Pubdate: Tue, 03 Apr 2001
Source: Washington Times (DC)
Copyright: 2001 News World Communications, Inc.
Contact:  http://www.washtimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/492
Author: Don Feder
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/mmj.htm (Cannabis - Medicinal)

RX THE COURTS SHOULD CANCEL

If marijuana is medicine, Dr. Jack Kevorkian wrote the prescription. Last 
week, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in United States of America 
vs. Oakland Cannabis Buyers Cooperative. At issue is whether the nation's 
drug laws can be nullified for so-called medical necessity. The court could 
go further and decide that state laws legalizing pot for medical purposes 
are unconstitutional because drug policy is an area pre-empted by federal law.

California is one of eight states whose citizens decided they were 
competent to make scientific judgments. In 1996, voters passed Proposition 
215, allowing anyone to treat himself with a joint for any illness, on a 
physician's recommendation.

The initiative was heavily funded with out-of-state money. (Three 
individuals alone contributed more than $600,000.) After the question 
passed, its author told an interviewer that everyone who smokes pot is 
"self-medicating," thus all marijuana use is medicinal. Calling Dr. Cheech. 
Calling Dr. Chong.

Medical marijuana is the compassion cover for legalization. Ethan 
Nadelmann, a spokesman for George Soros (a billionaire backer of the 
California initiative) has stated, "Ultimately our drug policy should be 
based upon one very simple notion: that people should not be discriminated 
against based upon the substance they consume."

An article in Proceedings of the Association of American Physicians 
observes, "Most supporters of medical marijuana are hostile to the use of 
purified chemicals from marijuana, insisting that only smoked marijuana 
leaves be used as 'medicine,' revealing clearly that their motivation is 
not scientific medicine but backdoor legalization."

There are more than 400 chemicals in raw marijuana; most have never been 
analyzed. Its potency can vary greatly from batch to batch.

Marijuana is a narcotic. According to the Drug Abuse Warning Network, 
marijuana use accounted for 87,150 emergency-room admissions in 1999, up 
455 percent from a decade earlier. Longtime users (who spend an estimated 
27 percent of their income on the drug) suffer withdrawal symptoms and 
usually need some type of therapy to stop.

Medical marijuana is a way to persuade the public that pot is benign. It's 
also great for getting kids hooked. If adults tell them that marijuana 
helps cancer patients, how bad can it be? "Just say no to medicine" is not 
an effective slogan.

An increase in juvenile pot use has coincided with the medical marijuana 
campaign. The number of eighth-graders who'd used marijuana at least once 
went from 10.2 percent in 1991 to 20.3 percent in 2000.

Former Health, Education and Welfare Secretary Joseph Califano (with the 
National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse) reports, "12- to 
17-year-olds who smoke marijuana are 85 times more likely to use cocaine 
than those who don't."

The drug lobby counters that most causal users never progress to harder 
drugs. But when an adolescent becomes used to the effects of marijuana, 
many are prepared, physically and psychologically, to seek a more intense high.

Ginger Katz of Norwalk, Conn., understands this all too well. Several years 
ago, her son called from college. "Crying, he told his father he'd been 
snorting heroin for four months and couldn't stop," Mrs. Katz relates. " 
'Please come and help me,' he said."

His family did. There was rehab and outpatient programs. But there were 
also relapses. Several months later, Ian Katz died of an overdose at age 
20. He started smoking pot when he was 13.

Today, Ginger is the head of Courage to Speak, composed of individuals who 
have lost a loved one to drugs. On Wednesday, she held a picture of Ian in 
a silent vigil outside the Supreme Court building.

"People underestimate marijuana. I don't," Mrs. Katz says. "The condoning 
of this gives a message to young people that it's OK. You're defeating all 
of the good anti-drug programs out there."

A ruling is expected in June. In their questions, the justices seemed 
suitably skeptical. Justice Anthony Kennedy disagreed that medical 
marijuana was a narrow exception to the federal Controlled Substances Act. 
"That's a huge rewrite of the statute," Justice Kennedy commented. The huge 
rewrite is also a deadly prescription.
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