AN IRRATIONAL MARIJUANA POLICY

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,
including Colorado, 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 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.