COURT SHOULD PROTECT MARIJUANA PRESCRIPTIONS

The Bush administration is asking the Supreme Court for permission to
strip prescription licenses from doctors who recommend marijuana to
patients.

Frustrated in its attempt to block the use of marijuana for medical
purposes, the Justice Department is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to
punish doctors who prescribe it. The department claims that the
federal Drug Enforcement Administration should be allowed to revoke
prescriptions licenses from physicians who recommend marijuana to
their patients, even though Hawaii and eight other states allow
marijuana for medical uses. The high court should maintain its
previous stance that federal drug agents should not be allowed to
usurp states' traditional role in regulation of doctors.

The Bush administration's frustration reached the boiling point last
month when a federal judge in California sentenced Ed Rosenthal, a
prominent advocate of medical marijuana, to a single day in jail for
the felony conviction of cultivating and distributing the substance.
Jurors in Rosenthal's trial had been denied information about the
purposes of Rosenthal's marijuana and were outraged when they learned
of those facts after the trial.

Solicitor General Theodore Olson is challenging a ruling by the 9th
U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that blocked the punishment or
investigation of physicians who tell patients that pot could help
them. A policy put in place during the Clinton administration requires
revocation of federal prescription licenses of doctors who recommend
marijuana.

Attorney General John Ashcroft used a similar tactic last year in an
unsuccessful attempt to undermine Oregon's law allowing
physician-assisted suicide. He maintained that a doctor's lethal
prescription to a terminally ill patient violated the federal
Controlled Substances Act's requirement that drugs be used for a
"legitimate medical purpose." In a majority opinion, Supreme Court
Justice Sandra Day O'Connor said the task of safeguarding "liberty
interests" associated with that issue should be entrusted to the
"laboratory" of the states.

The same can be said of states that allow physicians to prescribe the
use of medical marijuana to relieve their patients' pain from AIDS,
cancer, multiple sclerosis, glaucoma and other illnesses. Those
benefits were confirmed in a 1999 study by the National Academy of
Sciences' Institute of Medicine, commissioned by then-President Clinton.