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Bad Medicine?

By Scott Thill, AlterNet. Posted August 9, 2005.

Cannabis is proven to be a fairly harmless drug -- so
why is the American right still waging a massive war
on weed?

"For me, the law is about the promise of justice,"
John Ashcroft confessed in his opening statement to
the Senate Judiciary Committee during his confirmation
hearing in the early months of 2001. "All men and all
women, all people are equal."

And so -- judging by the actions of the attorney
general after that statement was issued -- are drugs.
Although a wide expanse of independent and
government-funded research into cannabis has proven
the drug to be less dangerous than sometimes-lethal,
but nevertheless legal, substances such as alcohol and
tobacco, that accumulating body of evidence did
nothing to shrink the growing impasse over marijuana
(cannabis).

In fact, barely two years later, and in the midst of a
frenetic Department of Justice scramble to secure
America against the sort of terrorists that assaulted
us on 9/11, there stood Ashcroft and his colleagues,
announcing the arrest of...Tommy Chong. For selling --
what else? -- bongs.

Although Chong's son Paris was the chief architect of
the company Chong Glass -- as well as its Nice Dreams
series of smoking pipes -- it was Tommy (the stoner
icon that helped make Cheech and Chong one of
20th-century counterculture's funnier experiments)
that "was the more responsible corporate officer,
because he financed and marketed the product," U.S.
Attorney Mary Beth Buchanan told LA Weekly. The
punishment came down on Chong, ironically enough, on
September 11, 2003: Nine-month prison bid, $20,000
fine and more than $100,000 in personal assets seized.

And while some may not blink at that sentence, it's
fair to rewind the clock some before moving onward
into America's continuing war on weed.

In the mid-'90s, when Dan Burton, Jr., son of the
virulently anti-drug U.S. Rep. Dan Burton (R-IN), was
busted in Louisiana for transporting almost eight
pounds of marijuana, and was found a scant six months
afterwards in his Indianapolis residence with 30
cannabis plants and a shotgun nearby, the feds
declined to prosecute the case. Instead, Burton was
ordered by a Louisiana judge to engage in community
service. (This is the same Rep. Burton who tried to
pass a bill that would subject some drug traffickers
to the death penalty, and who obsessively helped rake
President Clinton over Monica Lewinsky's coals.)

When Republican congressman Spencer Bachus' son Warren
was apprehended in 1993 for possession of cannabis --
as well as possession of the kind of drug
paraphernalia that cost Tommy Chong nine months of his
life and a suitcase full of $100 dollar bills -- the
younger Bachus wasn't even convicted. In fact, he was
set free after paying $56 in court expenses.

Fast forward several years later and nothing, as far
as the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) is concerned,
seems to have changed on the cannabis front.

Unless you ask the 500 law enforcement and child
welfare service agencies across the 45 states that
participated in the National Association of Counties
(NACO) recent survey on drugs, in which over 58
percent of those polled argued that meth -- not
marijuana -- is the nation's top drug epidemic. In
fact, less than 20 percent polled named cocaine as a
major culprit, and an even smaller contingency laid
the blame at the feet of cannabis. All of which seems
to conflict with the arguments of the DEA and Office
of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) -- which is
managed by the nation's drug czar, John P. Walters --
who contend that cannabis is still the nation's de
facto drug problem.

This attitude seems to fly in the face of scientific
facts, whether they are provided by cannabis anti-jail
groups like the Marijuana Policy Project (MPP) and
National Organization to Reform Marijuana Laws
(NORML), or hard-science advocates like the nonprofit
Institute of Medicine (IOM), a component of the
National Academy of Sciences which conducts research
and dispenses advice to the nation-at-large on
medicine, biology and health.

"Both the DEA and ONDCP[‘s missions are] to make sure
that marijuana remains illegal," argues Keith Stroup,
NORML's executive director. "ONDCP regularly puts out
press releases and runs public service ads claiming
marijuana is the number one drug problem we face in
America today. Keep in mind, alcohol kills 50,000
people each year; tobacco kills 430,000 people each
year. Marijuana has never killed anyone from an
overdose in the history of mankind."

Stroup's assertions are supported by evidence from far
and wide. Regarding the ONDCP's so-called public
service announcements, the drug czar's online bio
proudly claims Walters is responsible for "ads linking
drug trafficking with terrorism," as well as those
"focusing on the harms of marijuana," although there
is no specific mention of how such controversial
methods have decreased cannabis use. In fact, the bio
only claims that Walters' cannabis tactics "have been
credited with helping change youth attitudes and
behavior toward drugs," although it doesn't mention
how.

Furthermore, the DEA's April 2005 release on the
dangers of cannabis -- entitled "Marijuana: The Myths
are Killing Us" and penned by top administrator Karen
Tandy -- argues first that "America is not suffering
from anything that the truth can't cure," before
launching into a sloppy critique of medical marijuana
that it freely admits "three-fourths of Americans over
the age of 45 support." How sloppy, you ask? The first
paragraph of the release, which is invested in
disseminating (as Tandy argues) the "truth" about
cannabis, tells the tale of a 14-year-old Californian
who died not from marijuana, but from ecstasy. The
weed connection? Her young friends thought they could
save her by stuffing cannabis leaves in her mouth.

It gets worse. Tandy goes on to frame the argument in
the type of "Myth/Fact" binarism that plays well in
medical brochures, but lapses immediately into
obfuscation in the first example: — "Myth: Marijuana
is Medicine" -- by following it with "Fact: Smoked
marijuana is not medicine" (emphasis added). By
shifting the spotlight from cannabis to its more
popular ingestion system (inhalation by smoking),
Tandy erects a guilt-by-association condemnation of
marijuana that continues for eight paragraphs. Not
exactly hard science.

By the time she gets to a landmark IOM study,
conducted in 1999 and funded by none other than the
ONDCP, Tandy wanders aimlessly off the reservation,
claiming that IOM "researchers who conducted the study
could find no medical value to marijuana for virtually
any ailment they examined, including the treatment of
wasting syndrome in AIDS patients, movement disorders
such as Parkinson's disease and epilepsy, or
glaucoma," although the IOM's release on the study
claims that "Marijuana's active components are
potentially effective in treating pain, nausea, the
anorexia of AIDS wasting, and other symptoms, and
should be tested rigorously in clinical trials."

Further, when the IOM took on the task of affirming
the popular myth that marijuana is a so-called
"gateway" drug, they were unequivocal in their
assessment that "there is no conclusive evidence that
marijuana acts as a 'gateway' drug." Tandy, meanwhile,
had no room for conclusion and evidence: "Marijuana is
a gateway drug," she baldly claimed in the release.
Her evidence? "Rarely do we meet heroin or cocaine
addicts who did not start their drug use with
marijuana."

When asked to comment on the discrepancy, the IOM's
media officer Christine Stencel was noncommittal,
albeit in a pointed fashion. "I'm sorry, but I cannot
offer any theories or explanations for statements made
by any other groups or organizations. We stick to
stating facts as supported by evidence, not
conjecturing about others' interpretations or
reasonings."

Fair enough; it's all about the facts with the IOM. So
I moved on to the DEA to ask about the inconsistency,
and was passed on to Rogene Waite, a DEA public
information officer with an AOL email address. Rather
than tackle any of my questions head-on, Waite
responded by arguing that, "Congress enacted laws
against marijuana in 1970 based in part on its
conclusion that marijuana has no scientifically proven
medical value, which the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed
in 2001 in United States v. Oakland Cannabis Buyers'
Cooperative." She neglected to mention that her
statement was lifted directly from Tandy's press
release -- which also appeared in the March 2005 issue
of Police Chief magazine.

Further, when asked to explain the U.S. vs. Oakland
Cannabis Buyers Cooperative case, or the more recent
(and controversial) case of Gonzales vs. Raich
(previously known as Ashcroft vs. Raich), Waite broke
from her script to explain via email that the "DEA has
NEVER [emphasis hers] targeted the sick and dying, but
rather, criminals engaged in drug cultivation and
trafficking."

But, again, the evidence shows the contrary: Far from
being a "drug trafficker" of any sort, Angel Raich is,
according to a declaration filed under oath by her
doctor, Frank Henry Lucido, a violently ill patient
allergic to conventional medicine, one who will
"suffer imminent harm without access to cannabis."

Indeed, Lucido claimed, "it could very well be fatal
[for Raich] to forego cannabis treatments." To combat
her terminal illness, Raich procured cannabis from a
series of caregivers, which is legal under California
law yet maddeningly illegal under a federal law called
the Controlled Substances Act. As a result, the DEA
raided her home in 2002 and destroyed all cannabis
plants in her possession. If that's not targeting the
"sick and dying," I'm sure Raich is still waiting for
an explanation for what is.

Invoking the Controlled Substances Act as a basis for
their seizure and destruction of Raich's property
didn't work well as an excuse when the 9th Circuit
Court of Appeals granted Raich and her co-plaintiff
Diane Monson a preliminary injunction to prevent the
federal government from interfering with her life,
arguing along the way that they found "that the
appellants have demonstrated a strong likelihood of
success on their claim that, as applied to them, the
Controlled Substances Act is an unconstitutional
exercise of Congress' Commerce Clause authority"
(otherwise known as the oft-abused Article I, Section
8, Clause 3 of the U.S. Constitution that empowers the
Congress "to regulate Commerce with foreign Nations,
and among the several States, and with the Indian
Tribes").

"They said, 'Hold on! What we're doing is within
California, it's completely non-commercial, we're not
selling anything,'" explains Bruce Mirkin,
communications director for the Marijuana Policy
Project. "'There's no interstate commerce here, so the
feds should have no authority. That was a perfectly
reasonable common-sense look at the situation." But in
the end, that common sense was not so common, and the
Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that Raich and Monson had
indeed violated the Commerce Clause.

"Unfortunately," Stroup explains, "the Supremes made
... a drug exception to the line of recent cases in
which they had limited the power of the federal
government to legislate, based on the interstate
Commerce Clause. Because the subject was marijuana,
the court found the federal government could
legislate, even when the marijuana had never crossed a
state line, and no money had traded hands. What an
intellectually embarrassing decision! I knew we were
in trouble when I found myself agreeing with the
dissenting opinion of Clarence Thomas."

Indeed, although Sandra Day O'Connor put forth the
persuasive federalist argument that the Supreme
Court's "overreaching stifles an express choice by
some States, concerned for the lives and liberties of
their people, to regulate medical marijuana
differently," it was the much-maligned Thomas who
seemed most confused by the decision, explaining that
"In the early days of the Republic, it would have been
unthinkable that Congress could prohibit the local
cultivation, possession, and consumption of
marijuana."

He's right: according to Martin Booth's exhaustive
book Cannabis: A History, "both George Washington and
Thomas Jefferson -- who were landowning farmers --
cultivated hemp as an important cash crop." In fact,
Jefferson was known to prefer growing hemp to tobacco.

In other words, the DEA, ONDCP and DOJ can try
invoking the U.S. Constitution as proof that Congress
has the ability to regulate marijuana cultivation and
usage, but that is a case even the Founding Fathers
would not make. And though the criminalization of
cannabis continues to be marred by labyrinthine
legalese and the sloppy condemnations of Tandy, and
even though, according to Booth, cannabis has been
cultivated since "prehistory, [and] it may have been
among the first plants to be farmed" -- the trend
toward legalization, and perhaps not just for medical
purposes, is a runaway train that cannot be stopped.

"We're seeing an increasing number of organizations
from all sides of the political spectrum starting to
question these policies," explains Mirkin. "We've had
reports just in the last six months or so from the
Sentencing Project, which tends to be on the left side
of the political spectrum, as well as the American
Enterprise Institute and Citizens Against Government
Waste, who are much more on the conservative side. But
they are all essentially saying the same thing: This
doesn't make sense. We're pouring money down a rat
hole and very possibly doing more harm than good."

Scott Thill runs the online mag Morphizm.com. His
writing has appeared on Salon, XLR8R, All Music Guide,
AOL and others.

http://www.alternet.org/drugreporter/23806/


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