IRONIC, BUT NOT FUNNY by
Copyright (c) 1997, Madison Newspapers, Inc.

Several years ago, the United States enacted a sound piece
of legislation that guaranteed the right of American
Indians to engage in nonviolent religious practices without
fear of legal sanctions.

Before the development of that law, as many as 250,000
members of the Native American Church had been forced to
live with the threat of legal sanction for using a
hallucinogenic plant, peyote, as part of their spiritual
practice.

Now the Pentagon has extended the law's protections to
the thousands of American Indians who serve in the military
a wholly appropriate, if somewhat ironic, move.

What's so ironic?

While the Pentagon is showing due compassion for the
spiritual concerns of American Indians, the Clinton
administration has moved to prevent physicians from
prescribing a far gentler moodaltering drug, marijuana, to
patients who could use it to relieve the side effects of
chemotherapy, glaucoma and other conditions that scientists
tell us marijuana can ease.

Irony is often employed as a humor device. But in this
case, the government's ironically inconsistent actions
aren't funny. For tens of thousands of Americans who have
been forced to suffer the medical consequences of the
government's refusal to allow the use of marijuana for
medical purposes, this is a cruel joke.

American Indians have every right to employ peyote as
part of their religious worship, and we're pleased that the
government has recognized that right. But it is impossible
to understand how that same government can fail to
recognize the right of ailing citizens to seek appropriate
treatment for their conditions.