CITY NOT VOCAL ON MEDICAL MARIJUANA

Issue Has Sparked Activism Across U.S., But Not In Lawrence

To the east of Kansas, Columbia, Mo., just passed a city ordinance on
the subject. To the West, Colorado has a state law.

In opinion poll after poll, including one released last week by the
AARP, it's becoming clear the public supports the idea that sick
patients should be allowed to use marijuana if a doctor recommends
it.

So could Kansas or Lawrence -- a city with "Honk for Hemp" advocates
on the corner and pot entwined in its history -- become the next place
to pass a medical-marijuana law?

On the state level, Rep. Paul Davis, D-Lawrence, suggests people not
hold their breath.

"It's an issue where I have not detected a groundswell of public
opinion support for it, and I would suspect if I'm not hearing a lot
about it in Lawrence, Kansas, then legislators in more rural parts of
the state aren't hearing about it, either," Davis said.

Although the issue might appeal to the Libertarian-leaning wing of
Kansas' powerful Republican party, Davis said others in the party
might see it as a move toward legalization of the drug for
recreational purposes.

"Generally, the Legislature is interested in cracking down on the drug
problem and not creating what some people say is a loophole," Davis
said.

Columbia Law

In November, Columbia voters approved two marijuana-related ballot
resolutions. One made marijuana the lowest priority for local police
and required anyone caught with small amounts of the drug to be fined
instead of arrested. The other said patients who used marijuana with a
doctor's recommendation should not be arrested or punished in any way,
or, if that part of the law was found invalid, should be punished by
no more than a $50 fine.

An article in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch after the election described
Columbia as the Midwest's closest thing to Berkeley or Amsterdam. But
in Lawrence -- a place "60 Minutes" once dubbed the nation's marijuana
capital -- no such movement has materialized.

Lawrence attorney Robert V. Eye, who represented a well-known
medical-marijuana grower last year in U.S. District Court in San
Francisco, said he thought a law eventually would pass in Kansas or
Lawrence, in part because he's seen so many surveys showing public
support for medical marijuana.

But until Congress or the Supreme Court settles conflicts between
state or local laws and federal marijuana prohibition, all
medical-marijuana laws will have a "legal cloud" hanging over them,
Eye said.

"It seems to me that we're close to having something that looks like a
national consensus," Eye said. "People are saying, Look, medicine is
medicine, and I don't care where it comes from.'"

In The News

Studies have found marijuana has medical uses that include relieving
nausea in chemotherapy patients and stimulating AIDS patients' appetites.

"I think it's been fairly well-studied on those two things," said
Lawrence family-care physician Steven Bruner.

But Bruner said he'd never had a patient bring up the subject.

"It's really just not a hot-button issue around here," he said.

One of the federal government's many arguments against allowing
medical marijuana is that the active ingredient, THC, already comes in
pill form.

"The idea that smoked marijuana would be an effective delivery device
for medicine, I think, is ... something that really doesn't have any
future as medicine," acting solicitor general Paul Clement told the
U.S. Supreme Court last month.

The most recent survey indicating the public's views came last week,
when the AARP announced that in a random telephone poll of 1,706
adults, nearly three-fourths of respondents, including 69 percent of
those over 70, supported the idea of medical marijuana.

An often-cited 2002 CNN/Time Magazine poll found 80 percent of people
thought marijuana use should be legal with a doctor's
prescription.

On a recent afternoon in the break room of Douglas County Senior
Services, four employees questioned -- all of whom are seniors -- said
they didn't have a problem with doctor-prescribed pot.

"I don't see that there's anything the matter with it," said Dorothy
Resco, who gave her age as "old enough to know better, too young to
care."

"It's got to be with a prescription, just like any other drugs," said
Norma Kelley, 66.

Interest-Group Money

According to the Washington, D.C.-based Marijuana Policy, 10 states --
Vermont, Montana, California, Oregon, Alaska, Washington, Maine,
Hawaii, Colorado and Nevada -- have "effective" medical-marijuana
laws. Most commonly, the laws allow sick patients to use marijuana
with a doctor's note, and most but not all were passed by ballot initiative.

Other states have laws on the books that have no practical effect. In
Arizona, for example, a state law allows doctors to prescribe
marijuana, but no doctors do because federal law prohibits it.

Krissy Oechslin, spokeswoman for the Marijuana Policy Project, says
her agency picks the states each year in which it fights legislative
battles. The agency pumped $50,000 into the Columbia, Mo., campaign
and has pressured lawmakers in states such as Vermont, where a law
passed by the Legislature went into effect this year.

"It's a matter of focusing on who holds the key committee votes,
working in their district., really being very savvy politically,
targeting exactly who we need to target," she said.

So far, the group hasn't targeted Kansas, but she said that could
change.

"You can't discount the whole middle of the country," she said. "I
think people tend to come to our side when they have the personal
experience. Most people probably know someone who's had cancer, and
probably would not deny them something that would ease their pain,
especially if the doctor recommended it."