MARIJUANA ISSUE FAR FROM RESOLVED

CAN A DECISION by the U.S. Supreme Court be at once right and wrong, good
and bad? It seems so in the court's decision effectively allowing doctors
to recommend the use of marijuana to patients without fear of federal
investigation and penalty.

The court's refusal to hear an appeal from the Bush administration of a
decision in favor of the doctors by the San Francisco-based 9th U.S.
Circuit Court of Appeals allows the lower court decision to stand in
California and seven other Western states that have approved laws
legalizing marijuana use on a physician's recommendation.

IT WAS CLEARLY a correct reading of the First Amendment constitutional
issue involved - that doctors must be free to discuss any and all options
with patients and recommend a course of treatment without fear of reprisal
by the government.

The threat, first posed by the Clinton administration and later the Bush
administration, to strip doctors of their licenses to prescribe drugs for
recommending marijuana was unnecessarily heavy-handed. THE FLIP SIDE is
this: The high court's action fails to clarify the murky legal morass
enveloping the use of marijuana as medicine. While voters in several states
have legislation in recent years legalizing so-called medical marijuana,
the federal government still maintains - correctly - that marijuana is
illegal, that the value of smoking the weed as medicine has yet to be
scientifically proved and that the government will prosecute those who grow
and use it.

So today, doctors are off the hook, but the patients are not, at least not
under federal law.

TO DENY THAT some of the ingredients of marijuana may have medicinal value
is to deny the science that has been done to date.

A federally funded study by the Institute of Medicine several years ago
determined that some of marijuana's constituent parts are useful in
treating AIDS wasting syndrome, nausea associated with chemotherapy and
chronic pain.

However, those ingredients are already available to doctors to prescribe in
the form of a drug called Marinol.

BUT THAT IS A long way from 21st century medical protocols that establish
whether a drug works, whether it's safe, what the proper dosages should be,
how it should be ingested and a host of other questions. More science is
needed. Until then, the legal conflict will continue.