POT POSTURING

(SMW) - 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 about medical marijuana laws. Currently eight
states feature such laws, which allow physicians to authorize the
dispensing of 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 who are 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 the 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 - indeed, sometimes the most effective and least
problematic - pain killer for people suffering from a wide 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 Drug
Enforcement Agency 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.