GOOD FIRST STEP

Holder Puts End to Medical-Pot Raids

Attorney General Eric Holder, in response to a question at a news
conference last Wednesday, affirmed that the Obama administration's
policy will be to end Drug Enforcement Administration raids on
medical marijuana patients and providers in states like California
that have laws allowing people with a recommendation from a doctor to
use marijuana medicinally. This is good news, but it should be
followed by a more thoroughgoing reassessment of the strict federal
policy that still makes any use of marijuana, even for medicinal
purposes, a crime.

All the scientific evidence and even the way the law in question is
written, would seem to demand such a reform.

California's voters, of course, changed California law in 1996 to
allow those with a recommendation from a licensed physician to grow,
possess and use marijuana therapeutically. The problem is that
marijuana remains on Schedule I under the federal Controlled
Substances Act, which means that no use is permitted. Thus, DEA
agents, who before California's law was passed had confined their
attention mostly to major traffickers and growers with 1,000 plants
or more, began to raid dispensaries that were scrupulously abiding by
California law and even paying state taxes.

Although President Barack Obama promised during the campaign that
this misallocation of law enforcement resources would end if he was
elected, the DEA conducted several raids in California and Colorado
since the inauguration, including a few on the very day Holder was
sworn in as attorney general. This had the appearance of Bush
holdovers who had not yet been replaced essentially thumbing their
noses at the incoming administration.

So Holder's statement that "What he [President Obama] said during the
campaign is now American policy" was more than welcome as recognition
that the United States is still to some extent a federal republic, in
which the states are free to experiment with approaches to public
policy issues. Further changes in the way federal law is implemented
should be the next step.

The 1970 Controlled Substances Act includes different "schedules" on
which drugs are placed, which dictate increasing levels of control,
theoretically in response to different levels of dangerousness.
Schedule I is the most restrictive schedule, and it is illegal to
prescribe such drugs or to possess them except in limited situations
involving supervised research.

The criteria for Schedule I are as follows: "A) The drug or other
substance has a high potential for abuse, B) The drug or other
substance has no currently accepted medical use in treatment in the
United States, C) There is a lack of accepted safety for use of the
drug or other substance under medical supervision."

Marijuana does not meet any of these criteria. In 1988 the then-chief
administrative law judge of the DEA, Francis Young, stated as much in
an extensive advisory opinion based on several years of hearings.
This view was reaffirmed by an extensive 1999 report in book form by
the government's Institute of Medicine, which summarized all the most
recent research documenting marijuana's medicinal uses and potential.

As the law is written, then, marijuana does not belong on Schedule I.
If anything it belongs on Schedule V, the least-restrictive schedule.
But even putting it on Schedule II (along with cocaine, morphine,
amphetamines, PCP and opium) would allow physicians and their
patients to use it appropriately. It would still not allow "recreational" use.

We understand that the Obama administration has a lot on its plate.
But correcting this ongoing mistake, thereby alleviating a great deal
of pain and suffering nationwide, is worth consideration.