SUPREME COURT BACKS DOCTORS ON MEDICAL MARIJUANA

WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court, in a silent rebuff yesterday to federal
policy on medical marijuana, let stand an appeals court ruling that doctors
may not be investigated, threatened or punished by federal regulators for
recommending marijuana as a medical treatment for their patients.

As a result, doctors in California and six other Western states where
voters or legislators have approved marijuana for medical uses like pain
relief may now discuss it freely with their patients without fear of
jeopardizing their federal licenses to prescribe drugs. Advocates of
medical marijuana greeted the court's action as a significant and
surprising victory.

In 1996, immediately after California voters approved a medical marijuana
initiative known as the Compassionate Use Act, the Clinton administration
warned doctors that recommending marijuana "will lead to administrative
action by the Drug Enforcement Administration to revoke the practitioner's
registration." The Bush administration carried the policy forward and
appealed the ruling by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals last October
that the federal policy violated both the free speech rights of doctors and
the "principles of federalism.

"While states have authority to issue licenses to practice medicine, it is
the Drug Enforcement Administration that issues licenses to prescribe
drugs, without which doctors could not remain in business as a practical
matter.

The Supreme Court's action, which it took without comment, was unexpected,
given that the court is nearly always willing to defer to the executive
branch at least to the extent of giving a hearing to a government policy
that a lower court has invalidated. The justices may have been persuaded by
the appeals court's strong opinion, which was joined by all three members
of a panel that included one of the 9th Circuit's most liberal members,
Senior Judge Betty B. Fletcher, and one of its most conservative, Judge
Alex Kozinski.

Chief Judge Mary M. Schroeder wrote the opinion, which said the government
was impermissibly seeking to "punish physicians on the basis of the content
of doctor-patient communications" and to condemn a particular viewpoint,
which she said was "especially troubling." In a concurring opinion,
Kozinski said the case was squarely governed by the court's states' rights
rulings in a series of recent federalism decisions. The 9th Circuit upheld
an earlier ruling by U.S. District Judge William H. Alsup in San Francisco.

Under California's law, a patient whose doctor has approved or recommended
marijuana will not be prosecuted by state law enforcement authorities. Of
the nine states within the 9th Circuit, seven -- Alaska, Arizona, Hawaii,
Nevada, Oregon and Washington, in addition to California -- authorize the
medical use of marijuana, as do Maine, Colorado and Maryland.

In the California case, Walters v. Conant, No. 03-40, 10 doctors, six
patients and two organizations brought a class-action lawsuit in 1997 to
challenge the policy the Clinton administration had recently announced. One
of the plaintiffs' lawyers, Daniel N. Abrahamson of the Drug Policy
Alliance, an advocacy group, said yesterday that about 20,000 Californians
were using marijuana for medical purposes.

Another of the lawyers, Graham Boyd, director of the American Civil
Liberties Union's Drug Policy Litigation Project, said yesterday that had
the court taken the case and overturned the 9th Circuit, "it would have
been the end of medical marijuana in one fell swoop."

In its Supreme Court appeal, the Bush administration called the 9th
Circuit's ruling "an unprecedented judicial intrusion on the executive
branch's investigatory authority."