Prop. 1's implications unclear, concern some

If Police Chief Warren is confused about Prop. 1, I suspect it is because he has not read it. The law is very explicit in what type of documentation patients must have to be protected from arrest: a state issued registry ID card. It is no more difficult than drivers’ licenses, which I would hope police would be familiar with. The patients will send their doctors’ written certifications to the department, the department will verify they are not forged, and then issue a card. The cards will have random numbers on them, along with the patients’ identifying information and an expiration date.

Similar registry systems are working in 10 of the other medical marijuana states. In Rhode Island, legislators make a very similar law permanent, after a trial period, with 85% of the vote. The law is working well and protecting very ill people.

Marijuana, unlike many of those FDA approved medicines (including Tylenol), has never caused an overdose death. It is in many ways far, far safer than the alternatives. Think about it, which is really more dangerous OxyContin or marijuana? It’s no surprise that 30% of all Oregon doctors have recommended that at least one patient use medical marijuana.

First off, patients are not protected by federal law, so they can be pulled over. Even though this was passed, federal law has jurisdiction over state law, so patients aren’t exactly safe from law enforcement.

Also, 30% is not a high percentage. And since Oregon has enacted the Death With Dignity Act, you may want to seek a statistic that does not include a bias. It would be helpful to cite the source where you got this statistic.

its quite easy to find the percentage of docs that have written recommendation. go to the state of oregons medical marijuana programs site and look at the stats. it tells how many doctors have signed. then just look up how many docs are in oregon. and what the heck does the death with dignity law have to do with any of this? biased about cannabis because a doctor can assist someone who shouldnt have to suffer? you said that like its a bad thing.

oh umm…. the last i checked DEA doesnt do traffic stops and a local police officers JOB is to obey and enforce state laws NOT FEDERAL. thats already been decided by the Supreme Court.

you should check your facts before sounding like a less educated type person.

I’m not going to debate with you about whether physician assisted suicide is right or wrong, however, if a person is going to cite a statistic, maybe it should be from a state that doesn’t permit it? Again, 30% is not a high percentage, so that is not helping your case. It’s not even at the halfway point. And you said it yourself, that stat is from the OREGON’S MEDICAL MARIJUANA PROGRAMS SITE. Try finding a source that is not biased. That’s like telling me that milk prevents cancer because the National Dairy Farmer’s Association said so.

People who have the license to use medical marijuana CAN STILL BE PULLED OVER. An example would be driving under the influence. Anything that impairs your ability to operate a motor vehicle is sufficient for a police officer to pull you over, regardless of the substance being illegal or not.

You should read up on your case law before you come here making a complete fool out of yourself.

Also if you’re referring to this site link text, your stat is nowhere to be found. Did you pull that statistic out of your ass?

I have no idea why it has taken me 3 posts to declare that you’re a moron, however, looking at that site even further, “Number of Oregon-licensed physicians who have signed applications

(MDs and DOs only) 3,034”

Meaning, that those physicians signed the applications that patients filed in order to use medical marijuana NOT voted for the proposal. Also, I’d love to know how you were able to round up the total number of physicians in the state of Oregon. Jesus Christ, I sure hope you didn’t graduate from MSU because apparently they’re letting quite a few people slip through the cracks.

First off, patients are not protected by federal law, so they can be pulled over. Even though this was passed, federal law has jurisdiction over state law, so patients aren’t exactly safe from law enforcement.

Interestingly enough this simply isn’t true. The Federal government has usurped the natural authority of the states. See, in the olden days it was very clear to all those interested that the power of the Federal government was rather limited. Simply because 9 feable minded old idiots of the Supreme Court rule that non-commerce which occurs wholey within the boarders of a state is covered by the Commerce Clause does make them right (see the Dread Scott or Plessy cases if you doubt). If you look ay historical precedent the Federal government would need a Constitutional Amendment similar to Eighteenth Amendment in order to legally maintain jurisdiction.

Ah, the whining of the crybabies. Opponents usually complain about the silliest things when it comes to medical marijuana.

I have to agree with the first poster: it is a license. If a cop can’t accept a State-issued license for ANY activity that the State issues a license for, he has not business being a cop. Period. The requirement to accept the law and uphold it is a basic responsibility of police. Suck it up, you are now living in a medical marijuana State.

Which brings us to their next argument: it’s against federal law. Well, not really. The appeals court in California was forced to review federal law during the San Diego v. California case last summer. They found that the county woudl not be volating federal Controlled Substances Act requirements by issueing medical marijuana cards because the CSA is designed and intended to combat recreational drugs, not to interfere in States’ medical practices. In other words, if your State says that marijuana is legal medicine, then it is because Article One, Section 3 of the US Constitution delineates the powers delegated to the States, qwhich includes the power to regulate and determine the appropriate practice of medicine.

The Assisted Suicide ruling says that only doctors and those licensed to practice medicine should have a say in determining the appropriate practice of medicine. Members of the Justice Department are not qualified to practice or determine the appropriate practice of medicine because they don’t go to medical school and are not trained in medicine. For the layman, that means that cops aren’t doctors and should never have a say in anyone’s medical care except their own. For a cop to say that a doctor is mis-recommending marijuana is to be mightily overstepping his bounds.

Just so you all know, the DEA can walk in to anyone’s house who is a medical marijuana grower and arrest them for growing it because the DEA doesn’t recognize that law. They’ve done it in California and they’ll do it here.

PS My question is how has smoking ever made anyone physically healthier?

Federales, you are correct under the current administration, medical marijuana patients are being arrested in California. However, President-elect Obama says he will stop the raids in California and that arresting medical marijuana users is a waste of precious limited resources. And even under the current administration, there has only been one federal arrest and the charges were later dropped here in Oregon. I’m certain they would come after Oregonians before they bothered with Michiganders.

Speaking of the DEA, did you know that most of thier activities are run by Byrne grants? Last Christmas, Pres. Bush cut the Byrne grants from $550 million donw to about $120 million. Those cuts took effect FY o8, or at the beginning of October this year. Most drug task forces are run by Byrne grants. With those grants cut so drastically, it is unlikely that there will be funds available for raiding medical marijuana patients, especially if they are protected from State prosecution by a legal license.

Why are people out there so worried about medical marijuana? It doesn’t hurt you. If someone who is in horrible pain prefers marijuana over vicodin, how does that hurt you? Mind your own business. People have their priorities so out of whack. If John Doe would rather use marijuana for his chronic pain, then let him do it. I think it should just be legalized and taxed for everyone. We let people smoke cigarettes, take massive amounts of prescription drugs LEGALLY, drink alcohol, etc. There is barely any regulation on pumping out all these prescription drugs that may cause suicide and more harm than good, but everybody gets their panties in a bunch over medical marijuana. Get over it.

Michigan State Police are directed to enforce state law, NOT federal law. Although federal agents have the authority to arrest anyone in possession of marijuana (proper name cannabis), in practice, only state police concern themselves with small cannabis offenses. Federal Agents are directed to only go after large cannabis growers and dealers.

Burning anything an inhaling it is damaging to your lungs, of course, but cannabis need not be smoked. By cooking with it, or vaporizing (heating to about 350 degrees to release the active chemical THC but not burning it so no harmful smoke enters your lung)
cannabis can be injested without harmful smoke. Also, even though smoking damages your lungs, oftentimes the benefits of reduced pain, easier sleeping, reduced nausea and increased appetite that cannabis proven to cause can outweigh the smoking harms. For many chemotherapy patients, lack of appetite and vomiting is a main obstacle to convalescence.

Finally, for me, the recreational use of cannabis is akin to how others might drink a beer on a friday evening after a long week of work. I am often very stressed and I used to get debilitating panic attacks before I began to use cannabis. I rarely smoke more than once a week, and it really goes miles towards helping me relax so I can get rest for the next hard week of work. Notice, I don’t drink alcohol, it doesn’t do anything for me but give me a headache. Without cannabis, I’d still be an unproductive member of society.

Well then HM, there already is a pill with THC in it the active ingredient in MJ. That pill is called Marionl. So tell me why you would need it in any other form? It’s because the druggies want a reason to have MJ legal. MJ leads to other drug related crimes either through use of it or crimes surrounding the money around it.

http://articles.latimes.com/2008/may/31/local/me-pot31

Tell me how much fun that neighborhood sounds to you?

Federales Again your not up on your research there . Its been proven by every MMj user out there that has tried marinol and currently use MMJ that it is NOT JUST the THC componet but a MULTITUDE of componets within the plant that gives the effects theat the people that are in pain, suffering, and dieing the releaf they cant get elsewhere. Youll accept a patients word if they say moraphine helps their pain but wont accept it if they say MMJ does? Whats the word for that? There is also current research abroad (as the DEA FDA ETC wont allow research inbto this) that shows this distinction as well. So as someone else said before…stop talking out of the wrong hole

You said I wasn’t up on my research and yet I provided something. At least provide me something to look at before saying there is current research somewhere. So don’t tell me not to talk out of the wrong hole before you say absolutely nothing of value.

Amendment IX

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

Amendment X

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.

Federales Again;
In Oliver Cromwell’s eloquent words, “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken” about the course you and President Bush urge us to adopt to fight drugs. The path you propose of more police, more jails, use of the military in foreign countries, harsh penalties for drug users, and a whole panoply of repressive measures can only make a bad situation worse. The drug war cannot be won by those tactics without undermining the human liberty and individual freedom that you and I cherish.

You are not mistaken in believing that drugs are a scourge that is devastating our society. You are not mistaken in believing that drugs are tearing asunder our social fabric, ruining the lives of many young people, and imposing heavy costs on some of the most disadvantaged among us. You are not mistaken in believing that the majority of the public share your concerns. In short, you are not mistaken in the end you seek to achieve.

Your mistake is failing to recognize that the very measures you favor are a major source of the evils you deplore. Of course the problem is demand, but it is not only demand, it is demand that must operate through repressed and illegal channels. Illegality creates obscene profits that finance the murderous tactics of the drug lords; illegality leads to the corruption of law enforcement officials; illegality monopolizes the efforts of honest law forces so that they are starved for resources to fight the simpler crimes of robbery, theft and assault.

Drugs are a tragedy for addicts. But criminalizing their use converts that tragedy into a disaster for society, for users and non-users alike. Our experience with the prohibition of drugs is a replay of our experience with the prohibition of alcoholic beverages.

I append excerpts from a column that I wrote in 1972 on “Prohibition and Drugs.” The major problem then was heroin from Marseilles; today, it is cocaine from Latin America. Today, also, the problem is far more serious than it was 17 years ago: more addicts, more innocent victims; more drug pushers, more law enforcement officials; more money spent to enforce prohibition, more money spent to circumvent prohibition.

Had drugs been decriminalized 17 years ago, “crack” would never have been invented (it was invented because the high cost of illegal drugs made it profitable to provide a cheaper version) and there would today be far fewer addicts. The lives of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of innocent victims would have been saved, and not only in the U.S. The ghettos of our major cities would not be drug-and-crime-infested no-man’s lands. Fewer people would be in jails, and fewer jails would have been built.

Columbia, Bolivia and Peru would not be suffering from narco-terror, and we would not be distorting our foreign policy because of narco-terror. Hell would not, in the words with which Billy Sunday welcomed Prohibition, “be forever for rent,” but it would be a lot emptier.

Decriminalizing drugs is even more urgent now than in 1972, but we must recognize that the harm done in the interim cannot be wiped out, certainly not immediately. Postponing decriminalization will only make matters worse, and make the problem appear even more intractable.

Alcohol and tobacco cause many more deaths in users than do drugs. Decriminalization would not prevent us from treating drugs as we now treat alcohol and tobacco: prohibiting sales of drugs to minors, outlawing the advertising of drugs and similar measures. Such measures could be enforced, while outright prohibition cannot be. Moreover, if even a small fraction of the money we now spend on trying to enforce drug prohibition were devoted to treatment and rehabilitation, in an atmosphere of compassion not punishment, the reduction in drug usage and in the harm done to the users could be dramatic.

This plea comes from the bottom of my heart. Every friend of freedom, and I know you are one, must be as revolted as I am by the prospect of turning the United States into an armed camp, by the vision of jails filled with casual drug users and of an army of enforcers empowered to invade the liberty of citizens on slight evidence. A country in which shooting down unidentified planes “on suspicion” can be seriously considered as a drug-war tactic is not the kind of United States that either you or I want to hand on to future generations.

Professor Friedman, 1976 Nobel Laureate in economics, now serves as Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution. This letter appeared in the September 7, 1989, issue of The Wall Street Journal. Reprinted by permission of Professor Friedman and The Wall Street Journal, Dow Jones & Co., Inc., 1989.

Bob Dobbs

I really like what you’ve got to say, that’s some real solid stuff. I am not for going out and arresting every drug user. I am not for getting the small time dealers or junkies. I want to go out and get the people who are out there doing the dealing. I see this as a way for drug lords to, from my view, legitimize their business by acquiring medical marijuana distributor licenses. Casual drug users aren’t the problem, its the distributors committing the crimes. I want them, and this is a way for them to legalize their business. I don’t like that, I don’t want my family to grow up in a state that is more important to me than anything with drugs abound. I know, you can say I should just move but I’m not going to run from the problem when voters brought it here. I never said go get the people using the marijuana, maybe I should make that clear. I want the big time distributors and the drug lords, regardless of where they are.

Federales Again;
I think you hae missed the point. when was the last time the Coors cartell had a shoot out with the Miller lite family? The only way to end this is to legalize their business. These are not my words but those of Professor Friedman, 1976 Nobel Laureate in economics. Google Wm. F. Buckley Jr and The war on drugs is lost to read what better men than I have had to say.

“The reign of tears is over. The slums will soon be only a memory. We will turn our prisons into factories and our jails into storehouses and comcribs. Men will walk upright now, women will smile, and the children will laugh. Hell will be forever for rent.”

That is how Billy Sunday, the noted evangelist and leading crusader against Demon Rum, greeted the onset of Prohibition in early 1920. We know now how tragically his hopes were doomed. New prisons and jails had to be built to house the criminals spawned by converting the drinking of spirits into a crime against the state. Prohibition undermined respect for the law, corrupted the minions of the law, created a decadent moral climate-but did not stop the consumption of alcohol.

Despite this tragic object lesson, we seem bent on repeating precisely the same mistake in the handling of drugs.

ETHICS AND EXPEDIENCY

On ethical grounds, do we have the right to use the machinery of government to prevent an individual from becoming an alcoholic or a drug addict? For children, almost everyone would answer at least a qualified yes. But for responsible adults, I, for one, Would answer no. Reason with the potential addict, yes. Tell him the consequences, yes. Pray for and with him, yes. But I believe that we have no right to use force, directly or indirectly, to prevent a fellow man from committing suicide, let alone from drinking alcohol or taking drugs.

I readily grant that the ethical issue is difficult and that men of goodwill may well disagree. Fortunately, we need not resolve the ethical issue to agree on policy. Prohibition is an attempted cure that makes matters worse-for both the addict and the rest of us. Hence, even if you regard present policy toward drugs as ethically justified, considerations of expediency make that policy most unwise.

Consider first the addict. Legalizing drugs might increase the number of addicts, but it is not clear that it would. Forbidden fruit is attractive, particularly to the young. More important, many drug addicts are deliberately made by pushers, who give likely prospects their first few doses free. It pays the pusher to do so because, once hooked, the addict is a captive customer. If drugs were legaily available, any possible profit from such inhumane activity would disappear, since the addict could buy from the cheapest source.

Whatever happens to the number of addicts, the individual addict would clearly be far better off if drugs were legal. Today, drugs are box incredibly expensive and highly uncertain in quality. Addicts are driven to associate with criminals to get the drugs, become criminals themselves to finance the habit, and risk constant danger of death and disease.

Consider next the test of us. Here the situation is crystal clear. The harm to us from the addiction of others arises almost wholly from the fact that drugs are illegal. A recent cominittee of the American Bar Association estimated that addicts commit one-third to one-half of all street crime in the U.S. Legalize drugs, and street crime would drop dramatically. Moreover, addicts and pushers are not the only ones corrupted. Immense sums are at stake. It is inevitable that some relatively low-paid police and other government officials-and some high-paid ones as well-will succumb to the temptation to pick up easy money.

LAW AND ORDER

Legalizing drugs would simultaneously reduce the amount of crime and raise the quality of law enforcement. Can you conceive of any other measure that would accomplish so much to promote law and order?

But, you may say, must we accept defeat? Why not simply end the drug traffic? That is where experience under Prohibition is most relevant. We cannot end the drug traffic. We may be able to cut off opium from Turkey but there are innumerable other places where the opium poppy grows. With French cooperation, we may be able to make Marseilles an unhealthy place to manufacture heroin but there are innumerable other places where the simple manufacturing operations involved can be carried out. So long as large sums of money are involved-and they are bound to be if drugs are illegal-it is literally hopeless to expect to end the traffic or even to reduce seriously its scope. In drugs, as in other areas, persuasion and example are likely to be far more effective than the use of force to shape others in our image.

1. Wm. F. Buckley Jr.

Last summer WFB was asked by the New York Bar Association to make a statement to the panel of lawyers considering the drug question. He made the following statement:

WE ARE speaking of a plague that consumes an estimated $75 billion per year of public money, exacts an estimated $70 billion a year from consumers, is responsible for nearly 50 per cent of the million Americans who are today in jail, occupies an estimated 50 per cent of the trial time of our judiciary, and takes the time of 400,000 policemen — yet a plague for which no cure is at hand, nor in prospect.

Perhaps you, ladies and gentlemen of the Bar, will understand it if I chronicle my own itinerary on the subject of drugs and public policy. When I ran for mayor of New York, the political race was jocular, but the thought given to municipal problems was entirely serious, and in my paper on drugs and in my post-election book I advocated their continued embargo, but on unusual grounds. I had read — and I think the evidence continues to affirm it — that drug-taking is a gregarious activity. What this means, I said, is that an addict is in pursuit of company and therefore attempts to entice others to share with him his habit. Under the circumstances, I said, it can reasonably be held that drug-taking is a contagious disease and, accordingly, subject to the conventional restrictions employed to shield the innocent from Typhoid Mary. Some sport was made of my position by libertarians, including Professor Milton Friedman, who asked whether the police might legitimately be summoned if it were established that keeping company with me was a contagious activity.

I recall all of this in search of philosophical perspective. Back in 1965 I sought to pay conventional deference to libertarian presumptions against outlawing any activity potentially harmful only to the person who engages in that activity. I cited John Stuart Mill and, while at it, opined that there was no warrant for requiring motorcyclists to wear a helmet. I was seeking, and I thought I had found, a reason to override the presumption against intercession by the state.

About ten years later, I deferred to a different allegiance, this one not the presumptive opposition to state intervention, but a different order of priorities. A conservative should evaluate the practicality of a legal constriction, as for instance in those states whose statute books continue to outlaw sodomy, which interdiction is unenforceable, making the law nothing more than print-on-paper. I came to the conclusion that the so-called war against drugs was not working, that it would not work absent a change in the structure of the civil rights to which we are accustomed and to which we cling as a valuable part of our patrimony. And that therefore if that war against drugs is not working, we should look into what effects the war has, a canvass of the casualties consequent on its failure to work. That consideration encouraged me to weigh utilitarian principles: the Benthamite calculus of pain and pleasure introduced by the illegalization of drugs.

A YEAR or so ago I thought to calculate a ratio, however roughly arrived at, toward the elaboration of which I would need to place a dollar figure on deprivations that do not lend themselves to quantification. Yet the law, lacking any other recourse, every day countenances such quantifications, as when asking a jury to put a dollar figure on the damage done by the loss of a plaintiff’s right arm, amputated by defective machinery at the factory. My enterprise became allegorical in character — I couldn’t do the arithmetic — but the model, I think, proves useful in sharpening perspectives.

Professor Steven Duke of Yale Law School, in his valuable book, America’s Longest War: Rethinking Our Tragic Crusade against Drugs, and scholarly essay, ``Drug Prohibition: An Unnatural Disaster,’‘ reminds us that it isn’t the use of illegal drugs that we have any business complaining about, it is the abuse of such drugs. It is acknowledged that tens of millions of Americans (I have seen the figure 85 million) have at one time or another consumed, or exposed themselves to, an illegal drug. But the estimate authorized by the federal agency charged with such explorations is that there are not more than 1 million regular cocaine users, defined as those who have used the drug at least once in the preceding week. There are (again, an informed estimate) 5 million Americans who regularly use marijuana; and again, an estimated 70 million who once upon a time, or even twice upon a time, inhaled marijuana. From the above we reasonably deduce that Americans who abuse a drug, here defined as Americans who become addicted to it or even habituated to it, are a very small percentage of those who have experimented with a drug, or who continue to use a drug without any observable distraction in their lives or careers. About such users one might say that they are the equivalent of those Americans who drink liquor but do not become alcoholics, or those Americans who smoke cigarettes but do not suffer a shortened lifespan as a result.

Curiosity naturally flows to ask, next, How many users of illegal drugs in fact die from the use of them? The answer is complicated in part because marijuana finds itself lumped together with cocaine and heroin, and nobody has ever been found dead from marijuana. The question of deaths from cocaine is complicated by the factor of impurity. It would not be useful to draw any conclusions about alcohol consumption, for instance, by observing that, in 1931, one thousand Americans died from alcohol consumption if it happened that half of those deaths, or more than half, were the result of drinking alcohol with toxic ingredients extrinsic to the drug as conventionally used. When alcohol was illegal, the consumer could never know whether he had been given relatively harmless alcohol to drink — such alcoholic beverages as we find today in the liquor store — or whether the bootlegger had come up with paralyzing rotgut. By the same token, purchasers of illegal cocaine and heroin cannot know whether they are consuming a drug that would qualify for regulated consumption after clinical analysis.

But we do know this, and I approach the nexus of my inquiry, which is that more people die every year as a result of the war against drugs than die from what we call, generically, overdosing. These fatalities include, perhaps most prominently, drug merchants who compete for commercial territory, but include also people who are robbed and killed by those desperate for money to buy the drug to which they have become addicted.

This is perhaps the moment to note that the pharmaceutical cost of cocaine and heroin is approximately 2 per cent of the street price of those drugs. Since a cocaine addict can spend as much as $1,000 per week to sustain his habit, he would need to come up with that $1,000. The approximate fencing cost of stolen goods is 80 per cent, so that to come up with $1,000 can require stealing $5,000 worth of jewels, cars, whatever. We can see that at free-market rates, $20 per week would provide the addict with the cocaine which, in this wartime drug situation, requires of him $1,000.

My mind turned, then, to auxiliary expenses — auxiliary pains, if you wish. The crime rate, whatever one made of its modest curtsy last year toward diminution, continues its secular rise. Serious crime is 480 per cent higher than in 1965. The correlation is not absolute, but it is suggestive: crime is reduced by the number of available enforcers of law and order, namely policemen. The heralded new crime legislation, passed last year and acclaimed by President Clinton, provides for 100,000 extra policemen, even if only for a limited amount of time. But 400,000 policemen would be freed to pursue criminals engaged in activity other than the sale and distribution of drugs if such sale and distribution, at a price at which there was no profit, were to be done by, say, a federal drugstore.

So then we attempt to put a value on the goods stolen by addicts. The figure arrived at by Professor Duke is $10 billion. But we need to add to this pain of stolen property, surely, the extra-material pain suffered by victims of robbers. If someone breaks into your house at night, perhaps holding you at gunpoint while taking your money and your jewelry and whatever, it is reasonable to assign a higher ``cost’‘ to the episode than the commercial value of the stolen money and jewelry. If we were modest, we might reasonably, however arbitrarily, put at $1,000 the ``value’‘ of the victim’s pain. But then the hurt, the psychological trauma, might be evaluated by a jury at ten times, or one hundred times, that sum.

But we must consider other factors, not readily quantifiable, but no less tangible. Fifty years ago, to walk at night across Central Park was no more adventurous than to walk down Fifth Avenue. But walking across the park is no longer done, save by the kind of people who climb the Matterhorn. Is it fair to put a value on a lost amenity? If the Metropolitan Museum were to close, mightn’t we, without fear of distortion, judge that we had been deprived of something valuable? What value might we assign to confidence that, at night, one can sleep without fear of intrusion by criminals seeking money or goods exchangeable for drugs?

Pursuing utilitarian analysis, we ask: What are the relative costs, on the one hand, of medical and psychological treatment for addicts and, on the other, incarceration for drug offenses? It transpires that treatment is seven times more cost-effective. By this is meant that one dollar spent on the treatment of an addict reduces the probability of continued addiction seven times more than one dollar spent on incarceration. Looked at another way: Treatment is not now available for almost half of those who would benefit from it. Yet we are willing to build more and more jails in which to isolate drug users even though at one-seventh the cost of building and maintaining jail space and pursuing, detaining, and prosecuting the drug user, we could subsidize commensurately effective medical care and psychological treatment.

I HAVE spared you, even as I spared myself, an arithmetical consummation of my inquiry, but the data here cited instruct us that the cost of the drug war is many times more painful, in all its manifestations, than would be the licensing of drugs combined with intensive education of non-users and intensive education designed to warn those who experiment with drugs. We have seen a substantial reduction in the use of tobacco over the last thirty years, and this is not because tobacco became illegal but because a sentient community began, in substantial numbers, to apprehend the high cost of tobacco to human health, even as, we can assume, a growing number of Americans desist from practicing unsafe sex and using polluted needles in this age of AIDS. If 80 million Americans can experiment with drugs and resist addiction using information publicly available, we can reasonably hope that approximately the same number would resist the temptation to purchase such drugs even if they were available at a federal drugstore at the mere cost of production.

And added to the above is the point of civil justice. Those who suffer from the abuse of drugs have themselves to blame for it. This does not mean that society is absolved from active concern for their plight. It does mean that their plight is subordinate to the plight of those citizens who do not experiment with drugs but whose life, liberty, and property are substantially affected by the illegalization of the drugs sought after by the minority.

I have not spoken of the cost to our society of the astonishing legal weapons available now to policemen and prosecutors; of the penalty of forfeiture of one’s home and property for violation of laws which, though designed to advance the war against drugs, could legally be used — I am told by learned counsel — as penalties for the neglect of one’s pets. I leave it at this, that it is outrageous to live in a society whose laws tolerate sending young people to life in prison because they grew, or distributed, a dozen ounces of marijuana. I would hope that the good offices of your vital profession would mobilize at least to protest such excesses of wartime zeal, the legal equivalent of a My Lai massacre. And perhaps proceed to recommend the legalization of the sale of most drugs, except to minors.

I know a couple of people with serious spinal injuries, and they would much rather use medical marijuana, then be doped up/out of it by vicoden, oxycotin, etc. MJ is a lot better for you than the FDA approved synthetic heroin and opium.