Pubdate: Tue, 29 Jan 2013
Source: Rome News-Tribune (GA)
Copyright: 2013 Rome News-Tribune
Contact:  http://www.romenews-tribune.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1716
Author: Marie Myung-Ok Lee
Note: Marie Myung-Ok Lee is a novelist who teaches at Columbia and 
Brown universities. She wrote this for the Los Angeles Times.
Page: 4A

OVERKILL IN THE WAR ON POT

As a candidate in 2008, Barack Obama emphatically stated that medical 
marijuana use was an issue best left to the states. One of the first 
promises he made as the newly elected president was that he was "not 
going to be using Justice Department resources to try to circumvent 
state laws."

This was even reiterated formally in the socalled Ogden memo of 2009, 
in which the Department of Justice instructed U. S. attorneys that 
federal enforcement should apply only to medical marijuana operations 
that were not in clear compliance with state law.

Obama has since "clarified" those promises, but it still makes no 
sense that Matthew R. Davies, a business school graduate who set out 
in 2009 to create a medical marijuana dispensary that would be in 
full compliance with California law, is facing up to 15 years in 
prison - with a mandatory five-year sentence.

This is just one more puzzling incident in the history of a president 
who not only made these promises but has also admitted to heavy 
recreational use of marijuana himself in his youth. As a secondterm 
president, with little to lose, why is he continuing his odd campaign 
on a state-approved industry that employs people, pays taxes and 
distributes a safe and clinically useful product?

Lost in this fray is the fact that marijuana is medicine.

My son is autistic and has an autoimmune gastrointestinal problem for 
which, at my suggestion, his doctor prescribed him Marinol ( a 
synthetic THC drug). When that proved ineffective, the doctor agreed 
to prescribe medical cannabis, which is legal in Rhode Island where 
we were living and, unlike in some states, such as California, is 
approved for pediatric use.

At the time, our son was eating his clothes. Whether as an autistic 
behavior or because of gastric pain, we weren't sure; but every day, 
unless we had him shirtless, he would consume the entire front of his 
cotton shirt, and sometimes his jacket, on the bus to and from school.

Medical marijuana cured him. But it wasn't as easy as running out and 
buying him a joint. When we first considered cannabis, my husband and 
I made a decision not to procure it illegally. That was complicated 
because although medical marijuana was legal in Rhode Island at the 
time, dispensaries were not, and we needed information about what 
kind of marijuana might help our son.

There are hundreds of strains of cannabis, with varying clinical 
properties - anxiety relief, sleep promotion, analgesia, anti-nausea 
- - and the ways they are processed also affect the way they work.

I realize that some people use dispensaries to purchase cannabis for 
recreational use, but I can attest that the cannabis experts at the 
out-of-state dispensaries we consulted were focused on the medical 
properties of the marijuana they sold. They shared their considerable 
knowledge to help us find the particular strain that cured our son's 
pica (the medical name for eating nonfood items).

I keep a corduroy jacket with a half-nibbled sleeve as a reminder of that day.

Our doctor, who started out as a healthy skeptic, was so impressed 
and moved by our son's experience that he asked if I'd speak with 
another parent in a similar situation. This woman was desperate for help.

Her son was even more destructive and aggressive than ours, and she 
had several children (we have one) and just didn't have the time and 
energy for the kind of trial-and-error experimentation we had done. 
If she'd had access to a good dispensary, things could have been 
different for her.

Without access, a medical marijuana license is a piece of paper.

Even with the attentive grower we found in Rhode Island, we ran into 
problems, including a pest infestation and a robbery. Then came an 
even more devastating obstacle: After a year or so, he informed us he 
was giving up growing because he needed to find work. If there had 
been a dispensary in Rhode Island, he could have sold his excess 
there. But because he wanted to follow the law - which meant patients 
could only pay his actual costs - he was in an economic bind.

For a medical marijuana patient, a well-run, reliable dispensary like 
Matthew Davies' should be a basic patient right. There is scientific 
consensus that cannabis has useful clinical benefits, and unlike 
synthetic pharmaceuticals, it has almost no toxicity.

An article in the Atlantic estimates that prosecuting Davies' 
dispensary is going to run more than a million dollars, not to 
mention putting a man with two small children and no criminal record 
in prison for five to 15 years.

The federal government has charged Davies with cultivating marijuana. 
It contends he "sought to make large profits," which, if true, might 
have put him out of compliance with California law. He has insisted 
he violated no state laws. Putting that issue aside, it is clear that 
he was operating transparently and attempting to stay within the law. 
Is he really the biggest threat federal law enforcers can find to prosecute?

When large banks illegally game the system and ruin people's lives 
with subprime mortgages, instead of prosecution, our government bails 
them out and allows the CEOs huge bonuses. And yet a person who 
creates a business that provides safe, reliable medicine that 
patients rely on may have his life upended for following state law.

According to press accounts, Davies' business is transparent, 
efficient and provides professional service - all things worthy of 
praise. It has the additional social benefits of both employing 
people and helping law enforcement by keeping illicit marijuana off 
the streets. If a well-run, meticulously inventoried, 
state-law-compliant place is a target for federal action, no 
dispensary is safe.

According to Marijuana Policy Project estimates, there are more than 
1 million medical marijuana patients in the United States. An attack 
on state-approved dispensaries is an attack on patients.

We would consider it inhumane to take away anti-nausea or pain 
medicine from a cancer patient. But when the administration raids 
dispensaries and destroys plants, that is exactly what it was doing.

So what is the lesson here? Smoke marijuana illegally, and you can 
become president. Try to provide a safe, consistent product that 
keeps the trade out of domestic and foreign drug cartels and brings 
in tax revenue, and face 15 years jail time.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom