Pubdate: Mon, 21 May 2001
Source: National Journal (US)
Copyright: 2001 National Journal Group Inc
Address: 1501 M St., NW #300, Washington, DC 20005
Contact:  http://nationaljournal.com/njweekly/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1172
Author: Stuart Taylor Jr

MEDICAL MARIJUANA AND THE FOLLY OF THE DRUG WAR

The Supreme Court delivered a timely reminder of the social costs of 
our "war on drugs" with its May 14 decision rejecting a 
medical-necessity exception to the federal law criminalizing 
marijuana.

Meanwhile, President Bush has moved toward abandoning his own best 
instincts and repeating his predecessors' mistakes by endlessly 
escalating a $20 billion-a-year "war" that -- as most Americans now 
understand -- we have lost.

The most obvious proof that marijuana alleviates some patients' pain 
is that so many of them say so.

In the face of overwhelming evidence that tens of thousands of 
patients suffering from cancer, AIDS, and other serious illnesses can 
greatly alleviate their pain, and even extend their lives, by smoking 
marijuana, the Court held that Congress had allowed no room for a 
medical exception to the law making it a crime to distribute 
marijuana or even to possess it for personal use. This means that a 
doctor could be sent to prison for giving -- perhaps even for 
recommending -- marijuana to a terminal cancer patient whose pain and 
nausea cannot otherwise be relieved.

The cancer patient could be sent to prison, too, although such 
prosecutions seem unlikely, in part because most jurors would simply 
refuse to convict.

The Justices were correct.

Congress specified in 1970 that marijuana had no "currently accepted 
medical use" -- at least, none that Congress was prepared to accept.

In cases brought by the federal government, this congressional ban 
overrides the laws of California and the eight other states that have 
exempted medical marijuana from their own state anti-drug statutes. 
The Supreme Court neither agreed nor disagreed with Congress, but 
rather deferred to an enactment that it had no power to revise -- an 
enactment that inflicts needless suffering and ought to be revised by 
Congress.

The most obvious proof that marijuana alleviates some patients' pain 
is that so many of them say so. When a patient racked by agonizing 
pain says, "I feel much better after smoking marijuana," who is 
Congress to say otherwise? For those who need expert assurances, 
plenty exist. "A small but significant number of seriously ill 
patients who suffer from cancer, HIV/AIDS, multiple sclerosis, 
epilepsy, or other conditions do not benefit from, or cannot 
tolerate, the leading or conventional therapies," the American Public 
Health Association and others said in an amicus brief. "Some... have 
found cannabis to be effective at alleviating symptoms of their 
condition or side effects of their treatment.... [It] can mean the 
difference between life and death or relative health and severe 
harm." Marijuana is also safer, less addictive, less subject to 
abuse, and less likely to have bad side effects than many legal pain 
relievers and prescription medications. The U.S. Institute of 
Medicine (a National Academy of Sciences affiliate), the California 
Medical Association, and Britain's House of Lords have all given 
guarded approval to carefully monitored marijuana smoking as a 
therapy for certain patients.

Indeed, no serious analyst could doubt that marijuana alleviates some 
patients' sufferings. Serious drug warriors' real concern is that 
"state initiatives promoting 'medical marijuana' are little more than 
thinly veiled legalization efforts," as William J. Bennett, the first 
President Bush's drug czar, said in a May 15 Wall Street Journal 
op-ed. There is some truth to this. Many medical-marijuana champions 
do have such an agenda: Some exaggerate the medical benefits, and the 
1996 ballot referendum in which California's voters became the first 
to approve marijuana for medical use was so loosely drafted as to 
leave room for recreational users to concoct bogus medical excuses.

But most advocates of a less-punitive approach to drug policy are 
unpersuaded (at least so far) by the advocates of legalization -- a 
group that includes such prominent conservatives as Milton Friedman, 
George Shultz, and William F. Buckley Jr. And Congress could easily 
legalize medical marijuana only for patients with certain severe 
illnesses without vitiating the criminal sanctions for all other 
sellers and users.

Why do hard-line drug warriors fight even that idea? Apparently out 
of fear that it would muddy the message they want to send to people 
like my teenagers. The message, in Bennett's words, is that "drug use 
is dangerous and immoral."

Much as I respect Bennett, I take that personally. I smoked some 
marijuana myself in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when it was hard 
to go to a party without being offered a puff of the stuff. (Unlike 
President Clinton, I inhaled.) Most of my peers seemed to smoke more 
than I did. They also seemed less dangerous when smoking than when 
drinking.

Were we all immoral?

Were our parents or grandparents immoral when they drank bootlegged 
liquor during Prohibition? Is having too many beers immoral? Was 
President Bush immoral when he did whatever it was that he did when 
he was "young and irresponsible"? When he drank too much? When he 
drove drunk?

Like Bennett, I hope that my teenagers will shun illegal drugs.

But I don't tell them that marijuana would be immoral or dangerous to 
their health, because I don't believe that. The danger, I tell them, 
is that using any illegal drug could leave them with criminal records 
or land them in jail.

Bush and some of his advisers have said some vaguely encouraging 
things about drug policy. "Maybe long minimum sentences for the 
first-time users may not be the best way to occupy jail space and/or 
heal people from their disease," Bush mused on January 18. But on May 
10, he named as his drug czar former Bennett deputy John P. Walters, 
who immediately stressed that he wants "to escalate the drug war." 
Like Attorney General John D. Ashcroft, he has pushed the cruel and 
futile policy of imprisoning small-time participants in drug deals -- 
many or most of them nonviolent -- by the hundreds of thousands.

Walters has also displayed a special relish for sending the military 
into Latin America to help friendly regimes chase cocaine growers and 
suppliers -- notwithstanding such collateral damage as the April 20 
deaths of an American missionary and her daughter in a small plane 
that a Peruvian fighter mistakenly shot down.

Walters revealed his mind-set in 1996, when he assailed the Clinton 
Administration's emphasis on drug treatment for hard-core addicts as 
"the latest manifestation of the liberals' commitment to a 
'therapeutic state' in which government serves as the agent of 
personal rehabilitation." In fact, treatment programs have proven 
more effective on a dollar-for-dollar basis than criminal sanctions 
- -- although many addicts cannot get access to treatment unless they 
first get themselves arrested.

In his Wall Street Journal op-ed, Bennett argued that the Reagan and 
(first) Bush Administrations had been winning the war on drugs until 
the Clinton Administration took over with a policy of "malign 
neglect." He stressed that between 1979 and 1992, "the rate of 
illegal drug use dropped by more than half, while marijuana use 
decreased by two-thirds." Then, Bennett noted, the rate began to 
climb again, especially among teens.

But critics counter that such surveys of drug use are inherently 
volatile and unreliable. "In 1979, almost anybody would tell a 
surveyor that they smoked marijuana," says Ethan A. Nadelmann, head 
of the Lindesmith Center-Drug Policy Foundation; by 1992, drug use 
had become legally risky and socially stigmatized. And Bennett's 
depiction of President Clinton as soft on drugs does not withstand 
scrutiny.

While Clinton Administration officials softened the "war" rhetoric by 
speaking of drug abuse as a "cancer" and slashed the budget of the 
drug czar's office, they protected their political backsides by 
increasing overall spending on drug enforcement and interdiction. 
They also outdid even Republicans in supporting savagely severe 
mandatory minimum prison sentences for (among others) minor, 
first-time, nonviolent drug offenders.

More fundamental, the surveys cited by Bennett are a less-valid 
window into the costs and benefits of the drug war than some other 
facts: the nearly 500,000 drug offenders now behind bars -- many of 
them first-timers nailed for mere possession -- which is a tenfold 
increase since 1980; the death toll from HIV infections and drug 
overdoses that could have been prevented by public health measures 
such as needle-exchange programs, which Bennett and Walters condemn; 
the crack epidemic that ravaged inner cities from the mid-1980s into 
the early 1990s; the undiminished hard-core abuse of cocaine, heroin, 
and other hard drugs, which have fallen steadily in price since 1980, 
and to which some users have turned as the price of marijuana -- 
bulkier, smellier, harder to smuggle -- has gone up; the gang 
warfare; the police corruption; the racial profiling; the invasions 
of privacy.

These and other harms inflicted on America by the drug war -- 
especially in black neighborhoods, where families have been decimated 
by drug-related incarceration -- dwarf the importance of the 
fluctuations in pot smoking among middle-class teenagers that so 
interest Bennett. Ninety-nine percent of them will never be serious 
drug abusers.

Nixon went to China. Bush should go to a commonsense drug policy that 
might actually work. It's not too late.

Stuart Taylor Jr. is a senior writer for National Journal magazine, 
where "Opening Argument" appears.
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MAP posted-by: Josh Sutcliffe