LEGAL MARIJUANA DEBATE CONTINUES

To the editor:

In mid-March, several seriously ill Minnesotans bared their souls before a
legislative committee, often in tears, to explain the unique benefits they
derived from using marijuana medicinally and the anguish they suffered due
to the severe criminalization of their medicine. Immediately thereafter,
Aaron P. Fredrickson of the Minnesota Family Council responded in cold
indifference to their medical and legal plight with a canned reefer-madness
statement fraught with distortions akin to those in his April 22, 1999 guest
editorial.

Fredrickson is pharmacologically wrong and religiously wrongheaded. The
recent Institute of Medicine report commissioned by the federal government
confirms those patients' experience: marijuana is medicinally beneficial.
Smoking delivers the medicinal compounds rapidly and, where nausea is
concerned, in a uniquely useful way (cancer patients with severe vomiting
may simply regurgitate pills) and the amount of smoke involved is generally
medically inconsequential. Contrary to Fredrickson's innuendo about
marijuana as a criminogenic substance, marijuana actually inhibits
aggression (see the February 1994 Dept. of Justice comprehensive study
'Psychoactive Substances and Violence' by Dr. Jeffrey Roth). It is true,
however, that the same persons willing to skirt drug laws may act in other
risky ways, as well. There is a similar correlation between cigarette
smoking and criminality (see 'America's Longest War' by Duke and Gross,
Jeremy Tarcher Press, 1993), but neither correlation demonstrates causation.

One might expect intolerant right-wing extremists to prevaricate to gain
political control, but such conduct ill befits an organization whose stated
purpose is "the preservation of traditional Judaeo-Christian values," as the
Minnesota Family Council claims. First, traditional Judaeo-Christian values
clearly forbid the withholding of useful medicines from the sick. Second,
the Judaeo-Christian tradition insists that the whole of the created order
is good, including the cannabis sativa plant (commonly called hemp or
marijuana) that Mr. Fredrickson so despises. Like the rest of creation, it
can be put to pro-social, anti-social, or morally neutral uses. Medicine is
clearly pro-social. Third, lying to our kids by denying marijuana's
pro-social uses in order to dissuade them from anti-social uses cannot be
justified in Christian morality.

In relation to pleasure drugs, the traditional Christian standard is the
virtue of temperance (it is certain forms of Islam that advocate enforced
abstinence). Moderate and responsible use of pleasure drugs is acceptable in
Christian morality. In some cases, temperance demands abstinence (for kids,
drivers, and expectant mothers), but in general Christianity judges
temperate use as good. If there are pleasure drugs for which temperance is
truly impossible (and this may be so), we must ascertain this in the just
climate of truthfulness and respond with prudence informed by compassion. So
far, America has not done this.

In light of the Christian virtue of prudence, the Drug War that Mr.
Fredrickson so heartily endorses cannot be morally justified exactly because
abstinence enforcement creates more social evils than it prevents (for
example, crime, disease, urban decay, unjust punishments, corruption, legal
inequity, and the withholding of useful medicines). Bringing pleasure drugs
under civil regulation is not an 'outrageous agenda,' as Fredrickson
purports, but rather a necessary process to restore social order under the
wise counsel of the Four Cardinal Virtues of the Christian tradition. The
Minnesota Family Council would do well to abandon its strident and
ill-reasoned intolerance and adopt St. Augustine's advice for responding to
intemperance: "such things are cured not by bitterness, severity and
harshness, but by teaching rather than prohibition, by gentle admonitions
rather than threats."

Paul M. Bischke, Drug Policy Reform Group of Minnesota

St. Paul