INITIATIVE WOULD MAKE MARIJUANA LEGAL FOR ILL

Arizona voters may get a chance this year to do what they thought
they were doing in 1996: allow people who are ill to possess and use
marijuana legally.

An initiative being crafted would spell out that individuals who are
certified by their doctors as needing the drug would be able to
possess small amounts -- the details are still being worked out --
without running afoul of state law. They also would be able to grow
their own drugs.

Backers, organized as the Arizona Medical Marijuana Policy Project,
have until July 3 to get the 153,365 signatures necessary to put the
measure on the November ballot.

Financing for the initiative is coming from the national Marijuana
Policy Project which bills itself as the largest marijuana policy
reform organization in the country. It already has kicked in $10,000.

That organization is no stranger to state initiatives: It also was
behind a 2006 Nevada ballot measure to decriminalize marijuana and
instead regulate and tax it. But that initiative picked up just 44
percent of the vote.

Two years earlier, though, it financed a successful medical
initiative in Montana.

Dan Bernath, a spokesman for the national group, said it appears
voters are more willing to allow people who are ill to use marijuana
than to make its possession legal for everyone. That has proven to be
the case in Arizona, where by a 2-1 margin voters in 1996 approved a
law allowing doctors to prescribe marijuana -- and various other
illegal drugs -- to patients who are seriously or terminally ill.

That law was ratified again two years later by voters after state
legislators attempted to partially repeal it.

But a 2002 initiative, which included a provision to reduce the
penalty for possession of up to 2 ounces to a fine, picked up just 43
percent of the vote.

The new initiative comes because the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency
effectively quashed the 1996 law by threatening to revoke all
prescription-writing privileges of any physician who prescribed
otherwise illegal drugs to their Arizona patients. The result is no
Arizona doctor has written such a prescription.

Alternate language for this measure, still being worked out, would
allow doctors to "recommend" marijuana.

That distinction is crucial: The U.S. Supreme Court, in a historic
2003 ruling, blocked the DEA from going after California doctors who,
using that state's law, recommend a patient use marijuana.

That still leaves the question of how patients are supposed to get
the drugs in the first place. Courts have allowed agents to pursue
suppliers. And some of the "dispensaries" in California have been raided.

Bernath said that is why states which have adopted medical marijuana
laws since California allow patients or a "designated caregiver" to
grow a set amount of the drug.

"This keeps it small enough that the federal government doesn't turn
its attention to those kind of things," he said.

That defeated 2002 initiative attempted to deal with the supply
problem by allowing anyone with a doctor's recommendation to get up
to 2 ounces of marijuana, free, each month from the state Department
of Public Safety, which presumably would have obtained its supply
from drugs seized from those who lack the necessary state permission.

That initiative was opposed by Janet Napolitano, then the state
attorney general and, at the time, a candidate for governor, despite
her admission of having indulged.

"I experimented in college a little bit and regret doing it," she
said at the time. "When you're in college you do a lot of dumb stuff."