TIME TO LEGALIZE MEDICAL POT

A quiet victory for compassion and common sense was won this week when the
U.S. Supreme Court refused to consider an appeals court ruling that the
federal government cannot punish or threaten doctors who recommend
marijuana to their ill patients.

It means that doctors in California and six other Western states where the
substance is approved for such medical uses as relief of pain and
chemotherapy-induced nausea may discuss the subject freely with their
patients without fear of losing their federal licenses to prescribe drugs.

After California voters approved their law in a 1996 referendum, the
Clinton administration warned doctors that if they did what the state law
authorized them to do, they would jeopardize their licenses.

The Bush administration continued that policy.

When the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the warnings violated
both the free speech rights of doctors and the "principles of federalism,"
the Bush Justice Department sought a reversal from the Supreme Court. The
court now has declined without comment to accept the case.

One of the Ninth Circuit's most conservative judges, Alex Kozinski, wrote
in a concurring opinion that the matter was governed by several recent
Supreme Court rulings upholding states' rights.

Although the Bush administration itself professes a devotion to the
states'-rights principle, in this case it allowed its anti-drug ideology to
trump that devotion.

Unfortunately, federal law still makes the production, sale and possession
of marijuana illegal under all circumstances, even when the user seeks not
a high but relief from symptoms related to some debilitating sickness.

The Supreme Court in 2001 ruled that this prohibition allows no exception
for medical purposes.

Operating under this writ of authority, but in a bizarre distortion of
priorities, Attorney General John Ashcroft took time out from the war on
terrorism and other appropriate tasks to order Drug Enforcement
Administration raids on California farms growing medical marijuana and
treatment centers where hundreds of seriously ill patients, most of them
with cancer or AIDS, were obtaining the drug as prescribed by their doctors.

A total of nine states, including Maine and Maryland, have legalized the
use of the drug, under tight guidelines, for appropriate medical purposes.
In Canada, patients can grow pot for medical use with a doctor's approval,
or get it free from the government. It's long past time for Congress and
the White House to show similar concern for human suffering and amend the
Controlled Substances Act to provide a medical-necessity exception to the
marijuana ban.

Drug warriors blinded by their own ideology argue that such a step would
put the country on the slippery slope to legalization of drugs, but that is
untrue.

Statutory language can be carefully crafted to ensure that marijuana is
made available only to those with a legitimate medical need for it. As
Times/Boston Globe columnist Ellen Goodman wrote: "Compare this to morphine.

We don't allow morphine on the street but we permit it in the doctor's
arsenal for the treatment of pain. Imagine the uproar if we made morphine
illegal.

There is no logic in treating marijuana differently."