CANNABIS: A TOKEN ISSUE NO LONGER

This past Tuesday was sort of depressing, not because of the election
results; but studying for two exams the following day meant I could
not participate in any planned election night drinking hijinks or
dull my pain each time CNN saw fit to "check in on the bloggers."
Adding to that pain was the major media outlets' coverage of
Amendment 44 in Colorado, Question 7 in Nevada and Initiative 4 in
South Dakota which with the usual array of bad puns and metaphors:
they went up in smoke, voters just say "no," a hazy issue, a pipe dream, etc.

These ballot initiatives asked voters to legalize the possession of
marijuana in some way. South Dakotans were asked to decide whether
they should become the 12th state in the Union to allow medical
marijuana. That amendment failed to pass by four percent.

Colorado sought to fully decriminalize possession of 1 oz. or less by
individuals over the age of 21 in a state where simple possession
already garners a petty fine. That amendment failed by a much wider
20 percent margin.

The most ambitious of the amendments was Nevada's, asking voters to
not only decriminalize but fully regulate and tax the sale of
marijuana like alcohol or tobacco.

That question failed as well by 12 percent. Clearly, it was a defeat
all around for marijuana advocates and their grass-roots campaigns
this year at the ballot box.

The media's tone of coverage effectively pigeonholes an important
issue affecting all Americans today.

Patients, researchers and ordinary citizens are all deprived of
meanginful discussion involving the historical, philosophical and
scientific perspectives that surround this issue.

But that doesn't mean advocates are not gaining traction with the
public and lawmakers.

Since the 1970s, decriminalization and medical marijuana efforts have
made a lot of progress, given America's culture of prohibition and
the political forces that shaped it in the 1920s and '30s.

Harry J. Anslinger, the nation's first "drug czar," wrote for the
American Magazine, using gory, unsubstantiated tales of
marijuana-induced murders and racial rhetoric of "colored students
partying with [white] female students, smoking marijuana and getting
their sympathy with stories of racial persecution" to successfully
spearhead the enactment of the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937. Its
overriding purpose was not generating revenue, instead it enacted
harsh federal penalties for failure to obtain a tax stamp for an
already illegal substance.

The use of "marihuana" by Mexican migrants, who were flooding the
Depression-era job market with cheap labor, allowed southern states
to fast-track their deportation on counts of tax evasion.

After professor Timothy Leary, a noted LSD advocate and
counterculture icon, successfully challenged the tax act on fifth
amendment constitutional grounds, Congress crafted the Controlled
Substance Act (CSA) of 1970. In classifying narcotics in a tiered
fashion, placed in certain "schedules," substances would be evaluated
on their potential for abuse, possible medical applications and
general safety in a scientific way. For the most part, this system has worked.

Substances such as cocaine, heroin and methamphetamine are correctly
placed in the first two, most restrictive schedules for their high
potential of abuse, highly physically addictive nature and ease of overdose.

But when substances such as MDMA (ecstasy), cannabis and psilocybin
are included in the first schedule, it casts doubt on the integrity
of the entire system by placing politics before science.

Efforts to reschedule cannabis have been ongoing since 1972, when the
National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML)
petitioned the Drug Enforcement Administration to move the substance
out of Schedule I so physicians could legally prescribe it. Sixteen
years later, the hearings were complete, and then DEA Chief
Administrative Law Judge Francis L. Young ruled marijuana no longer
qualified as a Schedule I drug. After declaring cannabis to be "one
of the safest therapeutically active substances known to man," he was
roundly ignored by John Law, then-DEA administrator, and overruled.

Despite a multitude of scientific studies showing cannabis's lack of
physically addictive properties, medical applications and
non-carcinogenic delivery methods such as vaporization, the DEA has
clearly shown a staggering lack of movement in properly scheduling
this substance. While the agency's official rationale relied on
abiding by international treaties and legal acrobatics in parsing the
CSA's three criteria for classification, the actual reason likely has
to do with increased budgetary appropriations from asset seizures and
job expansion for bureaucrats. Whatever the case, the national media
failed to address, credit or discredit any such claim.

A sound framework to control narcotics-including marijuana-is already in place.

All that needs to done is for the DEA, the Department of Health and
Human Services and Congress to put science before politics. On April
3, 2003, the DEA accepted the latest petition to appropriately
reschedule cannabis.

If all the science is to be acknowledged, the only correct course of
action would be to move marijuana to Schedule V, alongside most
over-the-counter medications, or remove it from scheduling all together.

In the meantime, the media can do a better job informing the public
without all the cliches.