SMOKE SCREEN

In recent months we've seen what happens when the war on drugs reaches
fever pitch and gets out of control: An American missionary and her baby
were shot to death while riding in a plane that Peruvian officials wrongly
suspected of being involved in the drug trade.

Still, we can go too far toward leniency as well. Law enforcement officers
will tell you that the vast majority of crime they see -- in excess of 70
or 80 percent, according to some -- is drug-related.

Thus, a U.S. Supreme Court ruling this week finding no loophole in federal
law for medical marijuana is a good thing.

The pro-marijuana crowd will argue that it's a question of compassion. And
they will trot out terminally ill patients who claim that they have no
other source of pain relief and comfort than lighting up a joint.

Spare us. There are dozens of medical alternatives -- choices that are a
heck of a lot more healthful than passing toxic smoke through one's lungs.
Even if marijuana contained the only pain relief available, its delivery
system is fatally flawed. No medical doctor worth his or her medical degree
should be advising patients to take up smoking anything, terminal or not.

Let's be honest about this, too: Medical marijuana is a great front for
those pushing the recreational use of the drug. It's cynical, shameless and
more than a little disingenuous for the pot pushers to hide behind
terminally ill patients.

Yet, voters in Arizona, Alaska, California, Colorado, Maine, Nevada, Oregon
and Washington have bought into the pro-pot propaganda. The Supreme Court
ruling doesn't exactly clear up the discrepancy among federal law and the
various state initiatives.

But the feds' hand is forced when people brazenly flaunt the manufacture
and distribution of marijuana, which is still illegal for nonmedical use in
all 50 states. Homegrown pot in those states that allow it is one thing --
although even that may not be kosher under the court's ruling. But allowing
widespread manufacture and distribution -- and "cooperatives" such as the
one in Oakland that triggered the recent ruling -- only invites abuse of
the misguided medical marijuana exceptions.

In effect, the medical marijuana industry is giving rise to a "gray market"
of drug growers and dealers.

The use of marijuana is bad medicine and it's bad public policy.