MARIJUANA RULING MADE LEGAL SENSE

Many recent articles and letters and an editorial - "Marijuana
ruling: status quo," Opinion, June 7 - have castigated the U.S.
Supreme Court decision upholding the power of the federal government
to control the use of marijuana in this country.

The medical criticisms have some validity, but have been very
one-sided. The legal criticisms have been unreasonable.

Voiding the authority of the federal government to control the use of
marijuana would have required twisted logic overturning several
precedents and would have been the kind of judge-made law that the
Register usually criticizes so rightly.

Saying that the court has denied marijuana to patients reveals
ignorance of our federal system or is dishonestly inaccurate. The
court did not deny anyone anything; it only said that Congress has a
right to pass the laws that it did, whether they are stupid or not.
Although studies have shown that marijuana grown in a state would
probably have little effect on interstate commerce, that is not good enough.

The constitutional requirement is that there be a certainty that it
would have noeffect.

Moving on to the medical issues, we come to the fact that only the
viewpoint of those who proclaim the benefits of medical marijuana
have been presented.

I fully agree that we should let people who are severely ill try just
about anything they want to either get better or relieve their
suffering, especially if they are terminal, but that is not the
sticking point with legislators. They are deathly afraid that
allowing any legalization of marijuana would lead to a view that it
is safe and so the demand would increase and marijuana grown for
medical purposes would be diverted to the black market to satisfy the
increased demand. This could lead to a huge increase in medical and
social problems because marijuana is about 50 percent more toxic than
tobacco and its sedative and memory-loss effects last much longer
than alcohol and are much sneakier in developing.

Marijuana advocates often proclaim that it is not addictive, but that
is not true. About 10 percent of marijuana users become dependent or
addicted - about the same as alcohol.

But the 10 percent addicted to alcohol already cause huge problems
and marijuana, even though illegal, also does. If marijuana were
legal to any extent, it might well cause even more problems.

One major fear is that young people would believe, even more than
they do today, that marijuana is safe and harmless, and they would
use it even more than they do already.

Marijuana is not harmless; it is the No. 1 cause of drug-related
emergency room visits for teenagers and the No. 1 drug involved for
teens seeking addiction treatment. Perhaps if the marijuana advocates
would get real and admit that it can be dangerous to use, but could
be beneficial for those already debilitated, they could get a lot
more support from scientists and doctors (and even legislators).

The last point is that there is virtually no evidence that smoked
marijuana is statistically superior to modern medicines for any of
the problems for which it is advocated, with the possible exception
of wasting syndromes.

In fact, modern medicines are usually better and more reliably effective.

Even prescription oral THC (the most effective ingredient in
marijuana) is often statistically more effective than smoked marijuana.

That is not to say that individuals could not be the exception to the
rule, because individuals are not statistics. Doctors see all the
time individuals who respond to a medication much differently than the average.

Although I would like to see marijuana available for medical use and
I think that it would be reasonable to let individual states
experiment with different policies of legalization ("the laboratory
of democracy"), those who are afraid of its use becoming widespread
are not foolish and it was legally very reasonable for the Supreme
Court to uphold federal oversight of marijuana use.

We want to be able to hold the people we vote for accountable for
their policies.