FROM OBAMA, SANITY ON MARIJUANA POLICY

In 1973, Robert Randall was going blind from glaucoma when he
discovered that smoking marijuana seemed to help his condition. That
didn't matter to police when they found the Washington, D.C., resident
growing cannabis and arrested him. Preferring to keep his sight,
Randall sued the federal government, arguing that he was entitled to
smoke pot as a "medical necessity."

It was a far-fetched argument -- but it worked. In 1976, a court ruled
in Randall's favor. Before long, the federal government found itself
in the strange position of supplying marijuana to him and a handful of
other patients under a "compassionate use" program.

The compassion didn't go very far. President George H.W. Bush stopped
the acceptance of new patients into the program in 1992 rather than
admit all those annoying AIDS victims, insisting that it sent a
dangerous message to young people.

The real danger, of course, was the message that government policy on
cannabis was ignorant and irrational. But since then, one president
and one drug czar after another has furiously resisted efforts to
allow therapeutic use of the drug no matter how helpful it may be to
the sick and dying.

Until now. This week, the Justice Department kept a promise made by
candidate Barack Obama when it announced that henceforth, "it will not
be a priority to use federal resources to prosecute patients with
serious illnesses or their caregivers who are complying with state
laws on medical marijuana."

The change is not only historic but humane and intelligent, two
adjectives rarely applied to federal drug policy. Science has
established that cannabis has useful properties for the treatment of
various diseases, countless physicians have endorsed it, and 14 states
have allowed sick people access to marijuana. But for three decades,
the people in charge of drug policy in the federal government didn't
give a rat's bottom.

In 1996, after California voters approved a medical marijuana law,
President Bill Clinton's administration fought it every step of the
way -- filing lawsuits to close cannabis buyers clubs, threatening to
strip the licenses of doctors who recommended marijuana to patients
and denouncing the entire program as "a Cheech and Chong show."

President George W. Bush's administration stuck to the same course. It
raided California dispensaries and went all the way to the U.S.
Supreme Court in a successful effort to crush the notion -- the
conservative notion, come to think of it -- that states should have
the power to set their own policy on pot.

But before long, the idea had caught on not just in hippy-dippy
California but in less fashionable places like Alaska, Maine, Michigan
and Montana. Some 75 percent of Americans think doctors should be
permitted to prescribe cannabis. The National Organization for the
Reform of Marijuana Laws reports that in 33 state referendums since
1992, voters have embraced liberalization 30 times.

Most of the time, the two major parties are about as different as Coke
and Pepsi. But last year, they presented a stark contrast on this
issue. Republicans denounced the use of marijuana as medicine, while
Democrats lined up to criticize the prevailing federal policy. Obama
took a clear position, declaring it "entirely appropriate" for
physicians to prescribe cannabis and pledging, "What I'm not going to
be doing is using Justice Department resources to try to circumvent
state laws on this issue."

But as opponents of the Iraq war, "don't ask don't tell" and
Guantanamo know, a promise made by Obama is not exactly money in the
bank. This time, though, he deserves full credit for doing what he
said he would do, repudiating a bipartisan legacy of pigheaded stupidity.

What's more, Obama may not stop there. Some reformers expect the
administration to agree to let a scientist at the University of
Massachusetts at Amherst grow cannabis for research on its medical
potential -- something the Bush administration opposed, lest the
research contradict its ideology.

During the campaign, Obama also indicated he favors scrapping a
21-year-old policy that forbids cities from using federal money to
finance needle-exchange programs to block the spread of AIDS, and the
House voted last summer to lift the ban. The White House drug czar has
even solicited advice from critics of the drug war, whom previous drug
czars saw as deranged.

Robert Randall, who died in 2001, might have been surprised to hear
the federal government admit the possibility that it was wrong about
marijuana. He probably wouldn't have been surprised that it took 33
years.