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GOVERNMENT MUST STAY OUT OF MEDICAL DECISIONS

Thanks for publishing Scott Ross' excellent but emotion-filled letter on medical marijuana.  I just wanted to point out that Scott subliminally makes Thomas Jefferson's most powerful arguments apply to real life.  "Were the government to prescribe to us our medicine and diet, our bodies would be in such keeping as our souls are now.  Thus in France the emetic was once forbidden as a medicine, and the potato as an article of food.  Government is just as infallible,[sic] too, when it fixes systems in physics.  Gallileo was sent to the Inquisition for affirming that the Earth was a sphere .  .  .  It is error alone which needs the support of government."

"Truth can stand by itself," wrote Jefferson in "Notes on Virginia." Ross has made the emotional argument and Jefferson the rational argument.

All these laws were put in place before most readers were even born.  Can some prohibition supporter please stand up and tell us what justification the state has for controlling the medicines and the ideas we have about them in a supposed free country?

CHRIS BUORS

Winnipeg

Manitoba, Canada