THIS LAWYER NEEDS TO QUIT HIS BELLYACHING OVER MARIJUANA

Feeling poorly at 3 in the morning?

Call Paul Clement, the Bush administration's top court lawyer. "One
aspirin, Paul, or two?" Clement is the administration's top gun in
the showdown to prohibit medical marijuana use by patients who have a
doctor's recommendation. Hey, thought that's a judgment call for MDs,
not JDs. "Smoked marijuana really doesn't have any future in
medicine," Clement was quoted during the swirl of debate last week as
the Supreme Court timidly took up the question: Is it OK or not?

One of these days we'll look back in nostalgia at something called
"doctor." That will be the era when the afflicted are finally
instructed by a coterie of non-medical "experts" to phone up
insurance company reps, medical risk assessment groups and government
big wigs for advisories on handling everything from the flu to cancer.

It's the day when the theater manager flicks on the lights over the
heart attack victim in the third row and hollers "Is there an
attorney in the house?" Supreme Court justices have been considering
whether sick people in 11 states with medical marijuana laws can get
around a federal ban on pot. That was reported last week by Associated
Press.

The same ad nausea arguments against this option have been mounted
repeatedly despite what some see as the potential for marijuana -- in
controlled situations -- to help the critically ill overcome nausea
and pain and, by extension, ease their suffering.

Here's the big fret by dissenters: Pot laws would be weakened. What a
heap of you-know-what. Doctors routinely prescribe thousands of drugs
that are illegal if sold on the streets -- as many are. They include
powerful pain killers such as OxyContin, which has become a drug of
choice in pharmacy hold-ups.

And Paul Clement is exorcised that an RX for a few puffs of weed by
someone suffering from cancer or AIDS is going to bring about the fall
of the empire? His precious time would surely be far better spent
trying to figure out why this country's elderly have to hop the bus
for travel into Canada to buy prescription drugs that cost them the
month's food budget when purchased here. Marijuana use carries risks.
Everyone knows that. So do a host of prescription drugs that have
received the imprimatur of our own Food & Drug Administration.

Just look at those television ads of delighted consumers in breezy
countryside family portraits extolling panaceas for mundane complaints
- -- drugs that may also cause side effects from blood clots to sudden
death. Lots of prescription drugs have been recalled because they turn
out to be dangerous in ways that were not foreseen, or reported.

Just last week, the Journal of the American Medical Association
editorialized that the country's government overview of drug safety is
flawed. Too much reliance, it said, is placed on self-report of risks
and benefits by the pharmaceutical companies.

Well, seems to me that Mr. Clement has far more pressing issues
awaiting his expertise than being a pain the grass -- abetting the
withholding of aid for the desperately ill who just want a little
help from their friends, their family doctors.