Abstract
Scholars share essays on American states' broad marijuana prohibitions.
< Efforts like this rally in Canada have brought nation-wide medical marijuana reform. Cannabis Culture, Flickr CC
Every month since the fall of 1982, Irvin Rosenfeld receives 300 joints, around nine ounces of pot, courtesy of the federal government. Packed tightly in a tin canister, they are delivered via Fedex to a local pharmacy. The Fort Lauderdale stockbroker, now 60, suffers from a degenerative bone disease—multiple congenital cartilaginous exostoses—that causes painful tumors, a condition he believes to be much relieved by smoking marijuana. What’s more, he credits it with arresting the growth of the tumors and allowing him to live a relatively normal life. The pot itself is grown on a 12-acre federal farm at the University of Mississippi, the sole producer of federally legal marijuana since 1968. The plants are stored in a massive and securely guarded steel vault and then sent to Raleigh, N.C. where they are dried and prepared and rolled.
And yet, the government that provides Rosenfeld with the drug still classifies marijuana as a Schedule 1 substance. This puts it on par with heroin, LSD, and ecstasy, but renders it more dangerous than cocaine. It also makes research outside the narrow confines of the University of Mississippi’s lab nigh on impossible. The federal government claims with unyielding certainty that cannabis has no “accepted medicinal use.” Why then does it play the part of small-time dealer to people like Rosenfeld?
The answer has to do with a narrowly defined “compassionate protocol” of the National Institute on Drug Abuse’s Investigational New Drug Program (IND). The program was started in the late ‘70s when another Floridian, Robert Randall, successfully argued that pot was essential in treating the glaucoma he had suffered since his teens. First, however, Randall had to fend off cultivation charges after the pot he grew on his sun porch was discovered in a raid on his neighbor’s house. Armed with cache of supporting research—including the results of exhaustive tests he had undergone—Randall argued that marijuana had kept him from going blind. The criminal charges against him were dismissed when D.C. Superior Court Judge James A. Washington determined with poetic succinctness that “the evil he sought to avert, blindness, is greater than that he performed.” (One can still quibble with the implication of maleficence in cultivation and self-treatment.)
Later, in 1978, Randall sued the federal government to obtain legal access to federal pot supplies. This resulted in an out of court settlement that provided him prescriptive access to pot and formed the legal basis for the Compassionate IND program. Randall was the first legal medical marijuana patient since cannabis prohibition began in 1937.
The U.S. government classifies marijuana as a Schedule 1 substance. This puts it on par with heroin, LSD, and ecstasy, but renders it more dangerous than cocaine.
The government began supplying a handful of patients suffering from glaucoma and cancer with cannabis. The program was then expanded to include HIV-positive patients in the late 1980s. At its height, the program enrolled thirty patients. It stopped accepting new patients in 1992, and only four patients continue to receive cannabis from the federal government. Randall was also a prominent figure in a 1987 lawsuit that led the DEA’s chief administrative law judge to conclude that marijuana is “one of the safest therapeutically active substances known to man.” The decision was, of course, ignored by the DEA. Such frustrations led legalization activists to turn to the polls and state ballot initiatives.
Two of medical marijuana’s forms: a smokeable “bud” and hash oil.
Andres Rodriguez, Flickr CC
There are 23 states with laws allowing access to medical marijuana and 18 states that have decriminalized pot, including four states that have legalized the drug for recreational purposes. (It still actively prosecutes suppliers in those states—though the Obama administration has shifted policy away from prosecuting medical marijuana dispensaries in states where its distribution is legal.) All told, around a million Americans use pot legally to treat an ailment.
As for Randall, he never did lose his sight, though he died of AIDS-related complications in 1991. Rosenfeld reckons he has smoked over 200 pounds of government pot—somehere north of 130,000 joints. What’s rather interesting is that both Randall and Rosenfeld’s love for cannabis is Platonic: they claim not to get high from smoking; it’s purely medicinal. As Jake Browne explains in his piece, they may be right: not all weed is the same. Strains can be grown with varying levels of tetrahydrocannabinol, THC, the chemical responsible for “highs,” as well as cannabidiol, a non-psychoactive chemical that can purportedly suppress seizures. So you can make an effective medicine and you can make a pleasurable drug, or both at once.
Efforts to develop effective medication are severely curtailed by federal policy. The DEA, for example, has only issued a single license for the cultivation of marijuana for research, and that to the lab in Mississippi. But as frustrating as the situation is for research, the criminalization of marijuana has been even more disastrous in terms of lives wasted. According to the ACLU, there were over 8 million pot arrests in the U.S. between 2001 and 2010 and about $3.6 billion a year is spent on enforcing marijuana laws. Enforcement is deeply inflected by racial bias, as the brunt of failed War on Drugs policies falls most heavily on communities of color. Marijuana use is roughly equal among Blacks and Whites, yet the former are 3.73 times as likely to be arrested for marijuana possession.
In the meantime, the popularity of the War on Drugs—with its mandatory minimum sentences for possession, its militarized policing, and its mighty contribution to the national trauma of mass incarceration—has plummeted. This displeasure with the status quo, Craig Reinerman argues, is not just some inchoate sentiment. Rather, the hard work of sympathy-gathering, conscience-raising, and coalition-building has converted that outrage into something like a social movement pushing for policy reform. We might even take some grassroots pleasure in the fact that most of gains have been at the state and local levels, and that federal mandates are increasingly seen as irrational. Change is in the air.
But as Wendy Chapkis reminds us, the same air is as suffocating as ever for Drug War casualties behind bars. It is thus imperative that any reform efforts take their plight into consideration. The commuting of sentences for low-level offenders and the expunging of drug-related blemishes from criminal records, which hugely diminish one’s employment and education prospects, are some ideas that come immediately to mind. Otherwise, any solution to the problem of prohibition will likely splinter along the familiarly depressing lines of race and class. Nonetheless the pressure for reform today is very real, and it suggests a future in which people mightn’t suffer so needlessly under the Draconian policies of the past.