Well, here in the States the determination about marijuana's effectiveness as a medicine is made by neither judges nor medical researches, but by politicians.

You've probably missed out on the recent round of anti-marijuana commercials that, in addition to suggesting that the bills you laid down on your last bag went to fund terrorists, implicate marijuana in a number of other heinous acts: shooting your friend in the head while playing with your father's gun, raping a girl at a party, and driving over a little kid on a bike. What infuriates me more than anything about these commercials is that they'd be so goddamned true if they were about alcohol.

I tried to find links to them but failed. I did, however, unintentionally Google up this great letter to the Springfield News-Leader, wherever that is, which reads in part:

Another ad shows two kids hitting a bong in the office of one of their fathers. One kid gets so stoned that he shoots his friend after he finds his father's gun. The flaw in this scenario is that this kid is an imbecile. Pot didn't raise a moron; his parents did. Also, this commercial makes no mention of the fact that Daddy left accessible a fully loaded, shiny pistol for little Johnny to grab.

Finally, the most insulting of all of this propaganda is the ad that shows a couple smoking a pipe together. They giggle and giggle. Then he rapes her. I'm sorry, what? Grass does not induce violence. I have wasted many hours being stoned. It added to my apathy, left me lethargic and bored, made it impossible to work my DVD player, but never gave me the slightest inclination that rape is an option. But then, I'm not a rapist, nor a terrorist, nor simple-minded enough to point a gun at anyone's head.

Use of aspirin has serious consequences.

500 to 1,000 pepole every year die of aspirin overdoses in the US of A.

In 5,000 years of recorded history - no confirmed deaths from pot overdoses.

Which is the more dangerous drug?

On top of all that we have a regular drug war gestapo going after drug users. That is a human rights violation. I'd say the judge ought to be able to rule on those grounds. In fact in Canada most of the judicial opposition to the drug laws is based on human rights violations.

Here is what a signer of the American Declaration of Independence had to say about medical freedom:

"Unless we put medical freedom into the Constitution, the time will come when medicine will organize an undercover dictatorship. To restrict the art of healing to one class of men, and deny equal privilege to others, will be to constitute the Bastille of medical science. All such laws are un-American and despotic, and have no place in a Republic. The Constitution of this Republic should make special privilege for medical freedom as well as religious freedom." abridged quote --Benjamin Rush, M.D., a signer of the Declaration of Independence

You see Joe the government is interfering with a natural right. Now the legislature can regulate in very limited ways re: natural rights. It cannot prohibit their exercise. American Judges should have the courage that our cousins up North do.

The government should be allowed to regulate purity, quality, labeling etc. It does not have the ability to prohibit. Under natural rights theory. So the legislature has exceeded it's bounds. You are not seeing judicial usurpation in Canada. If anything the Judges have been way too accomodating to ther legislature giving them something like 3+ years to fix the problem.

I actually can get by the DVD controls (they're fairly drug-user friendly), my problem is that I have to start the film over three or four times before I can figure out what's going on.

The effect of marijuana on people varies quite a bit, like alcohol. I have never seen it induce violence, however. I lived in Amsterdam for a couple of years. Marijuana is such a natural part of leisure and the social scene for a lot of people, in particular young to babybooming professionals, that I wouldn't even call it part of the "drug culture", unless you wanted to add in alcohol (which in moderate to immoderate doses actually is far more impairing). It's a frequent postprandial treat for perfectly "normal" people, and there are a lot of upscale coffeeshops where you can order it after dessert, and then of course you order a second dessert. (The Dutch are a great people by the way, they're both diverse and tolerant, and in some ways less hysterical than Americans.)

I have to agree with Joe's basic point however. There is no constitutional right to drug use (but maybe it's buried somewhere in the penumbras at this point), which means it's an issue for the legislature. Maybe the issue is enforcement zeal: as in when does it start getting ridiculous to send my grandmother to jail for 5 years for downloading Frank Sinatra oldies.

Re: The Evils of Aspirin,

I think even Ronald Reagan implied at one point that aspirin could lead to rape.

Medical Marijuana in the US. A recent amendment to H.R. 2799 that was shot down 152 to 273. If you navigate to page H7302 (it takes two links to ge to that page), about a third of the way down is the debate, including debate about gateway issues, health issues, failure of WoD, etc.

http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/D?d108:12:./temp/~bdir1h::

If you have no Constitutional right to drug use you have no right to breathe or to have a family or design computers or walk on the public way.

None of these are mentioned in the Big C.

However, giving due respect to Amdmts. 9 & 10, the court now finds you have a right to Liberty. This was the basis of the recent Lawrence decision. Liberty means you may do as you please as long as you don't infringe on the Liberty of others.

On top of this for millenia peole had the right to self medicate. No law can violate inherent human rights. Period.

What Gabriel really means is that no Amendment has been passed giving the Legislature the right to control medicine.

The Constitution is not about the Rights of the People. It is about the limits on Government. Thus no reason to enumerate rights. Read IX and X again.

On top of that you will note that there once was an alcohol Ammendment. Where is the pot Amdmt.?

m simon is absolutely right. that does not mean we cannot take action against very lethal and destructive drugs such as crack and heroin. it simply means that there is a presumption of liberty in our system that our laws must abide by. the rights of the people shall not be abridged by the actions of government for the same reasons that they cannot be violated by the actions of the people acting against each other. when we deny rights to each other, or when the government denies its responsibility to protect and advance the rights of the people who are in themselves the substance of that government, all rights cease to have meaning.

to paraphrase nathaniel brandon: you cannot deny to others the rights you claim for yourself.

to paraphrase hillel: do not do unto others that which is hateful unto yourself.

to paraphrase the lawrence decision as could be applied to "moralist" drug laws: get your grubby hands off of my non-abusive non-addicted occasional moderate drug using life.

Well, actually the new construction is "Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Ecstasy".

im happy with that. just make sure its none of that pma or dxm garbage.

What people here are ignoring is that the issue isn't whether or not there should be marijuana prohibition or the seriousness of the offense. The question is why are we allowing the courts to destroy democracy by supplanting their judgment for the political process. Our political system should be deciding the question, not the courts.

I got busted for a stem and seeds back in 1977 and I told the trooper that's not pot, that's a stem and some seeds. The trooper replied, "it's all marijuana son, it's all marijuana." At the jail, after allowing me to follow him in my own vehicle, I asked the trooper, "don't you think they'll legalize pot in a few years?" He replied, "that's what I'm afraid of son, that's what I'm afraid of." I don't think they'll ever legalize it in the US. The local, city/county, governments receive too much money from the federal government to fight it and that's too much money to live without.

who is this "they" of whom you speak?

its the voters in this country that will decide such things. the voting public is a group to which many of us here belong. therefore as i see it, it is an "us" not a "they".

i think sensible drug laws are quite a reasonable thing to expect. they wont just happen on their own, but we can be succesful in bringing about that kind of change.

as for the questions of judicial activism, i do agree that i would rather see popular activism, but there is something to be said about the degree to which the drug war undermines every presumption of liberty that could be said to exist within american laws. the courts play a role in that. i do not think they should play the only role by any means, but that does not mean they have no part to play either.

personally i think this also all relates to our support of the war against terror. for all those who are concerned about losing freedom due to the war against terror, i would turn their attention to the drug war. our loss of freedom is not some eventuality that will occur if we continue to hunt down those who are trying to deprive us of freedom by depriving us of life (talking about terrorism here), it is something that has already been in place for a long time because of the drug war.

in fact i think nothing could be a better plan for advancing freedom than continuing to pursue the war on terror vigorously hand in hand with ending the drug war (and preventing the kind of creative prohibition the movie and music cartels are working towards).

"If you have no Constitutional right to drug use you have no right to breathe"

This is a slight exaggeration in that even a strict constructionist would have to acknowledge that Life necessarily includes breathing.

However, I think I should take back the broad statement that there is no constitutional right to drug use. I see no compelling state interest in restricting my right to recreational drug use.

Boy do I miss that Warren Court...

The question is why are we allowing the courts to destroy democracy by supplanting their judgment for the political process. Our political system should be deciding the question, not the courts.

Actually, the courts are part of our political system. It's not the courts that destroy democracy, it is the Bill of Rights and other amendments, added to the original Constitution as an express limit on majority rule. That's the Liberal in "Liberal Democracy". That's why we don't want a theocratic Shiite popular democracy in Iraq.

The courts are supposed to be judicially active: if they weren't, they would not be performing their role in protecting individual liberties from the tyranny of the majority in our system of checks and balances.

You have to first establish that the right to engage in recreational drug use (at least drugs that are no worse than alcohol) is necessarily outside of the realm of those individual liberties that the State has no business regulating.

Actually, Gabriel, you have how our system is constructed completely backwards. And the idea that the burden of proof is on showing that a particular field of legislation, in this case drug use, is "outside of the realm of those individual liberties" is on myself is also exactly backwards. The presumption is that representative democracy is in charge.

With such terrible decisions as Lawrence, we have a "tyranny of the minority" in judicial rule.

Robin,

The Reason for the Bill of Rights is to show that minorities do have Rights. America is not a democracy. It is a limited government republic. The powers granted the government are in the document.

Governments under the theory of natural liberty on which our government is based (see Declaration of Independence) do not have the power to regulate sexual behavior among consenting adults. The fact that such regulation was customary does not prove it's correctness.

Similarly before the turn of the 20th Century it was thought that government didn't have the power to control medicine and prohibit commerce in certain substances. That was reflected in two ways. To prohibit pot they just raised the tax on it until no one would buy at those prices. The black market was much cheaper. The second was a Constitutional Amdmt. to prohibit alcohol. Of course our Constitutinal reasoning has been much debased since then.

I hope to bring the original ideas back. They were pretty good when invented and seem better today.

Government out of my bedroom and out of my wallet.

Balagan,

Uh, heroin and cocaine were once over the counter. The trouble didn't begin until the substances were prohibited.

Perhaps we can't handle freedom as well as our predecessors. Or perhaps you think we should just start slow. Which is not a bad idea.

Perhaps we should start slow but I favor informed consent. You can get any thing you want by acknowledgeing the risks and signing for them.

After all 100 aspirin can kill you. You can get all you want over the counter.

coke and heroin are quite deadly and addictive. yes prohibition is a large part of that, but not all of it. i do not think full scale legalization is around the corner, nor do i think it should be.

if we are speaking only about the principle of the thing then yes, in a healthier, more actively self informed and self reliant society it makes sense that distributed self regulation would be the best means of dealing with what a person puts into their own body, even in the case of deadly addictive substances.

however as it stands now, heroin and coke are much more deadly and addictive than aspirin. the entire reality of these "hard drugs" is drenched in blood. much of it is the fault of our policies, but i do not believe that the drugs themselves do not share any of the blame (no i dont mean literally - im not suggesting that drugs are persons under the constitution or anything - and after some responses on this site i wouldnt be surprised if someone misunderstood me and thought thats what i meant).

if we agree that our current drug policies are harmful, the question becomes how we get from where we are to where we want to be. i dont think its necessary to centrally plan what the society of tomorrow will look like. all we have to do is take good steps along the way.

in the case of our drug laws in general, i would think a good first step is decentralization of the source of moderate and mild drugs (thereby providing distributed competition to the violent cartels) through sensible steps of decriminalization. allow for the possesion and growth of small amounts of pot (even though i personally cant stand pot - no matter what any of my pot head friends may say, it does make you more stupid over time), de-prioritization of ecstacy, acid, and other "party drug" legal crackdowns; strengthening penalties for fake pills that are made of pma and dxm (the cause of the vast majority of "ecstacy" related hospitalization); repeal of horrible laws like the rave act; broad support for harm reduction methods like dancesafe; and putting the pharmacorps in direct competition with the drug cartels (im open for suggestions on this one of course - its just sometime about corporations going up against cartels that appeals to me).

the real way to deal with the hard drugs is to diminish availability at the source and to deal directly with the question of why so many people are taking drugs like coke and heroin to begin with. just as a hardcore vicodin addiction isnt just a matter of "i can do whatever i want with my body" casual recreational drug use, a coke or heroin habit is indictative of something very fucked up in a persons life. sometimes that may stay limited to that person... most times it isnt, and it directly destroys the lives of everyone around them. the same is simply not true for other drugs like pot, ecstacy, acid, shrooms, etc unless the person taking them is a complete and total idiot who is abusing anything they can get their hands on. in which case the people in their lives already had a problem with them anyway.

with drugs like coke and heroin we also have to look at what the trade is doing to the nations who are our primary suppliers. the drug war may have helped cause the damage to places like colombia, afghanistan, and others in the first place. but now that the damage is done, it will take more than legalizaton to recover from that damage.

so no, i dont think its enough to say lets just legalize everything and everyone can do whatever they want to themselves. first of all, its not practical - we wont see legal victories this way. second of all, its not desireable. there are very real problems with hardcore drug abuse that go beyond the capabilities of drug treatment programs to fix. so yes, i take an incremental approach to sensible drug laws.

where i was talking about pharmacorps vs drug cartels above, i said "sometime" but meant "something". any other mistakes or incoherence can be attributed to my very sleep deprived current state, which i am going to remedy by getting myself to sleep right about now. if anyone wants any more comments out of me in the meantime they are going to have to go get a no-knock warrant.

now i, i dont do drugs.
i smoke marijuana.