Pubdate: Sun, 04 Dec 2011 Source: Record Searchlight (Redding, CA) Copyright: 2011 Record Searchlight Contact: http://www.redding.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/360 GOVERNORS POINT TO A PATH OUT OF MARIJUANA MAZE It's a frequent question amid the debate about the medical-marijuana collectives that the city of Redding is trying to shut down: "If it's medicine, why don't they sell it at the pharmacy?" The simple answer: Federal law forbids it. The U.S. government classifies marijuana under the Controlled Substances Act as a "Schedule 1" drug - one with no medicinal use and a high potential for abuse. Other such drugs include heroin and LSD. But in the highest-profile political push yet to bring this increasingly retrograde rule up to date, the governors of Washington and Rhode Island last week petitioned the Drug Enforcement Administration to reclassify marijuana to "Schedule 2." Drugs in that category are considered potentially addictive and often dangerous, and the DEA strictly oversees their manufacture and distribution - but they are available by prescription through pharmacies. What would that mean for marijuana? For starters, California cities wouldn't face the costly challenge of laboriously crafting rules to regulate marijuana distribution, only to be told such local ordinances are forbidden under federal law. Local officials wouldn't face the prospect, however faint, of prosecution under the Controlled Substances Act simply for issuing a zoning permit. And instead of buying through shops that sometimes openly mock any pretense of supplying "medicine," patients could purchase cannabis from well-trained professionals who maintain strict controls and close relationships with doctors. "A pharmacy based method is an existing and effective model that could provide safe and reliable access for patients in need, just like it provides for other controlled substances," says the letter from Washington Gov. Christine Gregoire, a Democrat, and Rhode Island Gov. Lincoln Chafee, a Republican-turned-independent. Backing up their letter is a report that exhaustively argues, based not just on anecdote but serious medical studies (60 pages worth are cited as sources), that cannabis has serious value as medicine for some patients and that it is far less dangerous and less addictive than many legal drugs. It even goes so far as to argue that wider availability of cannabis could reduce overdose deaths from opiate painkillers. "Cannabis is a medicine that has proved efficacious and could be potentially very beneficial for patients and much safer than other 'legal' options such as opioid based medicines," says the report. This isn't the marijuana lobby making this argument, mind you. These are medical advisors to the state of Washington. The report further notes that numerous doctors groups, including the American Medical Association, have called on the DEA to reschedule marijuana or otherwise supported therapeutic use of cannabis. If the federal government isn't listening to doctors' advice about what has a valid medical use, just whose advice is it taking? The irony is that relaxing the federal rules on marijuana would, effectively, amount to far more stringent regulations in states that allow medical use of the drug. Currently, marijuana sales are a profitable gray-market business with next to no oversight. Schedule 2 medications, meanwhile, have extraordinarily strict oversight - from the plants where they're produced to the doctors who prescribe them to the pharmacies that hand out pill bottles. Far from being another step toward legalizing marijuana, as some drug opponents no doubt fear, rescheduling marijuana would help bona-fide AIDS, cancer and pain patients while drawing tighter lines to shrink the number of otherwise healthy people who just want to get high without criminal penalty via flaky "recommendations." Millions of voters and dozens of medical groups have called on the government to make cannabis available for medical use - to no avail, at least as far as the federal authorities are concerned. That doesn't lend confidence the governors' letter will change any minds. But it should. Today's contradictory laws leave truly sick patients no guarantee of a reliable source of medicine, stymie police and prosecutors who try to prosecute criminals, create costly headaches for local governments like Redding's, and stick taxpayers with the bill for the mess. We deserve better. - --- MAP posted-by: Matt