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May 04, 2006

Dissecting Medical Use 1 Whether cannabis (marijuana) has any medical value key has become a key social and political issue now dividing America. Those with either a vested interest in the drug war or a fundamentalist religious point of view usually agree with the federal government’s emphatically stated opinion that it doesn’t. Although constituting only about 35% of the nation’s population, their extreme views have dominated how all the ‘medical marijuana’ laws and initiatives passed over the last decade have been both written and implemented in every state where they exist. That’s especially true of California, where the first such law was passed in 1996 and everyone agrees its provisions are the most ‘liberal.’
   
Just why the most conservative possible structure and implementation of pot laws should have been the rule isn’t that difficult to understand; it’s because those who voted for them originally were also deeply divided in their opinions over what should qualify someone for the privilege of using cannabis and how to deal with those who don’t pass muster. ‘ One extreme was apparently that pot should be allowed only for certain ‘serious’ or terminal diseases; thus people ith that view continue to have have no problem with arresting and prosecuting people  seen as having ‘trivial’ complaints. At the other extreme was what may now be a slowly increasing fraction—   perhaps thirty to forty percent— of the general population who think pot should be ‘legalized’ for all adults and regulated like alcohol and tobacco.

 Since most professional law enforcement officers and prosecutors continue to be numbered among the hard core minority supporting the most punitive federal position, it’s not difficult to understand why implementation of medical marijuana laws has been so one sided; nor is it difficult to understand why California has emerged as the battleground in what has really been a ten-year, to-and-fro guerrilla war between patients and law enforcement.

Unfortunately, for a variety of complex reasons, most practicing physicians, including those who think of themselves as ‘pot docs,’ and a majority of cannabis activists have not played a very constructive role; that’s because they have either activley or passively supported the most conservative  (and unrealistic) definition of medical use: that it shoud be restricted to the ‘seriously ill.’

In my next entry I’ll explain exactly why I regard their position ‘unrealistic’ and how it must change if we are to take full political advantage of the brilliant master stroke the first medical marijuana initiatives actually represented.

Posted by tjeffo at May 4, 2006 07:50 PM

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