Pubdate: Wed, 16 May 2001
Source: Sacramento Bee (CA)
Copyright: 2001 The Sacramento Bee
Contact:  http://www.sacbee.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/376
Author: Peter Schrag
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/ocbc.htm (Oakland Cannabis Court Case)

THE SUPREMES' POT DECISION -- WHO CAN ENFORCE IT?

There were no great surprises in Monday's Supreme Court ruling 
allowing the government to shut down organizations that invoked a 
medical necessity defense in distributing marijuana. Federal law, 
which regards marijuana as a dangerous and medically useless 
substance, allows no exceptions other than research.

But the decision doesn't appear to invalidate the medical marijuana 
laws, among them California's Proposition 215, which are now on the 
books in nine (mostly Western) states, much less close the growing 
gap between voters and federal drug policy. It merely shifts the 
battle into other arenas.

Justice Clarence Thomas, who wrote the decision, may not believe in 
the medical necessity defense, but if any federal prosecutor chooses 
to follow him, he may have a hard time finding many sympathetic 
juries.

If anything the court decision, combined with the recent nomination 
of John Walters, a hard-line conservative, as the nation's new drug 
czar, can only intensify the battle between a federal government 
committed to a $20 billion "drug war" emphasizing crop eradication 
abroad, interdiction at the border and prosecution at home, and 
voters who see that war as a costly failure and favor much greater 
emphasis on treatment. Call it the left-wing sagebrush rebellion.

The rebellion has been spreading ever since California and Arizona 
passed their medical marijuana initiatives back in 1996. Since then, 
similar laws have been approved by voters in Washington, Oregon, 
Alaska, Nevada, Colorado and Maine and by the Legislature in Hawaii. 
All told, one of every five Americans now lives in a place where 
state laws allow patients with serious illnesses -- cancer, glaucoma, 
AIDS, multiple sclerosis -- to relieve their symptoms or the side 
effects of treatment by smoking marijuana.

In addition, drug-law reformers, backed by billionaire financier 
George Soros and other deep pockets, have also successfully pushed 
through asset forfeiture reforms in Utah and Nevada; bills 
authorizing over-the-counter needle sales in a number of other 
states; and, perhaps the biggest of them all, California's 
Proposition 36, which requires treatment instead of prison for those 
convicted of nonviolent possession of all illegal drugs.

But with the Supreme Court's decision Monday, probably the biggest 
battlegrounds -- and certainly the most intriguing -- will be the 
distribution systems in the states that have enacted those medical 
marijuana laws. In Oregon, Alaska and Hawaii, the state operates a 
registration system of patients with a certified medical need for 
marijuana. A similar bill, SB 187 by Sen. John Vasconcellos, backed 
by the state District Attorneys Association and the state Sheriffs 
Association, is pending in the California Senate.

In each case the registration and distribution systems reflect 
attempts by both drug law reformers and law enforcement to create 
order out of what could otherwise be -- and often already is -- a 
chaotic legal situation, with state law appearing to allow what 
federal law absolutely forbids. Absent congressional action, this 
week's Supreme Court decision, though sound on legal grounds, makes 
such order still harder to achieve.

In Nevada, the Legislature has been debating a measure that would put 
the state itself in the business of growing and distributing the 
marijuana. That move, prompted by language in the initiative that 
Nevada voters approved last November, is not entirely unprecedented: 
In what may be the ultimate irony, the federal government itself 
grows pot, and makes it into cigarettes that it distributes to a 
residual list of eight patients under its Compassionate IND 
(Investigative New Drug) Program.

The program was created to settle a civil suit filed (in 1976) by 
Robert Randall, a glaucoma patient who had been prosecuted -- and 
acquitted on medical necessity grounds. He argued that the government 
left him no choice between a criminal act and the certain prospect of 
blindness. Some 34 others were admitted to the program before the 
feds, fearing it would get swamped (mostly by a new generation of 
AIDS patients) shut it down to new cases. Randall is among the eight 
who still survive. Each month, the government sends a tin of 300 
marijuana cigarettes to a pharmacy near where each of them lives.

The Randall story is just one episode in a long history of official 
ambivalence and hypocrisy about marijuana. Two years ago, the U.S. 
Institute of Medicine, following an extensive review of research, 
issued an official administration-sponsored report, "Marijuana and 
Medicine," that's quoted by both sides in the debate.

"Because of the health risks associated with smoking, smoked 
marijuana should generally not be recommended for long-term medical 
use," it concluded. "Nonetheless, for certain patients, such as the 
terminally ill or those with debilitating symptoms, the long-term 
risks are not of great concern." It then defines the conditions under 
which marijuana may be medically used.

But in Washington, law enforcement still speaks louder than any 
medical approach. This week's court decision, combined with the 
appointment of Walters, indicates that despite the current of drug 
law reform running through the states, the feds remain almost as 
rigid as ever.
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MAP posted-by: Josh Sutcliffe