Pubdate: Thu, 17 May 2001
Source: Economist, The (UK)
Copyright: 2001 The Economist Newspaper Limited
Contact:  http://www.economist.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/132

MEDICAL MARIJUANA - PLEASE LET US

No, says the Supreme Court

THE light is dim, the air pungent, but the cheerful patter of bingo
numbers hardly suggests a den of iniquity. At the San Francisco
Patients Resource Centre (SFPRC), near Haight-Ashbury, cannabis is
still being dispensed, and people who find it relieves the pain of
AIDS or cancer, or the unpleasant side-effects of medicine, are still
smoking it. Indeed, says Sister Rosemarie, a nun who is one of the
centre's three directors, business has been brisker than usual since
the Supreme Court's decision, on May 14th, that "medical necessity"
provides no exemption from the law's ban on the distribution of marijuana.

The case on which the court ruled originated across the Bay with the
Oakland Cannabis Buyers' Co-operative. Like the SFPRC, this is one of
the "buyers' clubs" set up in California after 1996, when the state's
voters approved an initiative, Proposition 215, permitting the medical
use of marijuana. The federal government, committed to "the war
against drugs", has always taken a suspicious view of such herbal
remedies. Three years ago the Justice Department sought, and won, an
injunction to stop the co-operative and five other clubs in northern
California dispensing the drug. The injunction was reversed on appeal
by the circuit court in San Francisco in 1999. Now the Supreme Court
has unanimously overruled the circuit court.

The decision leaves things distinctly hazy. The Supreme Court did not
invalidate Proposition 215, so growing and smoking pot for medical use
remains legal so far as state law goes. Indeed, three justices wrote a
separate opinion from the main one in which they underlined that the
court had not addressed the legality of medical use by individuals.
But the Supreme Court's ruling leaves no clear legal means of
supplying cannabis systematically to people who need it.

Keep off our grass

Local opinion remains on the side of the buyers' clubs. The Oakland
co-operative was set up with the endorsement of the city government
and police, and almost three-quarters of Oakland's voters supported
Proposition 215. A jury in the city would be unlikely to penalise
either smokers with a medical need or anyone who supplied them. Last
month a jury in Sonoma County, north of the Bay, acquitted a man who
offered medical necessity as his defence against a charge of growing
850 cannabis plants (worth remembering that, though it might not work
so well in, say, Utah).

The court's ruling has thrown the future of medical marijuana back
into the political arena, where public opinion also matters. The court
said that the law does not permit mass distribution of the drug for
medical reasons. This leaves open the possibility that Congress could
change the law to provide such an exemption. That may seem a faint
hope--John Ashcroft, the new attorney-general, has expressed the Bush
administration's approval of the ruling--but acceptance of medical
marijuana is spreading. Eight other states have passed laws similar to
California's since 1996.

Most of these states are in the west, and unlike California some of
them are strongly Republican. The struggle between state and federal
law will sharpen if Nevada and Maine pass proposed laws to have the
states themselves set up distribution systems for medical marijuana,
rather than leaving it to private clubs.

The smokers in the SFPRC already live day by day. They will keep
coming, they say, so long as the club is open. The club will remain
open, says Sister Rosemarie, so long as they continue to suffer.
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MAP posted-by: Derek