SANITY FROM THE SUPREMES

Seriously ill Americans finally can get uncensored advice from their
doctors, thanks to a surprisingly sensible and humane decision by the U.S.
Supreme Court.

The nation's top judges approved a lower court's decision that doctors can
tell their patients about the possible medical benefits of marijuana.

Like the Clinton administration before it, the Bush administration had
argued that it had the power to prosecute such doctors as criminals, take
away their authority to prescribe drugs and exclude them from Medicaid and
Medicare. The Supreme Court did not agree.

The decision means doctors can now suggest that cancer and AIDS patients,
among others, might want to try marijuana to ease pain or nausea.

How they get the drug, of course, is up to the patients or those trying to
care for them. Marijuana remains illegal, thanks more to politics than to
science.

The results of this modern Prohibition have been remarkably similar to the
one on beverage alcohol in the early 20th century. But even during that
farcical fiasco, doctors prescribed booze "for medicinal purposes."

Nine states have legalized marijuana for such purposes, but Congress and two
presidents - one who didn't inhale and one who admitted he'd done
unspecified unwise things when he was young -didn't have the sense, the
decency or the courage to follow suit.

But now the Justice Department's bullying of compassionate doctors and
suffering patients will end.

It's time North Carolina joined the states that allow doctors to authorize
the use of this drug by people who might benefit from it.

Otherwise, we will remain a state where morphine is legal but marijuana
isn't.