MIND-ALTERING NATIONAL CHARADE TO KEEP PATIENTS FROM THE JOINT

Both my parents are retired, scoping 70, in poorer health than they
deserve and living in so-called assisted-living facilities. Their
room, board, supervised pill-popping and shepherded time-killing add
up to a $300-a-day raid on their life savings.

It's remarkable that they've eluded the bills' side effects so far
(strokes, heart attacks, monthly bouts of post-traumatic stress
disorder). It's just as remarkable that they somehow manage to live
with the pains of their illnesses, day after day, agony on top of anguish.

If it were up to me, and if they so wished, and if I could get past my
case of boy-scout respect for the law (for them, I could), I wouldn't
hesitate to find a way to provide them with any drug they wished to
ease their days -- pot, hashish, cocaine or whatever.

I wouldn't do it on medicinal grounds.

That would be patronizing, as if relief from physical pain was
acceptable, but pleasure for its own sake wasn't. I'd do it on moral
grounds, and as a matter of choice -- their choice. They're past the
age when anybody has the right to tell them what is and what isn't
morally responsible so far as their personal, private indulgences are
concerned, least of all the government they've gorged with taxes all
their life or the care facilities they're gorging with dollars now.

As it is, my mother isn't the crack-pipe type and my father has never
smoked a day in his life. He's not about to develop a yen for reefers
now. They're both sticking to their regimen of "legal" drugs.

These differ from the illegal kind in addictive characteristics and
mind- altering content only in so far as they're approved by the Food
and Drug Administration, they're advertised on TV and their sales
profit shareholders instead of pushers.

It's all part of the greatest truth-altering charade since
Prohibition. A drug like marijuana, which has never killed anybody and
probably never will (you'd need to smoke 900 joints in one sitting for
it to be lethal) is the Ahab-like obsession of a government that
spends more money chasing after its dealers and punishing its users
than it does on anti-terrorism. Drug peddlers push
performance-enhancing opiates and amphetamines on children with one
hand while wagging at them to stay off drugs with the other.

Millions of Americans inhale anti-depressants as they would orange
juice even though the anti-depressants are more mind-altering, and
usually more dangerous, than marijuana.

Some anti-depressants' side effects include a tendency to go
homicidal on others or oneself.

Meanwhile the desperately sick who use a joint once in a while to
improve their appetite or counter the nauseating effects of
chemotherapy are branded criminals.

Unlike my parents, Angel Raich is in the prime of her life, but also
ravaged by diseases and pains that include tumors, seizures, spasms
and nausea. Prescription drugs don't help. Marijuana does. Raich lives
in California, where it is legal to use marijuana for medical
purposes, as it is in 10 other states.

So she uses. She is married and has two children. The marijuana eases
her pains and makes life easier for everyone. The freedom-preaching
Bush administration wants to stop her. Attorney General John Ashcroft,
whose moral code mimics mullahs' more than Solomon's, has been on a
tear against marijuana users and suppliers in those states despite
local laws that made them legal. Federal prohibition, he claims,
trumps local choice.

Raich and others sued. On Monday, their case went before the U.S.
Supreme Court.

Three years ago the court banned "marijuana clubs" from serving
patients. But it didn't address the issue of state laws legalizing
medical marijuana use. The case puts the court in a squirm.

This is the court that has codified the war on drugs' dopiest rules
and repressions. This is the court that has legitimized the longest,
most deceitful war the United States has been involved in, the most
damaging to the Constitution and the costliest to the nation, bar
none, a war that has cost the nation upwards of half a trillion
dollars since it was declared by Richard Nixon in 1969. This is also
the court that considers states' rights sacred -- up to the point
where those rights clash with the court's political prejudices.
Halting a state's electoral recount is OK, for example, for the same
reason that overturning blatant discriminatory laws like same-sex bans
isn't: Politics speak louder than constitutional principle.

And much louder than compassion and dignity.

Angel Raich is no criminal, and a marijuana joint is no more a threat
to America's morals and safety than a can of beer. But the war on
drugs is a $40-billion-a-year industry.

Government isn't about to let compassion and dignity, let alone
individual liberty, get in the way of such a popular and expedient
addiction.