MARIJUANA POLICY NOT DEFENSIBLE

As a rule, political disputes feature conflicting positions that are
obviously or at least arguably rational.

There are, however, exceptions. A particularly striking illustration of an
exception to the rule is provided by the dispute over medical marijuana laws.

Currently, eight states feature laws that allow physicians to prescribe
marijuana to patients to relieve pain from conditions ranging from glaucoma
to cancer to AIDS.

The federal government in general, and the Bush administration in
particular, has taken the position that since there is no federal law
permitting doctors to prescribe marijuana for medical purposes, people who
supply or possess marijuana legally under state law for medical purposes
should be prosecuted under federal law. This is not a rationally defensible
position.

Under federal law, marijuana is categorized as a Schedule I drug, which
means that, according to federal government, it is both highly dangerous
and has no recognized medical use. Both of these claims are obviously
false, and the federal officials charged with carrying out the laws that
flow from this indefensible categorization of the drug are well aware of
that fact.

The argument that marijuana is both so dangerous and of so little medical
value that -- unlike, say, morphine -- it is something that doctors should
not have the professional discretion to administer to their patients is
beneath contempt. It is, in short, the kind of argument that fails what
lawyers refer to as "the red face test."

Marijuana is far less dangerous than the literally hundreds of prescription
drugs that can be ingested in fatal quantities (there has never been a
recorded case of someone dying from an overdose of marijuana, and indeed as
a practical matter such a thing is physiologically impossible), and that
are far more addictive than cannabis.

Furthermore, despite strenuous efforts of the federal government to block
scientific research regarding the potential medical uses of marijuana, a
great deal of evidence has accumulated in recent years that marijuana is an
effective -- sometimes the most effective and least problematic -- pain
killer for people suffering from a variety of serious and often
excruciatingly painful conditions.

Given all this, it isn't surprising that several states have enacted laws
designed to offset the effects of the federal government's profoundly
irrational policies regarding the medical use of marijuana. What is rather
surprising is the hypocrisy of the Bush administration's response.

Now of course only the terminally naive are surprised when politicians deal
with drug questions hypocritically. Even so, the depth of the current
administration's hypocrisy should perturb even the most cynical observer.

Even if we leave aside the utter irrationality of the federal government's
attitude toward medical marijuana use, the fact remains that federal
prosecutions of people who are acting perfectly legally under state law
when they use marijuana for medical purposes violates every principle of
states' rights that George W. Bush has repeatedly pledged to uphold.
Indeed, when he was a presidential candidate Bush announced that he opposed
the precise policy that his own Justice Department and DEA are now carrying
out.

There is, needless to say, a rational explanation for all this.

Although the federal government's marijuana policy isn't rationally
defensible, politicians from the president on down are terrified of the
accusation that they are soft on drugs. As absurd as that accusation is in
the land of Budweiser and Percodan and mandatory prison sentences for
millions of drug offenders, it still carries enormous political power.

The Bush administration's policy on medical marijuana use seems clear: If
values such as democracy and federalism and common human decency happen to
conflict with the administration's policy, so much the worse for them.

Campos, a law professor at the University of Colorado, can be reached at
paul.campos@colorado.edu.

Scripps Howard News Service