MEDICAL MARIJUANA GAINING ACCEPTANCE

Arizona's new medical-marijuana law is not just a legal headache for
lawyers and lawmakers anymore.

The law that passed narrowly last fall is a cultural page-turning
event, prompting changes that just a few years ago would have seemed
inconceivable.

Like them or not - and we are not exactly thrilled with a lot of these
developments - the changes wrought by the medical-marijuana law go far
beyond what is dictated in statutes that declare pot a "medicine."

The arrival of a restaurant known as Ganja Gourmet comes to mind. The
Denver-based company expects to open an edible-marijuana operation in
Phoenix before the end of this year, a direct result of the
medical-marijuana law.

Legal novices might wonder how a law supposedly enacted to provide
"medicine" to the sick becomes the basis for a restaurant's recipes.
Unfortunately for anyone concerned about the proliferation of
marijuana use, the law is unspecific regarding how the prescribed drug
gets dispensed.

Restaurants won't be alone in exploiting the new law. A school for
teaching how to incorporate marijuana into home-cooked recipes, the
Arizona Dispensary University in Phoenix, already is offering classes
on growing pot and cooking with it.

If restaurants and cooking schools dedicated to marijuana use suggest
the mainstreaming of this drug into local culture, the announcement of
a planned medical-marijuana "superstore" emphatically underlines it.
Nothing says mainstream Phoenix quite like a big-box superstore, after
all. The "weGrow" chain plans to open a 21,000-square-foot operation
offering a wide assortment of growing supplies, including
hydroponics.

Obviously, these developments portend a dramatic relaxing of how
society views marijuana use.

Arizona law enforcers and prosecutors are in a quandary about how to
meld this law with far stricter federal laws, and they have
well-founded concerns about how crime and marijuana use are
intertwined, whether the drug is legal or not.

But on a social level, the presence of marijuana clearly is gaining
acceptance, which, obviously, is the goal of medical-marijuana
advocates. Few of them are interested merely in promoting marijuana as
an alternative to aspirin or other pain-killers. They are interested
in overturning decades-old, punitive drug prohibitions.

Arizona's new law advances that mission far down the road. And that
creates some serious concerns for those of us who fear the unintended
consequences that may escape from Pandora's pot box.