75A - PH - MEDICAL MARIJUANA - PROHIBIT

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One Web site devoted. to Proposition 2l 5 contains a letter sent by senior U.S. Customs inspector Mark Johnson to amarijuana-prescribing doctor in July 1998: "As a reminder you may want to tell your `patients' that although they may have received a'prescription' for marijuana from your office it will hold. no weight as far as federal or state laws are concerned. Such was the case a few days ago when. we confiscated less than. a gram of marijuana from one of the people who had put their confidence in you ... This was a stiff S5b0 lesson for someone who probably couldn't afford it, but erroneously placed their trust ii, yeu." There remains corfusior. at the medical_ level, too, but nothing like there used to be. Plenty of doctors maintain that pat's a damaging and addictive narcotic, but more anal. more point to studies confirming its medicinal value. In November, for example, BBC News reported that 80 percent of doctors in the United Kingdom woui.d prescribe medical marijuana to patients with serious illnesses if they were allowed to, according to a study by Medix UK, a Web site for doctors. if statistics like those from the Medix survey are surprising, it's because the evolution of thinking within the medical community has been undermined every step of the way. Even Drug Enforcement Administration administrative law Judge .Francis Young's 1988 acknowledgment that pot "has a currently accepted medical use in treatment in the United States for nausea and vomiting resulting from chemotherapy treatments" got buried. after a while. And of course marijuana's benefits among AIDS patients -- cannabis can help stimulate appetites, for example -- are obscured regularly by pot prejudice and AIDS prejudice. As far back as 1982, then Rep Newt Gin rg~ich wrote to the Journal of the American. Medical Association criticizing the "outdated federal prohibition" of medical marijuana, and the ,~ "bureaucratic interference tt encounters, as reported by Michelle Malkin in the Seattle Times. Sixteen years later, Malkin pointed out, Gingrich was "Speaker of a House that just declared. that marijuana contains no plausible medicinal benefits."' if doctors like Ellis eventually excuse themselves from the medical debate and start furiously signing pot prescriptions, it might be because the medical debate is stuck on repeat. None of the above -- the legal and the medical disputes --particularly matters. In the United States, medicinal marijuana still occupies a place far from the realm of reason. The terms of understanding are primitive. We rely on imagery and hysterical association to direct, and then articulate, our supporUdisdain for the movement. Like all drug debates to emerge in the past 15 years, this one is a closed system, impervious to new information. Progress occurs in spite of the alleged national conversation. Within the conversation, those opposed to medical marijuana have made little rhetorical progress since l 436's now-camp propaganda film "Reefer Madness." As few researchers will deny the drug's medicinal value, its detractors employ abstract versions of morality (it's "evil") and foresight (it's a gateway drug} to make their case. These tools interact with. the presiding convention of all drug debates -- a collective disregard of logic on both sides -- and consequently we no longer ask why pot is evil, or how we can legislate something because it might lead to something worse. (Are forks a gateway weapon.?) Those leading the medical marijuana charge can be dismissed, too: They're potheads, if there's a single obstacle to the acceptance of the drug's medicinal virtue, it's that it's fun, too. The high. that accompanies the pain relief is the un. spoken dozy conservatives can't surmount. That medical marijuana users experience this -- and perhaps even enjoy it -- diminishes their credibility. The high is distilled subversion.. What else could it represent? Like sex, religion and the red menace, its threat lies in its utter ungovernability. 34 75A-43