MEDICAL MARIJUANA

The U.S. Supreme Court was precisely right when it ruled Monday that
federal law does not allow a "medical necessity" exception to the
prohibition on distributing marijuana. The federal law does not allow
any exceptions, and the federal law needs to be changed.

As the justices noted, when Congress voted to include marijuana as a
"Schedule I" drug under the Controlled Substances Act, it in effect
"made a determination that marijuana has no currently accepted
medical use at all."

The problem is that, with a few exceptions, members of Congress are
neither physicians nor research scientists. They ruled against
marijuana more out of societal and legal considerations than medical
ones. They were thinking more about America's war on drugs than about
individuals who suffer painful and debilitating diseases.

Fighting drug abuse and illegal use of drugs is without doubt a
worthy cause. But it should not require denying drugs, under strict
controls, to those whom they might help.

As researchers and physicians have pointed out, the government
position on marijuana amounts to a sort of Catch-22: Marijuana cannot
be used at all because there are no currently accepted medical uses
for it; but the government controls marijuana so tightly that there
is little opportunity for medical uses to become accepted.

Agencies involved in fighting illegal drug use oppose medical
exceptions for marijuana because exceptions would make their job
harder. The case before the court involved a co-op in Oakland,
Calif., that distributes marijuana to patients whose doctors say they
need it to alleviate symptoms of cancer, AIDS, multiple sclerosis and
other serious illnesses. There is a great potential for abuse if such
co-ops as well as individuals can grow and distribute marijuana using
medical reasons as a justification.

But there ought to be a better solution to that problem than simply
to say that there are no cases in which people can legally distribute
marijuana for medical purposes. The many accounts of people for whom
marijuana provides the only relief from excruciating symptoms suggest
that the government should be encouraging, not inhibiting, research
and trials of the drug for medicinal purposes. If authorities are
worried about abuses at co-ops, maybe there's a better way to
dispense marijuana.

Society manages to deal with other drugs, including many that are
more potent than marijuana, that have legitimate therapeutic uses
even though they often are misused and are valued in the illegal drug
trade. Morphine, for example, is derived from opium.

California is not the only state to have some sort of medical
marijuana initiative, and the high court's ruling raises all sorts of
questions such as whether patients would be prosecuted for using
marijuana. Congress should intervene and come up with a law that
allows marijuana to be used if and when it helps people, under a
doctor's supervision and tight controls. It shouldn't be so hard to
separate the war on drugs from the fight against disease.