MEDICAL MARIJUANA DEBATE BELONGS IN THE MEDICAL COMMUNITY

Arguments began Monday in the lawsuit Ashcroft v. Raich. The medical
marijuana case seeks to give federal agents power to go after
devastatingly ill users, such as Angel Raich of California, who have
their doctors' permission to use the drug in states that have
legalized its medical use. As I read accounts of the Supreme Court
Justices battling the issue, I began to feel like I'm watching a giant
round of the board game Clue. But figuring this one out won't be as
simple as declaring "Professor Plum killed Dr. Black in the library
with a candlestick."

The game is real and the players are real human beings suffering from
excruciating pain and wasting diseases such as cancer, AIDS and seizures.

Why the debate is still not where it belongs, within the medical
community where professionals are trained to test drugs for safety and
value, is perhaps why we need the clues brought out and debated most.
The argument has raged for years whether marijuana can help some ill
people - years that could have been used to study marijuana and
perhaps have gotten FDA approval for medical use.

Instead, we have eight justices trained in arguing niggling points of
the law deciding what is or isn't a medicine. Why not, then, ask a
panel of physicians to start weighing in on legal decisions based on
their spare-time reading of the the National Law Journal?

As the justices battled out whether the federal Controlled Substances
Act supercedes the rights of states that have enacted
medical-marijuana use laws, the clues started flying. Some say the
case-breaker may rest with past lawsuits relating to regulating
interstate commerce. Other justices suggest that states should be
capable of regulating medical marijuana use within their borders.

Some justices began to look as if they'd just as soon decide Miss
Scarlet killed Dr. Black in the lounge by whacking him on the head
with dried marijuana bricks and go home. Justice Antonin Scalia, who
voted favorably for states' rights in one of the aforementioned cases,
seemed a mite contrite taking the opposite position on this one.

Justice John Paul Stevens seemed to be reversing engines, too, having
hated Scalia's stand on the same case but edging toward states' rights
here.

Yet in perhaps the most sensible clue all day, Stevens innocently
asked: Is the court bound by a 2001 case that concluded there was no
exemption to federal drug laws for medical use of marijuana? Perhaps,
he suggested, the court should study other professional medical
literature, such as the Institute of Medicine's 1999 report showing
great promise in easing the discomfort of chemotherapy after-effects
and other anguish?

Defense attorney Randy Barnett threw out another clue as to why we're
still disputing why a naturally growing plant cannot be used to soothe
agony. Barnett urged justices to read amicus briefs chronicling
government obstruction to cannabis research.

None of us - except perhaps those who have cared for those suffering
racking, intractable pain - can begin to understand what the right
drug can mean.

And the term "medical marijuana" is a misnomer, anyway. Medicine is
medicine. Morphine, another powerful pain-reliever that has made the
unbearable somewhat bearable from battlefields to burn units to the
beds of terminal cancer victims, is made from the seed pods of Asian
poppy plants.

What next? Will we start calling some flowers "medical poppies?"