IN their continuing fight to maintain the criminalization of the use of marijuana by sick and dying patients, opponents have called medical marijuana a ``cruel and dangerous hoax'' and said it has no medical value. If marijuana truly is ``Cheech and Chong medicine'' that has no value, why are tens of thousands of patients risking their freedom to use it? And why are federal bureaucrats, not medical professionals, even deciding this issue? By prohibiting doctors from prescribing marijuana, the government has forced patients to choose between two horrible possibilities: Suffer in pain or risk arrest by breaking the law to get their medicine from the black market. [continues 178 words]
While the federal government is doing everything in its power to deny medical marijuana to sick and dying people, apparently to send the ``right message to our children,'' politicians and the media are guilty of a cultivated historical and cultural amnesia! The DEA's own law judge, Francis L. Young, concluded in 1988 that ``marijuana, in its natural form, is one of the safest therapeutically active substances known to man . . . One must reasonably conclude that there is accepted safety for use of marijuana under medical supervision. To conlude otherwise, on the record, would be unreasonable, arbitrary, and capricious.'' [continues 89 words]
Alcohol prohibition was repealed after 12 years because it perversely made social conditions worse without stopping the ``wet crowd.'' Organized crime, violence, more dangerous adulterated substances and the absence of age restrictions inevitably occur in illicit markets. Clinton calls for more money, claiming that this time it will really work, but as President Carter said in regard to marijuana prohibition, the cure is worse than the disease. In 1988, Congress passed a resolution to attain a ``drug-free'' society by 1995! General McCaffrey is right to call Gingrich irresponsible; he is being completely irresponsible by choosing rhetoric over reality and selective moralism over pragmatism. Wake up, Capitol Hill! JOSHUA M. SINOWAY Santa Cruz [end]
