JUST SAY YES: LEGALIZING MARIJUANA WOULD BENEFIT MANY

Just one month ago, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously to ax yet
another proposal to legalize medicinal marijuana, with Justice Clarence
Thomas boldly stating that the plant has no valid medicinal uses; at the
American Medical Association's annual policy-setting meeting in Chicago
last week, the AMA was urged by one of its own committees to support the
"compassionate use" of the drug. Hopefully, the AMA will adopt this
proposal, thus lending some credibility to the many patients who've found
it helpful.

Lawmakers in Canada are well on their way to decriminalizing the wacky
weed. Terminally ill patients all over the country are able to live more
comfortably by smoking a bit of illegal pot. Public support is growing
faster than cannabis in a closet.

It's time for the U.S. government to get off its high -- or rather,
decidedly not high -- horse and legalize marijuana.

So far, all the federal government has done is spout rhetoric about
marijuana: Their propaganda tells us that it is dangerous, often laced with
deadly substances and leads inevitably to hard drug use. They ignore the
facts that legalization and minimal regulations would nearly destroy the
possibility of accidentally purchasing spiked marijuana and that just
because many hard-drug users also use or once used marijuana doesn't mean
that most marijuana users move on to harder drugs.

In fact, most of them don't.

First, marijuana appears to be less harmful than some other legal drugs.
Unlike the nicotine found in cigarettes, THC, the active chemical in
marijuana, has never been proven to be physically addictive.

While the alcohol found in beer, wine and other such beverages has caused
many deaths-by-overdose, there have been no documented cases of fatal
marijuana overdoses. It makes little sense that these proven-harmful
substances remain legal and widely advertised while marijuana is illegal
and condemned.

Secondly, contrary to the opinion of Justice Thomas, evidence suggests that
marijuana does have valid medicinal applications. It has enabled many
cancer patients ravaged by chemotherapy and AIDS patients on numerous
nauseating medications to eat again, preventing their weakened bodies from
consuming themselves. It has been used to ease the pains of quadriplegia,
to soothe the seizures of epilepsy and the pain of multiple sclerosis.
People unfortunate enough to be stricken with terminal diseases should not
also be denied their sole relief or sent to jail for trying to lessen this
pain through marijuana use.

This brings us to the next contentions in the case for legalization:
Possession arrests and prison overcrowding. About 85 percent of
marijuana-related arrests are possession arrests.

Every day, law enforcement officials waste their time and our tax dollars
by arresting people merely for possessing the drug. Additionally, U.S.
prisons are just teeming with marijuana offenders, people who have never
done anything to harm anyone else. If marijuana was decriminalized and
these "offenders" set free, there would be more space in our prisons for
dangerous, violent criminals (e.g. rapists, child molesters, murderers,
etc.) who pose an actual threat to society.

The public may never know why the federal government is so insistent about
keeping pot illegal, why it insists upon wasting its scarce prison space on
creatures as harmless as marijuana smokers or why it refuses to acknowledge
the plant's potential benefits.

At least, not until some prominent lawmaker finds him or herself afflicted
with a terminal disease.