Pubdate: Sat, 19 May 2012
Source: National Post (Canada)
Copyright: 2012 Canwest Publishing Inc.
Contact: http://drugsense.org/url/wEtbT4yU
Website: http://www.nationalpost.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/286

A NEW VOICE FOR DRUG REFORM

"Three and a half years ago, on my 62nd birthday, doctors discovered 
a mass on my pancreas. It turned out to be stage 3 pancreatic cancer. 
I was told I would be dead in four to six months. Today, I am in that 
rare coterie of people who have survived this long with the disease."

So begins a remarkable article that appeared this week on the op-ed 
page of The New York Times. As the article goes on, the author, 
Gustin Reichbach, describes not only his battle with cancer itself, 
but with the agonizing and debilitating side effects of the 
medications and radiation treatments required to keep death at bay.

"One struggles to eat enough to stave off the dramatic weight loss 
that is part of this disease," he writes. "Eating, one of the great 
pleasures of life, has now become a daily battle, with each forkful a 
small victory."

The only medicine that allows Mr. Reichbach to keep food down and get 
rest? Marijuana - the real stuff. "The oral synthetic substitute," he 
writes, was useless. "Rather than watch the agony of my suffering, 
friends have chosen, at some personal risk, to provide the 
substance." A few puffs a day, he reports, makes life worth living.

Of course, one can find thousands of such testimonials in the media 
and on the Internet. The medicinal effects of marijuana have been 
known for decades. What makes this New York Times author important is 
his curriculum vitae. Gustin Reichbach was a member of the New York 
State bar for four decades - the last two of them as a state judge. 
And yet now, he is effectively counselling the wisdom of breaking the 
law in this specific context. (Sixteen U.S. states permit the 
clinical use of marijuana; New York is not one of them.) As he 
correctly concludes, "This is not a law-and-order issue; it is a 
medical and a human-rights issue ... medical science has not yet 
found a cure [for cancer], but it is barbaric to deny [patients] 
access to one substance that has proved to ameliorate our suffering."

On this issue, as on many others, Canada is a more progressive place 
than the United States: Since the late 1990s, our government has 
provided sick Canadians with an institutional framework for medicinal 
marijuana access. But this policy largely arose through Charter 
litigation initiated by AIDS and cancer victims. Throughout it all, 
federal governments - both Liberal and Conservative - generally have 
been dragged through the process kicking and screaming. As a result, 
the federal Marijuana Medical Access Regulations still remain 
restrictive. Recently, in response to a suit from a Toronto activist 
suffering from fibromyalgia and other conditions, an Ontario court 
struck down those regulations. (The ruling is on hold pending an appeal.)

Critics of drug-policy reform warn that the medical-marijuana issue 
is the thin edge of the wedge: Once citizens get used to the sight of 
marijuana being used as medicine, they might question other aspects 
of the war on drugs, including the whole idea of criminalizing 
recreational drugs in the first place.

But would that be such a bad thing? Last week, 49 headless bodies 
were discovered near a highway outside the Mexican city of Monterrey. 
Western reporters covering the story are shocked that local residents 
are shrugging the massacre off, continuing to go out to restaurants 
and night clubs. Yet who can blame these people for trying to get on 
with life? With 47,500 Mexicans already dead in the drug war since 
2006, those 49 bodies in Monterrey are just a rounding error.

No one should underestimate the toll of misery and death caused by 
drugs themselves. Yet the war on drugs has arguably produced far 
greater misery and death. Stringent criminal sanctions against drug 
dealers and drug lords do nothing to mitigate the demand for drugs. 
They merely discourage marginal players, leaving the drug trade to 
the hard core of murderers and quasi-terrorists who now dominate 
Latin America (and, where heroin is concerned, Afghanistan), and 
whose tentacles extend well into the United States and Canada.

And yet, even as many Americans are realizing that enough is 
enough,Canada'scriminal-justice policies under Stephen Harper are 
lurching toward a reflexively lock-em-up mindset. To quote from a 
February 2012 letter to the Canadian government from the Global 
Commission on Drug Policy - a blue-ribbon group whose members include 
several prominent conservatives, including Reagan-era U.S. secretary 
of state George Shultz - "with the proposed implementation of 
mandatory prison sentences for minor cannabis-related offences under 
Bill C-10, Canada is at the threshold of continuing to repeat the 
same grave mistakes as other countries."

Drug decriminalization once was mostly the province of campus 
leftists and fringe libertarians. As the example of Gustin Reichbach 
shows, the cause is increasingly moving into the political 
mainstream. It's time that all of us - on up to Canada's prime 
minister - started opening our minds to new approaches for dealing with drugs.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom