VIA CNN.COM:

Court: Dying can be charged for using marijuana

SAN FRANCISCO, California (AP) — A California woman whose doctor says marijuana is the only medicine keeping her alive is not immune from federal prosecution on drug charges, a federal appeals court ruled Wednesday.

The case was brought by Angel Raich, an Oakland mother of two who suffers from scoliosis, a brain tumor, chronic nausea and other ailments. On her doctor’s advice, she eats or smokes marijuana every couple of hours to ease her pain and bolster a nonexistent appetite as conventional drugs did not work.

The Supreme Court ruled against Raich two years ago, saying that medical marijuana users and their suppliers could be prosecuted for breaching federal drug laws even if they lived in a state such as California where medical pot is legal.

Because of that ruling, the issue before the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals was narrowed to the so-called right to life theory: that marijuana should be allowed if it is the only viable option to keep a patient alive.

Raich, 41, began sobbing when she was told of the decision and said she would continue using the drug.

“I’m sure not going to let them kill me,” she said. “Oh my God.”

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Okay.

Let’s eat some hot facts for breakfast, shall we?

Cannabis is FAR less harmful than many other drugs, including many legal ones. 200 aspirin will kill you; marijuana (alone) has never killed a single human being, ever, including the guy who ate several pounds of hash to see if it would (he got sick for about 24 hours). Long term effects of pot are not as bad as those of cigarettes, alcohol, and fast food. (I say cigarettes because, though a joint has the same tar as an unfiltered cig (but no nicotine), most pot smokers smoke one or a few joints daily (or less), whereas cigarette smokers tend to smoke 20+, so the lung damage is usually, but not always, far worse with cigarettes. Plus, nicotine is a powerfully addictive stimulant, and the cannabinoid compound is minimally, if at all, physically addictive.)

So it’s not a safety issue, period. There’s no way in *hell* that one could call it a safety issue and still leave alcohol as a legal drug in any form. In fact, the source of anti-marijuana (and anti-LSD) laws is fascinating and worth a read; there’s no doubt in those facts that the origin of both bans is political, and has been from the beginning. You can find more and information on the original drug laws here, here and even here.

The above fact alone makes it absolutely criminal to deny this drug to the sick and/or dying, nevermind anybody else (there are compelling arguments that the Constitution doesn’t allow the Federal government to forbid adults from ingesting any substance they want). If there is an afterlife, a lot of doctors out there will be facing a very angry Hippocrates on the other side of the veil…Including the ones who prescribed in secret, or whispered advice, but were too chickenshit to use their clout as respected citizens to do anything about a cruel, misinformed law.

The illegality is also not supported by the general public, especially the second someone they know gets sick. A friend of mine had a high-up local government official call in confidence to try and find a dealer for someone he knew who had cancer. The same official is too cowardly about losing his job to say anything publicly, though, which I suspect is the case in most places. And almost without fail, the members of the public who are in favor of criminalization are shockingly misinformed about what the actual, known, tabulated, societal effects of criminalization are.

Illegality not only does nothing to stem usage, it actually encourages it. This is to the vast financial and political benefit of policing organizations, local on up to International. The “War on Drugs” is one where bad guys fight bad guys on our home turf, and the casualties are almost all civilians. For every real drug dealer in jail, there’s thousands of innocent teenagers, parents, and others who are stuck in the penal system, wasting taxpayer money at an astonishing rate while losing their jobs and being separated from their families for committing a crime no more serious than drinking (or sometimes just possessing) alcohol. If marijuana was legal, the street trade in it would die overnight (since, um, it’s a weed; paying for it would make as much sense as buying dandelions). It could be regulated in broad daylight and we could find and punish people who gave it to kids, same as with alcohol and cigarettes. Also, importantly, we could give our children real information about it instead of the lies left over from Reefer Madness and D.A.R.E., the unearthing of which almost always send kids running for a joint (and who knows what else, since if you lied about pot, what else might you have lied about?). Most kids, if they knew the truth about pot, probably wouldn’t try it (being lazy and stupid are not things most kids find “cool”)…but if they did, they could get ahold of it without going to the crackhouse downtown to find some, eliminating that “gateway” effect that’s caused by fraternizing with hard-drug dealers (all of whom try to “upgrade” kids off of pot and onto something more addictive) and junkies. And when the kids got caught, they could be punished by their parents or with an appropriate slap-on-the-wrist instead of being treated like, and exposed to, hardened criminals.

Also, legalizing and regulating pot would free up vast amounts of wasted resources to control other drugs, the kind that form terrible physical addictions that destroy people’s lives, and cause endless crime between drug lords and junkies, and violence perpetrated by both groups upon the general populace — none of which violence comes from pot, except where the money in the illegal trade is involved, which, as I said, would evaporate overnight without the government support of the illegal market.

I am in favor of regulation over criminalization in 90% of cases, because many of the above reasonings apply to other drugs, especially when it comes to the lucrativeness of the black market for bad guys and the violence caused, and money wasted, by the Drug War. However, at least in the case of other drugs — cocaine, heroin, X, etc. — there is a medical basis for the (generally badly executed) attempt to keep the drugs away from people. (Though for some reason we can still recognize the medicinal benefit of properly used cocaine, heroin, and amphetamines.)

In the case of pot and LSD, though, where addiction and physical harm is relatively minimal, and there are known medical benefits* when used under proper supervision, the mistakes of criminalization are compounded, sometimes to a horrifying degree.

Thanks to benchilada, for the excuse to write something down that I’ve been meaning to. There’s a fantastic 100-comment discussion on this article in his blog, if you’re interested.

-PD

*Yes, there are known benefits to both drugs, all of which need further study, but it’s very hard to do those studies thanks to the lies and taboos. Do we cover our eyes now and “just prefer not to know” how some substances might help our sick because we’re uncomfortable with the topic? Why aren’t we uncomfortable giving heroin to trauma victims or using cocaine to numb surgical sites, then? ….These are sick people we’re talking about. We’ve overcome our discomfort of emptying their bedpans because we love them, but we can’t let them have a substance we’ve grown up thinking is evil, even when we know that isn’t true?