Pubdate: Fri, 22 Jul 2011 Source: Morning Sun (Mt. Pleasant, MI) Copyright: 2011 Morning Sun Contact: http://www.themorningsun.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/3938 Author: Eric Baerren, Columnist, Morning Sun THE WAR ON DRUGS TAKES A TURN FOR THE SURREAL The War on Drugs has taken a turn for the surreal. Two turns, actually. For our first, we go to Midland County, where the prosecutor with the assistance of the state attorney general's office has picked up and run with a peculiar argument first advanced here in Isabella County by Larry Burdick. Markets, they are arguing, are created by act of government, not people. Their argument is that the medical marijuana law, ratified by two-thirds of voters two years ago, never intended to create marijuana dispensaries. In other words, when the people of this state legalized marijuana as a drug, we're supposed to believe that nobody expected that they'd need to buy it. We're supposed to believe that everyone expected that cancer patients and sufferers of other debilitating diseases would go out and gather the requisite supplies and seeds and grow it themselves. I'm not sure what is more shocking, that such an argument would be advanced by members of a political party that has made markets free from government intrusion its central plank, or that it would be advanced with a straight face. We hear all the time about the menace of centralized economic planning, that this kind of socialism undermines the very fabric of America. Here you have it, not being promoted by unions or Democrats or college professors with pointy heads, but by prosecutors arguing in favor of it in the courtroom. Carpenter, according to press reports, is using as his legal basis an opinion written by the same Bill Schuette whose office has joined his case (in addition to a Midland judge's opinion on the supremacy of federal law). In other words, the prosecutors in this case are trying to write their own laws and have them enacted not by the Legislature but in the courts. The end result they're looking for, I presume, is this: Medical marijuana is legal in this state, but obtaining it is so difficult that for all intents and purposes it is illegal. It's a case of government telling people, who've already made their opinion pretty clear on this, what's really in their best interests; and it would be downright comical if the prospects of prosecutorial nullification of a popularly-supported law weren't kind of scary. It goes without saying that government doesn't create markets, can't create markets and shouldn't be in the business of declaring this market good and this market bad. It also goes without saying that, in this case, a market for this product already exists. The problem is that if you're found in possession of it, you can get fined or go to jail. The law that our three fine lawyers are fighting lifted people with debilitating illness out of it. Not to be outdone, the Legislature has gotten into the act. Or, rather just Roger Kahn, the senator from Saginaw who represents Gratiot County. Kahn is a doctor, you see, and whenever Republicans in the Senate want to soft peddle horrible things on the medical front, they go through him. For instance, when Democrats tried to repeal Michigan's unique drug company immunity law, Kahn rose and delivered a gruesome depiction of what happens when cancer patients vomit blood. Earlier this week, Kahn introduced a bill that would require doctors who prescribe marijuana to be able to establish that they have a relationship with a patient. You might think that what goes on between you and a doctor is confidential. Roger Kahn's bill says that if your doctor concludes that you would benefit from medical marijuana that this isn't the case. The state wants to know whether you're a regular patient of that doctor, or whether you were maybe just out doctor shopping for weed. You don't want to minimize a potential problem of doctors too liberally prescribing marijuana. This kind of legislation, however, addresses that in a way that is deeply and personally invasive. We're also not talking about morphine here, but marijuana. There are lots of drugs that are much more powerful than that that are still easier to get. If I were a Tea Party type who wanted to talk about the evils of government control, I'd point to these two things and the War on Drugs in general, because both of them are nonsensical, unproductive attempts to smash a fly with a sledge hammer. You might think that an exaggeration. Well, think of what each of those things are at their core in the first, it's an attempt to redefine what constitutes a market, the central pillar of our free enterprise system; in the second, it's the idea that as long as we're trying to stamp out marijuana usage, it's okay to pry into people's medical records. This is all done for policy decisions made five decades ago that have proven to be utter failures at every level. The cost in terms of money since then is probably incalculable; the cost in terms of government intrusion into our lives is evident above. - --- MAP posted-by: Richard R Smith Jr.