Pubdate: Thu, 24 Jan 2013
Source: Denver Post (CO)
Copyright: 2013 The Denver Post Corp
Contact:  http://www.denverpost.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/122
Author: Marie Myung-Ok Lee
Note: Marie Myung-Ok Lee is a novelist who teaches at Columbia and 
Brown universities. She wrote this for the Los Angeles Times.
Page: 19A

OVERKILL IN WAR ON POT

As a candidate in 2008, Barack Obama emphatically stated that medical 
marijuana use was an issue best left to the states. One of the first 
promises he made as the newly elected president was that he was "not 
going to be using Justice Department resources to try to circumvent 
state laws." This was even reiterated formally in the so-called Ogden 
memo of 2009, in which the Department of Justice instructed U.S. 
attorneys that federal enforcement should apply only to medical 
marijuana operations that were not in clear compliance with state law.

Obama has since "clarified" those promises, but it still makes no 
sense that Matthew R. Davies, a business school graduate who set out 
in 2009 to create a medical marijuana dispensary that would be in 
full compliance with California law, is facing up to 15 years in 
prison- with a mandatory five-year sentence.

This is just one more puzzling incident in the history of a president 
who not onlymade these promises but has also admitted to heavy 
recreational use of marijuana himself in his youth. As a second-term 
president, with little to lose, why is he continuing his odd campaign 
on a state-approved industry that employs people, pays taxes and 
distributes a safe and clinically useful product?

Lost in this fray is the fact that marijuana is medicine. My son is 
autistic and has an autoimmune gastrointestinal problem for which, at 
my suggestion, his doctor prescribed him Marinol (a synthetic THC 
drug). When that proved ineffective, the doctor agreed to prescribe 
medical cannabis, which is legal in Rhode Island where we were living 
and, unlike in some states, such as California, is approved for 
pediatric use. At the time, our son was eating his clothes.

Medical marijuana cured him. But it wasn't as easy as running out and 
buying him a joint. When we first considered cannabis, my husband and 
I made a decision not to procure it illegally. That was complicated 
because although medical marijuana was legal in Rhode Island at the 
time, dispensaries were not, and we needed information about what 
kind of marijuana might help our son.

There are hundreds of strains of cannabis, with varying clinical 
properties- anxiety relief, sleep promotion, analgesia, antinausea- 
and the ways they are processed also affect the way they work. I 
realize that some people use dispensaries to purchase cannabis for 
recreational use, but I can attest that the cannabis experts at the 
out-ofstate dispensaries we consulted were focused on the medical 
properties of the marijuana they sold. They shared their considerable 
knowledge to help us find the particular strain that cured our son's 
pica (the medical name for eating nonfood items). I keep a corduroy 
jacket with a half-nibbled sleeve as a reminder of that day.

Our doctor, who started out as a healthy skeptic, was so impressed 
and moved by our son's experience that he asked if I'd speak with 
another parent in a similar situation. This woman was desperate for 
help. Her son was even more destructive and aggressive than ours, and 
she had several children (we have one) and just didn't have the time 
and energy for the kind of trial-and-error experimentation we had 
done. If she'd had access to a good dispensary, things could have 
been different for her.

For a medical marijuana patient, a well run, reliable dispensary like 
Matthew Davies' should be a basic patient right. There is scientific 
consensus that cannabis has useful clinical benefits, and unlike 
synthetic pharmaceuticals, it has almost no toxicity.

An article in the Atlantic estimates that prosecuting Davies' 
dispensary is going to run more than $1 million, not to mention 
putting a man with two small children and no criminal record in 
prison for five to 15 years. The federal government has charged 
Davies with cultivating marijuana. It contends he "sought to make 
large profits," which, if true, might have put him out of compliance 
with California law. He has insisted he violated no state laws. 
Putting that issue aside, it is clear that he was operating 
transparently and attempting to stay within the law. Is he really the 
biggest threat federal law enforcers can find to prosecute?

According to Marijuana Policy Project estimates, there are more than 
1 million medical marijuana patients in the United States. An attack 
on state-approved dispensaries is an attack on patients. We would 
consider it inhumane to take away anti-nausea or pain medicine from a 
cancer patient. But when the administration raids dispensaries and 
destroys plants, that is exactly what it was doing.

So what is the lesson here? Smoke marijuana illegally, and you can 
become president. Try to provide a safe, consistent product that 
keeps the trade out of domestic and foreign drug cartels and brings 
in tax revenue, and face 15 years jail time.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom