U.S WAR ON DRUGS TAKES NO PRISONERS

The federal government says it won't approve the use of marijuana as a
prescription medicine because it hasn't seen any scientific evidence to
prove that it has any health benefits.

So what happened when Lyle Craker, a plant and soil sciences professor at
the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, applied to the U.S. Drug
Enforcement Administration for a permit to grow high-grade marijuana for
scientific research in 2001?

The DEA lost his application. And then it said he had not filled out the
forms correctly. And then it sent two DEA agents to the Amherst campus to
discourage the university.

And finally the DEA rejected his application. Last week, Craker appealed
the decision to an administrative law judge. When the DEA looks at Craker,
it can't decide whether he's Cheech or Chong. He is neither. It's time the
DEA stopped fighting the war on drugs in his plant rooms on the Amherst
campus and gave him an opportunity to grow high-grade marijuana for research.

For a federal government that has been waging a decades-long war on drugs
with little measurable success, it is difficult, if not impossible, to
admit that there might be some medical benefit to marijuana. This was
demonstrated by John Ashcroft when he spent much of his tenure as attorney
general threatening to prosecute sick people in California for using
medical marijuana while the rest of the nation lived in fear of another
terrorist attack. In a 6-3 decision in June, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled
that strict federal drug laws prevailed over the California law, but
Justice John Paul Stevens suggested in his majority opinion that Congress
has the authority to change the law that classifies marijuana as a
dangerous drug.

The refusal of the DEA to give Craker permission to grow marijuana suggests
that it doesn't want the drug to ever be available as a prescription
medication. Much of the government research being done today on marijuana
asks scientists to find its harmful effects, not its potential benefits.
Congress should put an end to that reefer madness.