Detroit residents soon will have an opportunity to amend the city charter to make possession of marijuana for medical use the city’s lowest law enforcement priority, and entirely eliminate funding for such prosecutions from the city budget.
August 2002 will be the first time in nearly a century that any Michigan citizens have had an opportunity to vote directly on a question relating to substance prohibition. It’s about time.
The notion that the mere possession of plants and their byproducts can be effectively proscribed is ill-conceived. As best-selling author Peter McWilliams pithily observed: “Alcohol prohibition was called the ‘Noble Experiment’ — you wouldn’t think an experiment with such clear-cut results would need to be repeated.”
Although prohibition of heroin and cocaine is equally futile, the inherent danger of those drugs at least provides some rationale for the effort. That justification cannot be made with marijuana.
According to the report of the 1972 National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse, “A careful search of the literature and testimony of the nation’s health officials has not revealed a single human fatality in the United States proven to have resulted solely from ingestion of marihuana.”
Nor has any been reported since.
Meanwhile, the potential medicinal value of marijuana, especially as an anti-nausea agent for chemotherapy patients, has now been recognized by such mainstream medical institutions as the New England Journal of Medicine, the California Medical Association, the American Academy of Family Physicians, and the National Institute of Medicine.
Although opponents argue that synthetic substitutes can provide the same benefits, attempting to treat nausea with medication in pill form can be a Catch-22 as many such patients can’t keep the pills down long enough to realize the therapeutic benefit.
Plus it’s expensive. Marinol, the only FDA approved synthetic, costs $17.25 per 10-milligram dose. Those with chronic conditions such as AIDS patients will typically require three doses per day. This would mean a cost of more than $1,500 a month — in a city where one-quarter of the population has no health insurance.
The active ingredient in marijuana has also proven efficacious in the treatment of some chronic illnesses such as glaucoma and multiple sclerosis. Patients with these afflictions might likewise benefit from the new law.
Indeed, some opponents have attacked the proposal precisely because it does not particularize the list of diseases and symptoms for which medical marijuana may be used.
However, advocates consider this absence of circumscription a strength, believing that such decisions should be left to individual doctors and their patients.
“We are in no better a position to make case-by-case diagnoses than is John Ashcroft,” says organizer Tim Beck, referring to the US Attorney General who recently invoked federal authority to raid so-called “Buyer’s Clubs” for medical marijuana after California voters made them legal under state law.
Similarly, a Detroit city charter amendment does not affect state or federal law. Those higher branches of government could take it upon themselves to continue zealously enforcing their own marijuana prohibition laws.
However, that would require a reallocation of their resources since responsibility for the prosecution of routine marijuana possession cases has always fallen to local law enforcement.
Although politicians have been stubbornly resistant to every proposal to make drug laws less draconian, voters have proven to be more tolerant of new approaches.
Medical use exceptions to marijuana prohibition have already appeared in one form or another on ballots in eight states and the District of Columbia. Such proposals are currently 9-0.
In fact voters may well be ready to declare a more general cease-fire in the “War on Drugs.”
A group called the Campaign for New Drug Policies has already begun circulating another petition proposing to amend our state constitution to require medical treatment rather than incarceration for all first and second offense substance possession charges – regardless of the substance involved. If that petition drive is also successful, the statewide proposal will follow on the November general election ballot.
We might just be seeing the beginning of the end of the second ‘Noble Experiment.’
Maybe this time we’ll actually accept the results and never again put ourselves through this quixotic quest of attempting to save foolish people from the consequences of their own vices — while in the process denying medicine to sick people who desperately need it.
* * *Published as Medical marijuana could be relief for pain and finances in Detroit in the January 7, 2002 edition of the Detroit Free Press
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