RX THE COURTS SHOULD CANCEL

If marijuana is medicine, Dr. Jack 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 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 funded with 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," Mrs. Katz relates. "
'Please come and help me,' he said."

His family did. There was rehab and outpatient 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
have 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," Mrs. 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," Justice Kennedy commented. The huge
rewrite is also a deadly prescription.