I have a piece in the Daily Caller advocating, yet again, that the proper way to allow medical marijuana is to change the Controlled Substances Act. I begin complaining about the unprincipled nature of the current marijuana mess in California, and fix some blame. From “The Principled Way to Permit Medical Marijuana.
Unprincipled. That’s what it is. No, not the federal government’s too-long-delayed police crackdown on California’s recreational marijuana industry. That’s right, “recreational,” not “medical”: When Golden State sellers of marijuana bring in $1.5 billion each year, they are clearly doing much more than merely “providing sick people their medicine.”
But the real culprits here are not the people who are breaking both federal and California law. Ultimate blame must fall on enabling officials in cities like Oakland, Los Angeles and Long Beach who have smilingly issued city permits licensing blatantly felonious enterprises.
I note that the Puff the Magic Dragon crowd say that they might not vote for Obama over the crack downs, because they claim, it breaks a campaign promise. But they are just holding their breaths. Obama never pledged to allow a commercial MJ industry to thrive unchecked. Besides, it was unprincipled to run on a plank of violating one’s oath of office instead of on changing the law, namely the Controlled Substances Act, to permit the medicinal use of marijuana.
Then I point out how some marijuana distributors have become so emboldened, they actually sued cities that refused them to set up shop, and quote a court of appeals ruling extinguishing that argument. I then note a friend who receives pain relief from his MS where medical marijuana is legal, and conclude:
He showed me a marijuana spray his doctor legally prescribed that, he told me, effectively relieves his pain using precisely measured doses, without also creating a high. And, he obtained the medicine privately and respectably at a pharmacy, rather than having to patronize a marijuana store to buy a baggie of bud and rolling paper based on a doctor’s “letter.”
As it stands now, the CSA states that cannabis has no medicinal uses, another example of the lack of principle in this field. No law should be based on such a blatant falsehood. The time has come to bring the federal statute into conformity with current medical knowledge. Amending the CSA would bring order to the current anarchic system of medical marijuana dispensing and allow suffering people to obtain needed relief by prescription, while still outlawing the development of a recreational pot industry.
It is maddening that our cowardly politicians don’t ever mention the obvious answer to the medical marijuana issue.
