GOING TO POT

Once New Jersey gets a "medical marijuana" regimen going, will
cannabis become the updated version of the bottles of snake oil that
itinerant mountebanks used to peddle as a cure for gout, warts and
assorted other ailments?

Medical marijuana is touted by advocates as a means of alleviating
the discomforts of those suffering from various maladies ranging from
seizures to muscle spasms to AIDS to glaucoma. So the concept does
have something of the aura of a snake-oil panacea to it.

Rather than an updated version of snake-oil peddlers, however,
medical marijuana in New Jersey may signal another trend altogether
if California's experience is any indication: DEA raids.

But didn't the campaigning Barack Obama pledge to call off such
federal raids in places with state medical marijuana laws? He did
indeed. Yet the raids continue now that Obama is president, as the
libertarian Reason magazine recently noted with chagrin.

On Obama's White House watch, DEA raiders have hit licensed "medical"
marijuana purveyors in South Lake Tahoe, Venice, Marina Del Rey,
Playa Del Ray and San Francisco.

Atty. Gen. Eric Holder says the Obama administration is not forsaking
its promise. It is, he says, upholding the law. "The policy is to go
after those people who violate both federal and state law," he
explains. One of the raids was said to involve certain "financial
improprieties."

It would appear, then -- at least from the California experience --
that medical marijuana may not necessarily entail, in every case, the
pot-purveying Florence Nightingales that advocates depict.