GOVERNORS POINT TO A PATH OUT OF MARIJUANA MAZE

It's a frequent question amid the debate about the medical-marijuana
collectives that the city of Redding is trying to shut down: "If it's
medicine, why don't they sell it at the pharmacy?"

The simple answer: Federal law forbids it. The U.S. government
classifies marijuana under the Controlled Substances Act as a
"Schedule 1" drug - one with no medicinal use and a high potential for
abuse. Other such drugs include heroin and LSD.

But in the highest-profile political push yet to bring this
increasingly retrograde rule up to date, the governors of Washington
and Rhode Island last week petitioned the Drug Enforcement
Administration to reclassify marijuana to "Schedule 2." Drugs in that
category are considered potentially addictive and often dangerous, and
the DEA strictly oversees their manufacture and distribution - but
they are available by prescription through pharmacies.

What would that mean for marijuana?

For starters, California cities wouldn't face the costly challenge of
laboriously crafting rules to regulate marijuana distribution, only to
be told such local ordinances are forbidden under federal law. Local
officials wouldn't face the prospect, however faint, of prosecution
under the Controlled Substances Act simply for issuing a zoning permit.

And instead of buying through shops that sometimes openly mock any
pretense of supplying "medicine," patients could purchase cannabis
from well-trained professionals who maintain strict controls and close
relationships with doctors.

"A pharmacy based method is an existing and effective model that could
provide safe and reliable access for patients in need, just like it
provides for other controlled substances," says the letter from
Washington Gov. Christine Gregoire, a Democrat, and Rhode Island Gov.
Lincoln Chafee, a Republican-turned-independent.

Backing up their letter is a report that exhaustively argues, based
not just on anecdote but serious medical studies (60 pages worth are
cited as sources), that cannabis has serious value as medicine for
some patients and that it is far less dangerous and less addictive
than many legal drugs. It even goes so far as to argue that wider
availability of cannabis could reduce overdose deaths from opiate
painkillers.

"Cannabis is a medicine that has proved efficacious and could be
potentially very beneficial for patients and much safer than other
'legal' options such as opioid based medicines," says the report. This
isn't the marijuana lobby making this argument, mind you. These are
medical advisors to the state of Washington.

The report further notes that numerous doctors groups, including the
American Medical Association, have called on the DEA to reschedule
marijuana or otherwise supported therapeutic use of cannabis. If the
federal government isn't listening to doctors' advice about what has a
valid medical use, just whose advice is it taking?

The irony is that relaxing the federal rules on marijuana would,
effectively, amount to far more stringent regulations in states that
allow medical use of the drug. Currently, marijuana sales are a
profitable gray-market business with next to no oversight. Schedule 2
medications, meanwhile, have extraordinarily strict oversight - from
the plants where they're produced to the doctors who prescribe them to
the pharmacies that hand out pill bottles.

Far from being another step toward legalizing marijuana, as some drug
opponents no doubt fear, rescheduling marijuana would help bona-fide
AIDS, cancer and pain patients while drawing tighter lines to shrink
the number of otherwise healthy people who just want to get high
without criminal penalty via flaky "recommendations."

Millions of voters and dozens of medical groups have called on the
government to make cannabis available for medical use - to no avail,
at least as far as the federal authorities are concerned. That doesn't
lend confidence the governors' letter will change any minds.

But it should.

Today's contradictory laws leave truly sick patients no guarantee of a
reliable source of medicine, stymie police and prosecutors who try to
prosecute criminals, create costly headaches for local governments
like Redding's, and stick taxpayers with the bill for the mess. We
deserve better.