COURT: DOCTORS CAN RECOMMEND POT

Washington --- The Supreme Court cleared the way Tuesday for state
laws allowing doctors to recommend marijuana to ill patients.

Justices turned down a Bush administration request to consider whether
the federal government could punish doctors for recommending, or
perhaps just talking about, the benefits of the drug to sick patients.
An appeals court had said the government could not.

Nine states have laws legalizing marijuana for people with physician
recommendations or prescriptions: Alaska, Arizona, California,
Colorado, Hawaii, Maine, Nevada, Oregon and Washington. An additional
35 states have passed legislation recognizing marijuana's medicinal
value.

The Georgia Legislature in the early 1980s passed a bill allowing
doctors to prescribe marijuana for glaucoma and cancer patients under
an experimental federal program. But that program is no longer in
operation, and the Georgia law makes no provision for patients to
obtain marijuana by other means.

Federal law bans the use of pot under any circumstances, and the
Supreme Court two years ago ruled against so-called cannabis clubs in
California that provided medical marijuana to patients, finding that a
federal law classifying the drug as illegal has no exception for the
ill.

The latest case, also from California, presented a more difficult
issue. It pitted the free-speech rights of doctors against government
power to keep physicians from encouraging illegal drug use.

A ruling for the Bush administration would have made the state medical
marijuana laws unusable.

Some California doctors and patients, in Supreme Court filings,
compared doctor information on pot to physicians' advice on "red wine
to reduce the risk of heart disease, Vitamin C, acupuncture or chicken
soup."

The administration argued that public health --- not the First
Amendment free-speech rights of doctors or patients --- was at stake.

Also on Tuesday, the court:

Agreed to decide whether border officers can randomly search gas tanks of
vehicles coming into the country, a security measure the Bush administration
argued is important in the fight against drugs and terrorism. An appeals court
had said officers can visually inspect gas tanks, but not dismantle them without
some reason to suspect wrongdoing.

Agreed to revisit the thorny question of how to protect children from online
smut without resorting to unconstitutional censorship of material that adults
have the right to see or buy. The court will decide whether the government can
require some form of an adults-only screening system.