacist who cannot, in good conscience, perform or provide a particular thing. Forcing that person does not create more care. It drives good people out of medicine, and ask anyone who has waited months for an appointment whether this state has providers to spare. Patients stay free to choose their providers. Providers keep their conscience. That is how a free state handles deep disagreement: nobody gets conscripted. The same principle that protects your medical decisions protects the people in the white coats. ### "You call yourself a free-market conservative. Why is government in the meat case?" Because markets run on honest labels. Meat is an animal, raised on land, by somebody, and around Rapid City that somebody is often your neighbor. A product grown in a stainless steel tank is something else. When it sells under the rancher's word, the label is lying, and a lying label is not competition. It is fraud. Classifying lab-grown protein as adulterated keeps it from entering our food supply dressed up as somebody else's work. Sell what you want. Call it what it is. ### "Soda out of SNAP, but the body belongs to the citizen? Pick a lane." This is the objection I respect most, so it gets the straightest answer. Medical freedom is about what the state may force on your body. The answer is nothing. SNAP is about what taxpayers fund, and that is a different question. Nobody is banning soda. Buy any drink you want with your own money, and I will defend your right to do it. But SNAP has Nutrition as its middle name, and it exists to help families put real food on the table. Soft drinks are not nutrition. Declining to fund something is not force. A definition of freedom that cannot tell coercion from a grocery line item is not a principle. It is a slogan. ### "The marijuana plank is a backdoor repeal." It is the opposite. South Dakota voters approved medical marijuana in 2020, and I respect that vote, period. But a medical program earns the word medical through a real doctor, a real patient, and a real relationship between the two. Strengthening those requirements protects the sick people the program was passed for, and it protects the program itself from the abuse that would turn it into a punchline. The fastest way to lose medical marijuana is to let it lose its integrity. I will not let it be gutted, and I will not let it rot. ## The ask District 32 is the heart of Rapid City: downtown and North Rapid. On November 3, 2026, it sends two representatives to Pierre, and both of those seats should answer to your kitchen table, not to a party office or a lobbyist's spreadsheet. I am a dad, a businessman, and a community advocate with a Juris Doctor. For the last two legislative sessions I have been at the Capitol fighting to pass legislation for South Dakota families, so I know the difference between a politician's promise and a position written down where you can check it. Everything above is written down. Read the full platform at zac4sd.com. If it sounds like your kitchen table, donate or volunteer while you are there. --- Paid for by Zac Martin for South Dakota.