Pubdate: Tue, 21 Dec 2004
Source: Baltimore Sun (MD)
Copyright: 2004 The Baltimore Sun, a Times Mirror Newspaper.
Contact:  http://www.baltimoresun.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/37
Author: Steve Chapman
Note: Steve Chapman is a columnist for the Chicago Tribune, a Tribune 
Publishing newspaper. His column appears Tuesdays and Fridays in The Sun.
Cited: Marijuana Policy Project http://www.mpp.org
Referenced: The Missoula Chronic Clinical Cannabis Use Study 
http://www.medicalcannabis.com/PDF/Chronic_Cannabis.pdf
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/mmj.htm (Cannabis - Medicinal)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?140 (Rockefeller Drug Laws)

POT POLICY SHOWS FOLLY OF DRUG WAR

CHICAGO - People learn from experience, but the process can be very
slow.

In 1973, New York enacted what were known as the Rockefeller drug
laws, which imposed some of the harshest sentences in the country.
Last week, Gov. George E. Pataki signed a bill retreating from that
draconian approach. It only took 31 years, billions of dollars and
thousands of lives that were wrecked because of youthful mistakes and
very bad luck.

Under the Rockefeller laws, low-level drug possession could get you
life in prison, even if it was your first offense. If you were lucky,
you might get off with the minimum sentence - 15 years. Yet this
approach made for a poor deterrent: According to federal data, illicit
drug use is just as common in New York as it is in the rest of the
country.

Thanks to these brutal penalties, New York prisons house 19,000 people
convicted on drug charges, or one of every three inmates. The vast
majority of them are small-time offenders with no history of violence.

The belated recognition of these failures exemplifies the history of
the drug war. It has been a perennial failure, but to a large extent,
we persist at it.

Americans have curiously mixed attitudes about drug crimes. We
blithely elect people to high office who did things that, had they
been caught, might have earned them prison time. But we see the stiff
sentences given to those who were caught as fitting punishment.

In this realm, ideology has a way of overriding mere facts. We have
learned, for example, that marijuana is a comparatively benign drug
that has few risks and some apparent benefits. In 1999, a National
Academy of Sciences panel said pot has "potential therapeutic value"
for "pain relief, control of nausea and vomiting, and appetite
stimulation." The New England Journal of Medicine has endorsed medical
marijuana.

Ten states have also approved the idea. Yet the Bush administration
has spurned the idea. Not only has it actively fought state
initiatives to let sick people get relief from cannabis, it has
obstructed research to help patients.

Recently, the Drug Enforcement Administration rejected an application
from a researcher at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst who
wanted to conduct clinical trials to establish whether marijuana
should be available by prescription. The project would have required
the university to produce its own supply, which the DEA refuses to
allow. If researchers want the stuff, it says, they'll have to get it
from the only federally authorized source, a farm at the University of
Mississippi.

But if you hope to get approval from the Food and Drug Administration
to market a drug, as these researchers did, you have to be able to
produce and test the substance you propose to sell. You also need to
ensure high quality - which the government's product is not. A 2002
report from the Missoula Chronic Clinical Cannabis Use Study noted
that some test subjects regarded it as "the worst marijuana they had
ever sampled."

You can imagine that news breaks a lot of hearts at the DEA. The
agency is plainly not interested in studies that might lead to a
change of policy on pot. In rejecting the application, it said
clinical trials to examine the safety and effectiveness of the drug
are impossible because they "must utilize smoked marijuana, which
cannot be the permitted delivery system for any potential marijuana
medication due to the deleterious effects."

Talk about bizarre logic. Without allowing a study, the DEA knows that
smoking pot is too bad to be good. But the drug warriors are wrong on
the basic fact: Clinical trials are already being conducted in
California, using devices called vaporizers that allow ingestion
without smoking.

The result of the DEA decision, says the Marijuana Policy Project, is
to "block the only proposed research project that could lead to
marijuana's FDA approval."

In time, the steady accumulation of evidence about the value of
medical marijuana may overcome such opposition - just as the
experience under the Rockefeller laws forced a retreat. Someday, the
folly of the entire drug war may bring it to an end. But don't hold
your breath.
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MAP posted-by: Richard Lake