Legal Conflict

MEDICAL MARIJUANA REMAINS IN A LEGAL MORASS

Can a decision by the U.S. Supreme Court be at once right and wrong,
good and bad? It seems so in the court's decision effectively allowing
doctors to recommend the use of marijuana to patients without fear of
federal investigation and penalty.

The court's refusal to hear an appeal from the Bush administration of
a decision in favor of the doctors by the San Francisco-based 9th U.S.
Circuit Court of Appeals allows the lower court decision to stand in
California and seven other Western states that have approved laws
legalizing marijuana use on a physician's recommendation.

It was clearly a correct reading of the First Amendment constitutional
issue involved - that doctors must be free to discuss any and all
options with patients and recommend a course of treatment without fear
of reprisal by the government. The threat, first posed by the Clinton
administration and later the Bush administration, to strip doctors of
their licenses to prescribe drugs for recommending marijuana was
unnecessarily heavy-handed.

The flip side is this: The high court's action fails to clarify the
murky legal morass enveloping the use of marijuana as medicine. While
California voters approved a proposition in 1996 legalizing so-called
medical marijuana, the federal government still maintains - correctly
- - that marijuana is illegal, that the value of smoking the weed as
medicine has yet to be scientifically proved and that the government
will prosecute those who grow and use it.

So today, doctors are off the hook, but the patients are not, at least
not under federal law.

To deny that some of the ingredients of marijuana may have medicinal
value is to deny the science that has been done to date. A federally
funded study by the Institute of Medicine several years ago determined
that some of marijuana's constituent parts are useful in treating AIDS
wasting syndrome, nausea associated with chemotherapy and chronic
pain. However, those ingredients are already available to doctors to
prescribe in the form of a drug called Marinol.

But that is a long way from 21st century medical protocols that
establish whether a drug works, whether it's safe, what the proper
dosages should be, how it should be ingested and a host of other questions.

More science is needed. Until then, the legal conflict will continue.