FIRST, DO NO HARM

The U.S. Supreme Court Was Misguided In Its Ruling Against Medicinal
Marijuana

The judges have become doctors. Help.

How else to explain the Supreme Court's ruling that a federal law
against the distribution of marijuana allows no exception for the
drug's medicinal use?

That's as close as the court could come to imposing a ban on the use
of marijuana to ease the pain endured by AIDS and cancer patients,
among others. The ruling is based not on the laws of the nine states
that allow it, but rather on the justices' interpretation of a 1970
federal law that should have been rendered obsolete by now. The court
says that the law means marijuana has no established legitimate use,
medical or otherwise.

"In the case of the Controlled Substances Act, the statute reflects a
determination that marijuana has no medical benefits worthy of an
exception (outside the confines of a government-approved research
project),'' Justice Clarence Thomas wrote for the court's 8-0 majority.

Here's a conservative judge, usually of the view that the court should
be restrained in basing its rulings on the perceived intent of
existing law, deciding what Congress meant when it declared marijuana
to be a Schedule 1 drug. Justice Thomas is acting more like a doctor
than a lawyer when he concludes that marijuana thus has no medical
benefits and its use should be prohibited accordingly.

Even three of the justices who nonetheless agreed with the court's
decision about the legality of marijuana for medicinal purposes
wouldn't go along with a legal opinion prescribed by Justice Thomas.

Justice John Paul Stevens, joined by Justices David Souter and Ruth
Bader Ginsburg, still wonders about the fate of a "seriously ill
patient for whom there is no alternative means of avoiding starvation
or extraordinary suffering.''

So what about them, the people left trying to fight the nausea that
chemotherapy brings, or the wasting effects of an appetite lost to
AIDS?

There's good reason to hope that federal prosecutors aren't about to
waste their time and the public's money hunting down sick pot smokers.
But they could, with the law indisputably on their side.

The solution is what Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., proposes. Marijuana
should be reclassified, still as a controlled substance but as one,
like morphine, that can be legally prescribed by doctors and used by
patients. That, though, requires amending the Controlled Substances
Act. It requires lawmakers acting as just that -- on behalf of the
doctors otherwise stymied by the law.