FEDS, STATES MILES APART ON POT

There were no great surprises in the Supreme Court ruling allowing the
government to shut down organizations that invoked a medical-necessity
defense in distributing marijuana. Federal law, which regards marijuana
as a dangerous and medically useless substance, allows no exceptions
other than research.

But the decision doesn't appear to invalidate the medical-marijuana
laws, among them California's Proposition 215, which are now on the
books in nine states, much less close the growing gap between voters and
federal drug policy. It merely shifts the battle into other arenas.

Justice Clarence Thomas, who wrote the decision, may not believe in the
medical-necessity defense, but if any federal prosecutor chooses to
follow him, he may have a hard time finding many sympathetic juries.

If anything, the court decision, combined with the recent nomination of
John Walters, a hard-line conservative, as the nation's new drug czar,
can only intensify the battle between a federal government committed to
a $20 billion "drug war" and the citizenry who believe in the medical
benefits of marijuana use. Call it the left-wing sagebrush rebellion.

The rebellion has been spreading ever since California and Arizona
passed their medical-marijuana initiatives back in 1996. Since then,
similar laws have been approved by voters in Washington, Oregon, Alaska,
Nevada, Colorado and Maine and by the Legislature in Hawaii.

All told, one of every five Americans now lives in a place where state
laws allow patients with serious illnesses cancer, glaucoma, AIDS,
multiple sclerosis to relieve their symptoms or the side effects of
treatment by smoking marijuana.

With the Supreme Court's decision, probably the biggest battlegrounds
will be the distribution systems in the states that have enacted those
medical-marijuana laws. In Oregon, Alaska and Hawaii, the state operates
a registration system of patients with a certified medical need for
marijuana. A similar bill, SB 187 by Sen. John Vasconcellos, backed by
the state District Attorneys Association and the state Sheriffs
Association, is pending in the California Senate.

In each case, the registration and distribution systems reflect attempts
to create order out of what otherwise could be and often already is a
chaotic legal situation, with state law appearing to allow what federal
law absolutely forbids. Absent congressional action, the Supreme Court
decision, though sound on legal grounds, makes such order still harder
to achieve.

In what may be the ultimate irony, the federal government itself grows
pot, and makes it into cigarettes that it distributes to a residual list
of eight patients under its Compassionate IND (Investigative New Drug)
Program.

The program was created to settle a civil suit filed in 1976 by Robert
Randall, a glaucoma patient who had been prosecuted and acquitted on
medical-necessity grounds. He argued that the government left him no
choice between a criminal act and the certain prospect of blindness.

Some 34 others were admitted to the program before the feds, fearing it
would get swamped (mostly by a new generation of AIDS patients), shut it
down to new cases. Randall is among the eight who still survive. Each
month, the government sends a tin of 300 marijuana cigarettes to a
pharmacy near where each of them lives.

The Randall story is just one episode in a long history of official
ambivalence and hypocrisy about marijuana. Two years ago, the U.S.
Institute of Medicine, following an extensive review of research, issued
an official administration-sponsored report, "Marijuana and Medicine,"
that's quoted by both sides in the debate.

"Because of the health risks associated with smoking, smoked marijuana
should generally not be recommended for long-term medical use," it
concluded. "Nonetheless, for certain patients, such as the terminally
ill or those with debilitating symptoms, the long-term risks are not of
great concern." It then defines the conditions under which marijuana may
be medically used.

But in Washington, law enforcement still speaks louder than any medical
approach. The Supreme Court decision, combined with the appointment of
Walters, indicates that despite the current of drug law reform running
through the states, the feds remain almost as rigid as ever.