KEEPING MEDICINE OUT OF JOINT

"And God said, 'See, I have given you every herb that yields seed which is
on the face of all the earth, and every tree whose fruit yields seed; to
you it shall be for food.'" --Genesis 1:29

Bringing up medical marijuana in some circles will have listeners looking
for your hidden lava lamp, tie-dye, beard, and ponytail. In the event that
they find one of the above, so much the worse for you -- they'll know
you're a kook.

"Cheech 'n' Chong medicine," Gen. Barry McCaffrey christened medical
marijuana during his stint as the nation's drug czar, and the general is
not alone in his opinion. Others have been just as quick to dip their
poison quills in the ink well of ill will.

"If marijuana is medicine," says conservative columnist Don Feder, "Dr. Kevorkian wrote the prescription."

Taking aim at pro-medpot forces back in April, just after the Supreme Court heard arguments about whether medicinal cannabis should be exempted from the Controlled Substances Act, Feder pulled out all the stops. All the pertinent anti-medpot arguments were sewn into his crazy quilt: it's a front for legalization; marijuana is too dangerous; and the well-worn classic, pot is a gateway to chemical Armageddon.

For this last point, Feder used the anecdote of one Ian Katz. Ian started
pot at 13 and, after getting into heroin, Ian kicked over at 20. No other
factors were mentioned, of course. For Feder fingering pot was enough. He labeled medicinal marijuana "a deadly prescription."

On the face of it, such a declaration smacks of absurdity. Journalist Dan
Baum points out in is 1996 book Smoke and Mirrors that, unlike other drugs
such as alcohol, no recorded overdose from pot exists. And the gateway
argument is especially specious in this context because an AIDS patient
isn't likely to forgo the marijuana that helps him keep down his food and
pills just so he can OD on crack. The only "gateway" here is the one to
some relief from illness and pain -- and, if recent history means anything,
the government knows it.

Such was the case of Robert Randall. Randall was a cab driver-turned-college professor suffering from glaucoma in the early 1970s.

By increasing blood pressure in the sufferer's eyes, glaucoma causes
blindness. Depressed by his disease and the impotency of the prescribed
medications, Randall decided to smoke a few joints with friends one night
- -- after which he noticed his eyesight improving. He did it again, and his
eyes got better still. By 1975, Randall was puffing an ounce of marijuana
every week, growing it quietly in the bathroom of his Washington, D.C.,
apartment. That is, until the authorities found out, nabbed his plants, and
brought charges against him.

For a legal defense, Randall settled on a "medical necessity" argument
after speaking with scientists at the National Institute for Drug Abuse.

They told him that the government had known for some time that marijuana
was useful in treating his illness. With the science to validate his
bathroom pharmacy, Randall became the first defendant to win using a
medicinal necessity defense.

The immediate result was that Randall could legally smoke the 300
government-rolled joints given to him by the U.S. Department of Health,
Education and Welfare just 12 days before acquittal. The payoff, however,
for Randall and others suffering from his disease was the establishment of
the FDA's Compassionate Investigative New Drug program. The program doled
out doobies to federally approved patients. CIND survived clear through the
jingoist drug-war years of Reagan and part of the elder Bush
administration. It was finally felled only because the specter of thousands
of AIDS patients taking advantage of taxpayer-funded pot to treat
"AIDS-wasting syndrome" became too much for government health officials to
handle. From Randall's case in 1975, CIND provided medical marijuana to
patients clear until 1991 -- government ganja.

This history makes the Supreme Court's May 14 ruling in the case about
which Feder was so agitated both baffling and monstrously disappointing.

The question was whether the Oakland Cannabis Buyers Cooperative could,
like Randal, use a medical necessity defense against federal laws
prohibiting marijuana distribution and cultivation -- actions which
California's Proposition 215 had legalized in 1996 for medical reasons.

In an 8-0 ruling, the court said no such defense was possible because
federal law grants no such medical exemptions.

"It is clear from the text of the [Controlled Substances Act] that Congress
has made a determination that marijuana has no medical benefits worthy of
an exception," explained Justice Clarence Thomas -- who, according to
WorldNetDaily columnist Alan Bock, is the only Supreme to admit smoking
pot. He did so while studying at Yale Law School and presumably not for
medical reasons.

"He really should know better," wrote Bock in his May 18 WND column, adding
that "On its own narrow terms, Justice Thomas' opinion is just barely
defensible if you limit yourself to the artificial reality created by a
statute and ignore the real world outside the confines of that abstract
construct."

And what of that "real world outside".

The Controlled Substances Act was concocted in 1970 -- before most of the
recent research on medical usage for marijuana had been finished. If you
ignore the immediate federal inconsistency which says what is good for
Robert Randall is not good for the Oakland Cannabis Buyers Cooperative, you
still run into a massive problem. Sure there's no medical necessity
factored into the law, but that's because the law is hopelessly outdated;
not in the sense that platform shoes are outdated, but in terms of the real
medical science. Our medical understanding of pot has expanded and evolved,
leaving the CSA in flat-earth territory.

This is not to say that judges should update the books as soon as the
latest issue of The New Scientist magazine makes its way onto the reading
stack in the Supreme Court lavatory. As Justice Thomas makes clear in a
footnote, "Because federal courts interpret, rather than author, the
federal criminal code, we are not at liberty to rewrite it." It's too bad
that more federal judges don't feel the same way about more federal laws.

In fact, as Bock says, "In many circumstances, such judicial restraint
would be commendable. But it is difficult to believe that at some level
Justice Thomas was not aware that he was not only encouraging the most
repressive instincts of the federal government, but he was perpetrating a lie."

Thomas had written that, by virtue of being categorized by the government
as a Schedule 1 narcotic, "marijuana has no current accepted medical use at
all," regardless of the precedent set by Randall and CIND. In fact it is
more than a little peculiar that Thomas' opinion contains not a word about
CIND.

For at least 4,000 years, according to Daniel K. Benjamin and Roger Leroy
Miller's "psychohistory" in their 1991 book Undoing Drugs, the psychoactive
properties of marijuana have been known and cultivated for their use first
by China and India, and later by Middle Eastern nations and Europe, before
the time of Christ. Skipping ahead a few years, according to a March 2
story in the London Telegraph, analysis of clay pipes found around
Shakespeare's home of Stratford-upon-Avon indicate the Bard's 17th century
contemporaries smoked marijuana, as cannabis residues lined the walls of
these recently studied proto-bongs.

While it can probably be assumed that Romeo and Hamlet's use was largely
recreational, Benjamin and Miller point out that pot's medicinal value was
soon to be exploited by Western doctors. "By the nineteenth century," they
write, "the medicinal value of marijuana was widely recognized in Europe
and America, and physicians recommended it as a remedy for insomnia and
anxiety, as a pain reliever, and antidepressant, and as [get ready for
this] a treatment for the delirium tremens produced by alcohol withdrawal."

Alcoholics set free by smoking pot -- imagine that; if you tried that sort
of thing today, the poor user would be stuck attending two substance abuse
seminars instead of one.

Despite its recent pharmacological past, by the Reefer Madness years any
use of cannabis was deemed nefarious and considered the province of
profligates and (probably worse in the minds of many) black jazz musicians.

Randall's case began to turn that around, however, so that when drug czar
McCaffrey commissioned a report by the Institute of Medicine after passage
of California's Prop. 15 in 1996, the IOM returned with Marijuana and
Medicine: Assessing the Science Base. The report detailed not only the
accepted uses of medpot but prospective uses as well, pinpointing medicinal
value in pain management and dealing with nausea and appetite loss (the
two-headed nemesis of many AIDS and cancer patients). It also sounded
hopeful notes about possible advances in glaucoma, epilepsy, and "movement
disorders." Downplaying any serious threat of addiction, the IOM's biggest
worry seems to be that medical marijuana is typically ingested by smoking
it, which the report could not bring itself to deem "good medicine."

Marijuana can, of course, be taken by other means besides smoking. Users
can and do eat the plant and drink tea made from it called bang or bhang
(from the Sanskrit word for hemp). Still other methods abound.

Since Western medicine tends these days to favor medicine delivered in a
pill or syringe over pipes and funny cigarettes, a synthetic THC compound
(the psychoactive ingredient in pot) known as Marinol was invented to
fulfill that desire. "Unfortunately," says AIDS patient and New Republic
columnist Andrew Sullivan, "Marinol isn't that good a drug. The relief from
nausea quickly dissipates; even the docs prescribing the stuff don't
believe it's as effective as the real thing."

Sullivan is well within the pale here. In his invaluable book on the
politics of medical marijuana, Waiting to Inhale, Alan Bock points out that
many patients suffering from nausea have problems keeping the pills down,
making smoking a far more workable delivery method for the drug. According
to a survey cited by Bock, in fact, 44 percent of oncologists consider
smoking marijuana superior to downing a THC pill, as opposed to the measly
13 percent who favor Marinol.

Bock goes on to discuss a California organization called Genesis 1:29,
named after the verse quoted at the head of this article. Genesis 1:29 has
developed at least two other methods of dosing the drug: vaporizing, in
which the cannabis is heated almost, but not to, the point of burning,
giving patients their desired THC with much less smoke; and an oil-based
inhalant that produces almost no smoke or odor when heated. Both Genesis
1:29 products should put the IOM report authors at ease -- especially since
they consider smoked marijuana the best alternative for the next 10-or-so
years. Genesis 1:29 has a workable solution today, taking advantage of the
marijuana plant's medicinal properties acknowledged by IOM, while
mitigating the danger caused by smoking medpot.

All of that history and information (and scads more to be sure) was
available to Justice Thomas and his fellow Supremes. Without going so far
as to grant the medical exception -- which Thomas explained was beyond his
role as adjudicator -- the court could have at least acknowledged the
history and medical data. Instead, however, the justices simply ignored it.

"To me," wrote Alan Bock, "that was a prime example of intellectual
cowardice, dishonesty and irresponsibility."

Agreed. And while the justices can ignore relevant facts about marijuana's
medical properties, more and more Americans are paying full attention --
which means that medpot will no doubt find its own way into the nation's
medicine cabinets with or without the U.S. Supreme Court's approval.

Joel Miller is commentary editor of WorldNetDaily.com and is currently
working on a book about the drug war.