THE LAW IS AN ASS

Some general observations on last week's U.S. Supreme Court ruling against
"medical marijuana."

The court ruled correctly. More accurately, given both the court's
constitutional mandate to interpret the law as written and the written
nature of the law in question this time around, the Controlled Substances
Act of 1970, the justices had no choice but to rule as they did.

As long as marijuana is classified in federal law as an illegal Schedule I
substance, there exists little legal wriggle room in which to carve out the
kind of medical-necessity exception for cannabis clubs as featured in the
laws of California and other states.

To quote Clarence Thomas' straightforward majority opinion, the court ruled
as it did "because federal courts interpret, rather than author, the
federal criminal code, we are not at liberty to rewrite it."

The failure to provide a medical-necessity exception for marijuana in the
law is profoundly unjust. Scientific research and an accumulating body of
patient experience suggests that marijuana is useful for combating the
symptoms associated with a range of serious and painful medical conditions,
including AIDS, glaucoma and multiple sclerosis.

To allow sick people suffering from such problems to obtain relief is
precisely the reason medical marijuana movements initially developed and
spread, to the point of producing the passage of medical necessity laws so
far in eight states.

Thus, as conservative writer Richard Brookhiser notes after his own
(illegal) use of marijuana to alleviate the nausea flowing from
chemotherapy treatments for his testicular cancer, "The law disgraces
itself when it harasses the sick."

The nation thus awaits even one argument as to how people who turn to
marijuana to reduce their suffering from terrible diseases in any way harm
themselves or the surrounding society.

Simple logic and mercy, therefore, dictate that the law which the court had
no choice but to uphold should be changed.

Whatever the merits of our broader "war on drugs" (and this writer has had
trouble over the years finding many), there is nothing currently preventing
Congress from quickly moving to amend the Controlled Substances Act to
grant states the right to establish a medical necessity exception for
marijuana, and by doing so also introducing greater consistency between
federal law standing on one side and both public opinion and law at the
state level standing on the other.

It is also worth recalling here that, although George W. Bush opposed the
legalization of marijuana for medical purposes while serving as governor of
Texas, he claimed that each state should still be allowed to fashion its
own laws in the matter. By remaining true to that position, he can now give
some genuine meaning to both the conservative concept of states' rights and
to his favorite buzzwords of "compassionate conservatism."

A broader reconsideration of the relationship between law, marijuana and
our war on drugs is long overdue.

Warriors in the war on drugs claim that marijuana is a gateway to other,
more dangerous substances, but that claim ignorantly mistakes a dependent
variable for an independent one: Use of marijuana does, indeed, under
present circumstances, frequently lead to experimentation with other drugs.
But that is only because those present circumstances classify it as
illegal, not because of any qualities inherent in the substance itself.

A young person who has crossed the illegality threshold to experiment with
any substance is obviously going to be less able to resist the temptation
thereafter to try other illegal substances, but there is no logical reason,
other than its illegality, that someone trying marijuana should be more
likely to develop an itch to try heroin or crack than someone who just
drank his first Budweiser or smoked his first Marlboro.

All of which leads to the most obvious objection against the current
criminalization of marijuana--that it is cruel and illogical to throw
thousands of otherwise law-abiding people into jail every year for nothing
more than possession of a substance which, considered as a whole, is
probably much less harmful to both their own health and to that of the
people around them than such legal substances as alcohol and tobacco.

As for the specific question of a medical exception for marijuana use, what
kind of society puts seriously sick people in jail merely for consuming a
substance that makes them feel less sick?