Legaliiiize It (well at least medicinally anyway...)

I apologize in advance for the length of this post, but it has been long in the works. And there MAY be a prize for you at the endthereisnot. At this point, the fact that there is still a near total prohibition against marijuana, and even medical marijuana is still under attack despite even wider support, is disgraceful. The post-election polls on public support of legalization of marijuana show a large amount of support for legalization. Even with this support, especially by those who likely voted for Obama, the administration is still discussing ways to combat legalization in Washington and Colorado, including amongst "Senior White House and Justice Department officials." Not to put too fine of a point on it, but this is essentially spitting in the faces of many of the "hopey changey" generation of Obama voters, as well as the voters in Washington and Colorado. The problem is even larger for medical marijuana as the public widely finds it to be acceptable but the industry that has grown in states where medical marijuana has been legalized continues to be under attack by the feds. The fact that this such things are still being prosecuted by the DEA is ludicrously awful.

The Washington Post's Dylan Matthews argues, in a version of what I have been meaning to write for a long time (this post has been in my draft for a bit), for the changing of the classification of marijuana for medicinal use. The easiest way to alleviate much of this federal pre-emption talk, as marijuana remains illegal under federal law due to the Control Substance At, in regards to medical marijuana is to reclassify so that it is no longer a Schedule I drug. Which makes a ton of sense as the fact that marijuana is still a Schedule I drug in the first place is borderline scandalous. According to the current scheduling, Heroin, other opiates, and cocaine have more of a medical use and less of a potential for abuse and addiction than marijuana does. To most people, this should come off as patently ridiculous. Aside from old timey laughers like Reefer Madness, you do not have Requiem for a Dream or Trainspotting type depictions of the horrors of marijuana. Not that a drug's depiction in mass culture is the end all and be all, but it does give you a dramatized idea of most of our reality. The scandalous nature really takes route when you read the takes of people like John Schwartz, a theoretical physicist at Caltech and one time MacArthur "genius" Fellow, who is of the opinion that the DEA and National Institute on Drug Abuse ("NIDA") are working in tandem to maintain the prohibition on marijuana. As NIDA determines who receives legal marijuana for research purposes, they can thus withhold it to prevent research on the positive effects of medical marijuana allowing the DEA to refuse to reconsidered the schedulization of marijuana as there has been insufficient research to allow for such a change. What's a little epistemic closure amongst friends? According to physicist and foundation labeled genius rather than some rando pot head Schwartz,

As a physicist, I can assure you that this not how physics works. … We are all expected to act like grownups and accept it gracefully as experiments prove our favorite theories are false. In physics, unlike marijuana policy, we consider the right message to send to be the message that’s true. […]

Consider what American science might look like if all research were run like marijuana research is being run now. Suppose the Institute for Creation Science were put in charge of approving paleontology digs and the science of human evolution. Imagine what would happen to the environment if we gave coal and oil companies the power to block any climate research they didn’t like. (emphasis in the original).

This is the type of atmosphere that those against the federal prohibition of medical marijuana are operating against and it is beyond ridiculous. The issue is not helped by the fact, as pointed out by Rolling Stone magazine, that the current head of the DEA, Michele Leonhart, remains in the position after becoming acting head of the DEA during the Bush administration. In a pointed example of the DEA's backwardness on the benefits of medical marijuana, Ms. Leonheart refused to concede that heroin may be more dangerous than marijuana in a Congressional hearing, ignoring reality as most of us know it. These anti-drug hardliners, up to and including vice president and originator of the term "drug czar" Joe Biden, will ensure that there is no movement on moderating the failed "War on Drugs" despite popular opinion and medical research.

Further, the basis for the Drug War, at least in regards to marijuana, stands on shakier and shakier ground while having seriously detrimental effects that few will acknowledge. In addition to the fact that the continued prohibition of marijuana somewhat indirectly fills the coffers of cartels south of the border, financing the very horrific violence that talking heads in the US love to rail against, arrests for marijuana possession have outpaced arrests for violent crimes since the mid-2000s. Though there is not a one to one correlation since there are likely many more people prone to smoking weed than those prone to committing violent acts, the numbers still seem to present a shocking misuse of resources. There should not be prisons filled to the brim when many of the offenders are there for possession of marijuana.

Hope springs eternal for your author (a Knicks and Mets fan after all), however, and it does seem like the winds of change may be beginning to blow he said hopefully and unsuredly. Patrick Leahy, Chariman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has already requested guidance in regards to legalization of marijuana in Colorado and Washington. President Obama, after his re-election, did state that prosecuting recreational marijuana smokers in states that had legalized marijuana would not be high on his administrations list of priorities while not formally, or expressly, addressing Senator Leahy's request for clarification. This is interesting because he is explicitly stating that officers in the War on Drugs would not go after users while still not supporting legalization and not mentioning anything about the companies and shops that would form the infrastructure of legal marijuana in those states. The situation was similar in California where the DEA did not go after users but would still harass the growers and distributors, the affects of which would then trickle down to the users. Further, his comment "I just want to discourage drug use" seems remarkably similar to DEA chief Leonhart's position of a drug is a drug when pressed to admit that marijuana was a lesser drug than heroin. Congress, however, could still make an end run around the President, as POTUS admits when stating that he must enforce the laws as is, by changing the current federal laws.

Progress has been made on that front, albeit haltingly. The Ending Federal Marijuana Prohibition Act, introduced by representative Jared Polis, would decriminalize marijuana on the federal level and then take allow the various states decide how they would like to approach marijuana. Taking the states rights approach would deal with the pre-emption problem but would, admittedly, cause additional issues between states that legalized being adjacent to those that had not. This, however, could seemingly be addressed on the state level as well with related laws and regulations. Moreover, and probably more importantly, the D.C. US Court of Appeals recently ruled against moving marijuana from a Schedule 1 drug in Americans for Safe Access', a medical marijuana advocacy group, case against the DEA. The court deferred to the DEA's claim that there was a dearth of proper scientific studies stating that marijuana could be used for medicinal purposes and stated that Americans for Safe Access ("ASA") did not have standing as they did not really "suffer an injury-in-fact;" a.k.a. were not, directly, adversely affected by the regulation. The ASA, however, plans to file an appeal in conjunction with the Veterans for Medical Marijuana, who can show a more directly show the adverse effect the regulation is having on members of their group with the hope of taking the issue before the Supreme Court. Although there are no guarantees the Supreme Court would even hear such a case, an appeal to the highest Court in the land could at least give the issue more press than it is currently. Finally, in an indication of just how far the issues has moved in the past decade, recent articles in reputable publications, and I do not mean High Times, have begin to discuss the logistics of legalization of marijuana. A Bloomberg View op-ed last week advocated for clearer warnings on marijuana to be sold so that there is a properly informed consumer. Such labels would offer warnings on operating machinery after consumption, that it is only to be sold to those of a legal age, and a gradation on the potency of the strain similar to the proofing of alcohol. In the same vein, Time magazine considered what the proper level of taxation would be for legal marijuana with the balancing test being that a new income stream through taxation has been offered by proponents of legalization as why it should occur in certain states but too high a level of taxation will foster a black market that will undercut some of the benefits of legalization. These are important questions to consider for Colorado and Washington as they move forward as those two states are currently, whether they like it or not, operating as test cases for the rest of the nation. If the experiments are successful, other states will most likely jump into the legalization fray. And, much like gay marriage, the more states that legalize the more likely that things are to change on the federal level.

Before we get there though, can we all just agree that this classification of marijuana as a schedule 1 drug is absolute bullshit? As a nation, lets collectively see how Washington and Colorado make out and then the 48 remaining states can make a decision on full legalization. But cracking down on medical marijuana, with all the good it does, is insane. As great as it would be if President Obama was true to his word and backed off enforcement, the reclassification of medical marijuana needs to happen now so that this is an issue that neither he nor the rest of us have to worry about. Make medical marijuana, at least, legally on the federal level and the enforcement part will work itself out.


VIDEO: Bob Marley's "Legalize it" from da YouTube.com