IF MARIJUANA IS MEDICINE, DR. KEVORKIAN WROTE THE PRESCRIPTION

Last week, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in United States of
America vs. Oakland Cannabis Buyers Cooperative. At issue is whether
the nation's drug laws can be nullified for so-called medical
necessity. The court could go further and decide that state laws
legalizing pot for medical purposes are unconstitutional because drug
policy is an area pre-empted by federal law.

California is one of eight states whose citizens decided they were
competent to make certain scientific judgments. In 1996, voters passed
Proposition 215, allowing anyone to treat himself with a joint for any
illness, on a physician's recommendation.

The initiative was heavily backed by out-of-state money. (Three
individuals alone contributed more than $ 600,000.) After the question
passed, its author told an interviewer that everyone who smokes pot is
"self-medicating," thus all marijuana use is medicinal. Calling Dr.
Cheech. Calling Dr. Chong.

Medical marijuana is the compassion cover for legalization. Ethan
Nadelmann, a spokesman for George Soros (a billionaire backer of the
California initiative), has stated: "Ultimately our drug policy should
be based upon one very simple notion, that people should not be
discriminated against based upon the substance they consume."

An article in Proceedings of the Association of American Physicians
observes, "Most supporters of medical marijuana are hostile to the use
of purified chemicals from marijuana, insisting that only smoked
marijuana leaves be used as 'medicine,' revealing clearly that their
motivation is not scientific medicine but backdoor
legalization."

There are more than 400 chemicals in raw marijuana; most have never
been analyzed. Its potency can vary greatly from batch to batch.

Marijuana is a narcotic. According to the Drug Abuse Warning Network,
marijuana use accounted for 87,150 emergency room admissions in 1999,
up 455 percent from a decade earlier. Longtime users (who spend an
estimated 27 percent of their income on the drug) suffer withdrawal
symptoms and usually need some type of therapy to stop.

Medical marijuana is a way to persuade the public that pot is benign.
It's also great for getting kids hooked. If adults tell them that
marijuana helps cancer patients, how bad can it be? "Just say no to
medicine" is not an effective slogan.

An increase in juvenile pot use has coincided with the medical
marijuana campaign. The number of eighth graders who'd used marijuana
at least once went from 10.2 percent in 1991 to 20.3 percent in 2000.

Former Health, Education and Welfare Secretary Joseph Califano (with
the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse) reports, "12-to
17-year-olds who smoke marijuana are 85 times more likely to use
cocaine than those who don't."

The drug lobby counters that most causal users never progress to
harder drugs. But when an adolescent becomes used to the effects of
marijuana, many are prepared, physically and psychologically, to seek
a more intense high.

Ginger Katz of Norwalk, Conn., understands this all too well. Several
years ago, her son called from college. "Crying, he told his father
he'd been snorting heroin for four months and couldn't stop," Katz
relates. "'Please come and help me,' he said."

His family did. There was rehab and out-patient programs. But there
were also relapses. Several months later, Ian Katz died of an overdose
at age 20. He started smoking pot when he was 13.

Today, Ginger is the head of Courage to Speak, composed of individuals
who've lost a loved one to drugs. On Wednesday, she held a picture of
Ian in a silent vigil outside the Supreme Court building.

"People underestimate marijuana. I don't," Katz says. "The condoning
of this gives a message to young people that it's OK. You're defeating
all of the good anti-drug programs out there."

A ruling is expected in June. In their questions, the justices seemed
suitably skeptical. Justice Anthony Kennedy disagreed that medical
marijuana was a narrow exception to the federal Controlled Substances
Act. "That's a huge rewrite of the statute," Kennedy commented.

The huge rewrite is also a deadly prescription.