THE MEDIA GO TO POT

How News Outlets Blew The Medical-Marijuana Story

If you follow the news casually, you may have heard that the U.S. Supreme
Court just said no on Monday to the use of marijuana for medicinal purposes.

If you're a more serious news aficionado, you read the Post-Dispatch, which
reported -- in a front-page wire story headlined "High Court finds no
medical exception for marijuana use" -- that the court has issued an 8-0
ruling disallowing a "medical necessity" defense by a California
cooperative. You also learned, however, that the seemingly unanimous court
didn't address the initiatives and laws of eight states that have legalized
medical marijuana.

Now, if you're really a news junkie, you went to the New York Times for
your information. There you found the same basic news story (it was the
wire story used by the Post), but you could also have pored over the seven
paragraphs at the end of the original 19-paragraph piece, which the Post
just happened to chop off. (The cut wasn't purely for space. The Post did
manage to "localize" the story with six paragraphs quoting three presumed
experts, all of whom argued against medicinal marijuana.)

Missing from the Post and buried in the Times story is a not-so-small
detail: The justices were anything but unanimous on the basic issues of
medical marijuana. They merely agreed that the Oakland Cannabis Buyers'
Cooperative couldn't escape a federal injunction by claiming a "medical
necessity" defense, nothing more.

Even news junkies didn't get the real story. The "concurring" opinion
issued by Justice John Paul Stevens blasted the decision written by Justice
Clarence Thomas in no uncertain terms, reflecting a sharp division on the
pot-related issues that the rest of us would find most interesting. The
Times piece grossly understated this part of the story.

Stevens' nonexistent (in St. Louis) opinion was joined by Justices Ruth
Bader Ginsburg and David Souter. (Justice Stephen Breyer sat out the case
because his younger brother was a trial judge in the case.) Contrary to the
reporting in the Post and elsewhere, this was basically another close court
split.

The justices expressly do not agree that -- to borrow the Post's headline
- -- there is "no medical exception for marijuana use." The hot-button
subject of drugs appears to divide them deeply, and they merely concurred
on one narrow point in one case.

Mind you, this wasn't some challenge to California's Proposition 215, under
which the voters overwhelmingly chose to legalize marijuana for medicinal
purposes in 1996. This was shrapnel from the War Against Drugs not Enjoying
Corporate Sponsorship.

The Clinton administration, in an act of stunning hypocrisy, had sought an
injunction to close down the buyers' cooperative, which had been created in
the wake of Proposition 215. The Justice Department of the nation's First
Noninhaler wanted to shut down the cooperative for the sin of getting
marijuana to the sick and dying.

The administration didn't bother trying to prosecute the co-op, knowing it
could never win a jury trial in a city that had favored Prop 215 by a
3-to-1 margin. Even Oakland's police department and city government had
supported the cooperative's creation.

It seems that people in California (along with the seven other states that
have passed medicinal-marijuana initiatives) are not as willing as national
politicians to turn their backs on people with glaucoma, AIDS, cancer and
other diseases for which symptoms can be eased with marijuana. The drug can
relieve pain and eye-socket pressure, stimulate appetite and stop vomiting.
Those who follow Congress could use it.

Unable to prosecute, the federal government went the injunction route,
seeking to shut down the cooperatives under Congress' Controlled Substances
Act. The cooperative had argued that it should be exempted from federal law
because it distributed marijuana of "medical necessity" to its recipients.

The justices were unanimous only in finding that "the Controlled Substance
Act of cannot bear a medical necessity defense to distributions of
marijuana," in Stevens' words. He added emphasis on the terms
"distributions" and "manufacturing" three times in his opening paragraph.

Aside from that narrow point, Stevens' concurrence read like a blistering
dissent. He took particular issue with Thomas' blanket statements --
misreported in the press as if he spoke for a unanimous court -- regarding
the breadth of the decision.

"The Court takes two unwarranted and unfortunate excursions that prevent me
from joining the opinion," Stevens wrote. "First the Court reaches beyond
its holding, and beyond the facts of the case, by suggesting that the
defense of necessity is unavailable for anyone under the Controlled
Substances Act ...

"Second, the Court gratuitously casts doubt on 'whether necessity can ever
be a defense to any federal statute that does not explicitly provide for
it. By contrast, our precedent has expressed no doubt about the viability
on the common-law defense, even in the context of federal criminal statutes
that do not provide for it in so many words."

That couldn't be further from Thomas' blathering about marijuana.

"The very point of our holding is that there is no medical-necessity
exception to the prohibitions at issue, even when the patient is 'seriously
ill' and lacks alternative avenues for relief," Thomas wrote.

So much for compassionate conservatism. And so much for consistent
conservatism, at least in the context of "states' rights." When federal
laws are more politically correct (in the conservative view) than the
states', a Big Brother federal government doesn't seem so evil after all to
those on the right.

That point wasn't lost on Stevens, who needled his conservative colleagues:
"The overbroad language of the Court's opinion is especially unfortunate
given the importance of showing respect for the sovereign states that
comprise our Federal Union."

To drive the message home for his fellow justices, Stevens added a citation
from an Oct. 20, 1999, Dallas Morning News article. There, none other than
presidential candidate George W. Bush is quoted as opposing medical
marijuana but adding (in Bush-speak): "I believe each state can choose that
decision as they so choose."

Well put. But I'd add this: The mainstream media can choose to misreport
issues regarding drugs as they so choose. And if the Post is a fair
example, it so chooses.

Do you suppose marijuana could be used to treat the side effects of bad
journalism?