Medical Marijuana

South Dakota's one-man marijuana reform movement, Bob Newland, has informed the Chronicle that he has found a legislative sponsor for a medical marijuana bill and there will be a hearing soon, most likely before the end of the month. The text of the proposed bill can be read here. It would be a very pleasant surprise if this bill were to pass, and a sweet vindication for activists like Newland in the only state to fail to pass a medical marijuana legalization initiative at the polls. In the 2006 initiative, medical marijuana gained 48% of the popular vote. Earlier efforts to pass a bill in the legislature went nowhere, and the opposition to this bill will be led by Attorney General Larry Long (R), who was also point man for initiative opponents in 2006. (Who knew the AG was an MD? Oh, he isn't.) Newland sought meetings with Long in an effort to address "law enforcement concerns," but Long made it clear that he is unalterably opposed to medical marijuana. Period. Newland also has a fall-back bill prepared if, as he predicts, Republicans will be aghast at allowing patients to grow their own medicine and try to kill the bill. The fall-back bill simply allows an affirmative defense in a patients is arrested and prosecuted for his medicine.

After stalling for two years, the DEA has conveniently chosen the final days of the Bush Administration to act on the Craker petition:

WASHINGTON, D.C. - The Bush administration struck a parting shot to legitimate science today as the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) refused to end the unique government monopoly over the supply of marijuana available for Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved research.  DEA's final ruling rejected the formal recommendation of DEA Administrative Law Judge (ALJ) Mary Ellen Bittner, issued nearly two years ago following extensive legal hearings.

"With one foot out the door, the Bush administration has once again found time to undermine scientific freedom," said Allen Hopper, litigation director of the American Civil Liberties Union Drug Law Reform Project. "In stubbornly retaining the unique government monopoly over the supply of research marijuana over the objections of DEA's own administrative law judge, the Bush administration has effectively blocked the proper regulatory channels that would allow the drug to become a wholly legitimate prescription medication."

The DEA ruling constitutes a formal rejection of University of Massachusetts at Amherst Professor Lyle Craker's petition, filed initially June 24, 2001, to cultivate research-grade marijuana for use by scientists in FDA-approved studies aimed at developing the drug as a legal, prescription medication. [ACLU]

Marijuana, unlike LSD, MDMA, heroin and cocaine, is almost impossible to obtain for research purposes and the DEA will do everything in its virtually infinite unchecked power to keep it that way. We all know why: they’re afraid of what the research will show.

The really disgusting part of all this is that the drug warriors actually go around claiming that we need more research before we can allow patients to use medical marijuana, all the while doing everything in their power right before our eyes to prevent that research from happening. There’s nothing secret about any of this. You can just watch them do it.

And the best part of all is that the DEA actually managed to churn out a 118-page monstrosity explaining their position, which can be summed up as follows:

Marijuana is bad and we are powerful, so f**k you. Furthermore…f**k you. And in conclusion, based on the aforementioned facts…f**k you.

I don’t know why it took them over a hundred pages to flesh it out. I guess they just love killing trees.

As a native New Jerseyan, I'm pleased to report that a committee of the state senate gave its approval yesterday to the New Jersey Compassionate Use Medical Marijuana Act. One of the cosponsors of the bill, Sen. Loretta Weinberg, even represents my hometown. The upcoming Drug War Chronicle will have a feature story on the vote, and Phil actually got a preliminary version of that to me last night, so I thought I would make it available here on the blog. The article will be finalized sometime Thursday, but in the meanwhile you can read it here.

President-elect Obama has created a web page to accept policy questions from the public. Users can vote for their favorites and his transition team has pledged to answer the most popular questions. At this moment, I’m seeing these two in the top ten:

"Will you consider legalizing marijuana so that the government can regulate it, tax it, put age limits on it, and create millions of new jobs and create a billion dollar industry right here in the U.S.?"

"13 states have compassionate use programs for medial Marijuana, yet the federal gov't continues to prosecute sick and dying people. Isn't it time for the federal gov't to step out of the way and let doctors and families decide what is appropriate?"

Showing that we care about these issues is vitally important, so please head over to change.gov and vote for these questions. Registration is easy and the questions should be right there on the front page (where they’ll stay if we make sure to vote for them).

This is a very cool opportunity to show the strength of our movement by making marijuana reform the #1 issue on Obama’s website.  Please help, and forward the link to your friends and family. Votes close at noon tomorrow, so please don’t delay. Thanks!

Update: As noted in comments, I failed utterly to comprehend the fact that 12:00 am is midnight (duh!), so this post actually went up 9 minutes before the deadline (our time stamp is an hour ahead for some reason). So I'm an idiot, but the good news is that marijuana legalization ended up being the #1 question. I doubt I'm going to like the answer we get, but at least we've sent a message that marijuana reform is far from a fringe issue in 2008.

Months ago, Judiciary Committee chairman John Conyers (D-MI) sent a pointed inquiry to the DEA demanding an accounting of the costs and methodology behind the federal raids against medical marijuana dispensaries in California. DEA’s response (pdf) recently became available and contains some interesting information, including this:

DEA does not investigate or target individual "patients" who use cannabis, but instead the Drug Trafficking Organizations (DTOs) involved in marijuana trafficking.
…
Again, the agency does not target individual users who are
engaged in "simple possession" of the drug - even though they too are violating federal law and entitled to no immunity.

It’s not really news that DEA avoids arresting patients, but it’s remarkable to see it in writing. This serves to remind us that DEA in fact bears no legal obligation whatsoever to enforce federal marijuana laws in states that have approved medical use. The organization’s enforcement priorities with regards to medical marijuana are shaped by politics, not a sense of legal obligation, thus patients have been quietly left off the battlefield in recognition of the obscene PR fiasco that would result if they were visibly targeted. Keep this in mind if Obama’s pledge to end medical marijuana raids is met with resistance from anyone who claims that "federal law must be enforced."

DEA’s concession also helps to illuminate the complete incoherence of any argument that state-level marijuana reforms are rendered impotent in the face of incongruous federal drug laws. Such reforms have enormous practical value by dramatically reducing the threat of arrest and conviction under state laws, which have always been the only real threat facing individual users.

This acknowledgment should end debate over the importance of state-level marijuana reform.

As a toddler, Jonathan Magbie was struck by a drunk driver. He survived for 23 years, paralyzed from the neck down, until one day he was arrested for using medical marijuana to treat his pain. Magbie died in jail four days later.

This week, Magbie’s family settled a wrongful death suit, bringing this unfathomable tragedy back into the spotlight:

Attorneys for his mother, Mary R. Scott, declined to provide details of the financial settlement, which she reached with the city, private contractors and the insurance company that covered doctors at the hospital. The American Civil Liberties Union, which represented Scott, called the settlement "substantial" in a news release.
…
Magbie's mother was furious that the judge did not give her son probation, the typical punishment for first-time offenders. Magbie, paralyzed since being hit by a drunk driver at age 4, had no criminal record. Retchin told a judicial commission that she sentenced Magbie to jail because he said he would continue to smoke marijuana to alleviate his pain. [Washington Post]

He was literally singled out for using medical marijuana and being honest about the fact that his condition required continued use. Anyone still struggling to understand the persecution of patients in the war on medical marijuana need look no further than this.

And, as Dan Bernath at MPP points out, voters in Washington, D.C. overwhelmingly passed a law back in 1998 to protect patients like Jonathan from arrest. If Congressional drug warriors hadn’t continually blocked the implementation of D.C.’s medical marijuana law, Magbie would probably never have been arrested, never died in jail, and D.C. taxpayers wouldn’t have to foot the bill for the mindblowing callousness and incompetence that took his life.

This evening, Georgetown Law School’s chapter of SSDP hosted a debate on medical marijuana between MPP’s Assistant Communications Director Dan Bernath and ONDCP’s Chief Counsel Ed Jurith. Since the drug czar’s minions seldom subject themselves to public scrutiny, and only do so in D.C., it was my duty to document the dialogue.    

Bernath began with a reference to the recent discovery of a 2,700-year-old marijuana stash in the tomb of a Chinese shaman, establishing the extensive history of the medical use of marijuana. He described the dimensions of the current medical marijuana debate, including the support of the medical community, the benefits for a growing population of users, and the evolution of public opinion in support of protecting patients through ballot initiatives and state legislatures.

Jurith framed his argument from a legal perspective, providing a chronology of caselaw upholding federal authority to enforce marijuana and other drug laws. He emphasized the FDA approval process, insisting that reformers seek to bypass the traditional pathways through which medicines are deemed safe and effective. He focused heavily on dismissing the notion of a "fundamental right" to use medical marijuana, although Bernath hadn’t presented his position in those terms.

As the discussion proceeded, I was struck by Jurith’s continued preference for defending the legality rather than the efficacy of the federal war on marijuana. He just wouldn’t go there. In Q&A, I pointed out that the Raich ruling certainly doesn’t mandate a campaign against medical marijuana providers and that DEA demonstrates their discretion every day by declining to prosecute the majority of dispensary operators. Will he defend the raids in a practical sense? What determines who gets raided and who doesn’t? He responded with the notorious Scott Imler quote about medical marijuana profiteers, but never really answered the question.

So basically, the head lawyer at the drug czar’s office came forward to assure us that what they’re doing is technically legal, while failing in large part to actually help us understand why they do it. In turn, Bernath easily and convincingly depicted how ONDCP’s role in the medical marijuana debate consists entirely of opposing/interfering with state level reforms and blocking the exact research they claim is necessary.

I’d like to think that Jurith’s one dimensional presentation is indicative of the shrinking box from which his office draws its talking points on medical marijuana. Is the growing body of medical research and the solidification of popular support beginning to suck wind from the pipeholes of the proud protagonists in the war on pot? Jurith never compared marijuana to hard drugs, never employed the formerly obligatory "Trojan-horse-to-legalization" line, and generally declined to completely lie his face off when cornered. Maybe he’s just nicer than, say, this guy. But it’s also true that ONDCP as we know it is about to be dismantled and it may be that nobody over there currently gives a crap if the mild-mannered Ed Jurith is kind enough to put himself on the spot for the educational benefit of some law students.

Either way, by ONDCP standards, this was a fairly defanged defense of the war on medical marijuana. Jurith is absolutely correct that the federal government maintains considerable authority over the enforcement of our drug laws and it will be fascinating to see what happens when that power changes hands.

It’s hard to overstate the extent to which marijuana does the opposite of what the government says it does:

The more research they do, the more evidence Ohio State University scientists find that specific elements of marijuana can be good for the aging brain by reducing inflammation there and possibly even stimulating the formation of new brain cells.
…
"When we're young, we reproduce neurons and our memory works fine. When we age, the process slows down, so we have a decrease in new cell formation in normal aging. You need those cells to come back and help form new memories, and we found that this THC-like agent can influence creation of those cells," said Yannick Marchalant, a study coauthor and research assistant professor of psychology at Ohio State. [Physorg.com]

Over and over again, research finds that marijuana appears to prevent the exact conditions we were told it might cause. It’s amazing and we’re only just getting started. Not long from now, it’s quite likely that we’ll be faced with a new climate in which marijuana’s seemingly endless medical applications become impossible to ignore, even among those most determined to do so.

In the meantime, how do we explain to skeptics that marijuana is something completely different than they’ve been led to believe? Even the most sympathetic people look at me like I’m crazy when I explain that marijuana doesn’t cause cancer and may even cure it. We’re conditioned to instinctively reject a notion such as that and it usually takes a considerable amount of personal research and reflection to even become receptive to the reality that marijuana is a fascinating substance of untold potential.

If nothing else, it shouldn’t be terribly difficult to understand why marijuana users so often report wonderful outcomes in their lives. Many of the drug’s effects are decidedly positive and the only way to obscure that fact is to constantly obstruct users from participating in public discussions of what marijuana actually is.

The drug czar's recent claim that there are more medical marijuana dispensaries than Starbucks stores in San Francisco has finally achieved the level of public embarrassment it so thoroughly deserved.

San Francisco's Department of Public Health, which issues permits for medical marijuana dispensaries, is also befuddled by the federal data.

"It was extremely incorrect," said Larry Kessler, a senior health inspector at the department. "I don't know how they got that." [San Francisco Chronicle]

SF Chronicle obtained the alleged dispensary list from ONDCP and found double listings, closed businesses, and even a business in Los Angeles. With their fraud fully exposed, ONDCP has issued a totally bizarre reply saying it's "good news" that their story got press.

It’s straight-up insane. By the time you get to the part about how many Taco Bells there are in San Francisco, you’ll join me in hoping Sarah Palin is the next drug czar so we can at least get MSNBC to give these clowns the daily fact-checking they deserve.

Why can’t The Economist acknowledge the political progress of marijuana policy reform without resorting to derogatory stereotypes?

Meanwhile stoners continued their slow, shuffling march to social acceptance. Massachusetts voters decided to downgrade possession of less than an ounce of cannabis to an infraction, punishable by a mere $100 fine. Michigan legalised medicinal marijuana.

Grow up. This isn’t a joke, not anymore. In Massachusetts, voters overwhelming supported reforming harsh marijuana laws that ruin lives. It’s not about getting stoned. It’s about getting an education and getting a job.

In Michigan, voters overwhelmingly agreed that it’s wrong to arrest seriously ill patients for using medical marijuana on the advice of their doctors. What the hell does that have to do with being a "stoner"? Seriously, I’d like to know. This isn’t journalism, it’s childish name-calling.

If anyone remains confused about what marijuana policy reform really is, this ought to answer your questions: