LEGALIZE MARIJUANA; IT'S COMMON SENSE

I am surprised by last week's "Marijuana, Ya' Dig?". First I must
comment on the "debate" between Steve Hager and Bob Stutzman. That is
not a debate, it is a for-profit road show. Steve Hager is hardly a
recognized or representative voice within the drug policy reform movement.

Second, your editorial is full of ill-conceived notions.

Your editorial says reducing "crime is accomplished when people stop
breaking the law, not when people do away with the law." When the law
itself is criminal, what then? The prohibition of cannabis is not
based, in any sense, on common sense or any real threat.

The laws prohibiting cannabis are the contrived machinations of a
xenophobic, bigoted, career prohibition bureaucrat (Harry Anslinger).
Only through manipulating public perception by raising the specter of
crazed minorities in the media and by presenting perjured testimony
before the Congress of the United States were laws against cannabis
enacted.

There is no fatal level of consumption to cannabis.

According to DEA administrative law judge Francis Young (1988)
cannabis is "one of the safest therapeutic substances known to man."
Even the purported harms of smoking cannabis have fallen by the
wayside with the results recently published by UCLA's Donald Tashkin.
Probably the planet's most authoritative voice on cannabis and the
respiratory system, Tashkin concluded that there is no associative
risk of smoking cannabis and lung cancer.

In fact his results show that there is likely a causative reduction in
the likelihood of cancer among pot smokers. Evidence of the efficacy
of cannabis as medicine is abundant.

In Canada, Sativex, a patented, whole cannabis pharmaceutical
extract, is the only medicine available to multiple sclerosis patients
who suffer from the torturous pain of peripheral neuropathy.
Prohibition of cannabis has nothing to do with law, science or common
sense.

When law bears no relationship to justice, when in it turns law into a
mockery of justice, there is no moral compunction to honor such laws,
regardless of the will of the majority.

Allan Erickson

Drug Policy Forum of Oregon