Discussion.

To come out in favour of smth, a ceasefire, to enact a law, to fade, physical effects of drug abuse, a withdrawal symptom, a benign substance, to be exempt from …, (a) small-time (user), to put smth to use, a smoke-screen for …, crude (marijuana).

Article 1

Where There’s Smoke,

There’s Medicine

Bass Harbor, Maine (USA)

Marijuana became semi-respectable in Maine on November 2^nd, 1999 by the wish of 61% of the state’s voters. The new law allows patients with certain medical conditions, who have tried other remedies and found them ineffective, to grow, possess and use small amounts of the drug on a doctor’s advice.

Local police and sheriffs’ associations opposed the referendum, naturally enough. But their stand was undermined when Mark Dion, the sheriff of Cumberland County in the south-west of the state, came out publicly in favour of it, calling the new law “a humanitarian ceasefire”.

Maine is the latest of the seven states – the others are Alaska, Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, Oregon and Washington – to enact such a law as a result of citizens’ ballot initiatives. Some 36 states have at one time or another passed bills allowing the medical use of marijuana, 28 of which remain on the statute books.

The medical use of marijuana is increasingly popular, and the arguments against it seem to be fading. Earlier this year, a long-awaited report from the Institute of Medicine found “a potential therapeutic value for cannabinoid drugs, particularly for … pain relief, control of nausea and vomiting, and appetite stimulation.” What ill effects there might be, such as dizziness, “are not necessarily the same as the harmful physical effects of drug abuse,” and the dangers of such abuse were small. Withdrawal symptoms were mild, and the main long-term effect was the same – lung damage – as that associated with smoking tobacco. But marijuana was “not a completely benign substance.”

That is certainly the view of federal authorities. Federal law still classifies marijuana as a Schedule I drug, and people are fined and imprisoned merely for possessing it. Cancer- and glaucoma-stricken Mainers caught puffing the weed will not be exempt from being arrested or charged under federal law; but the new state law, says Allen Pierre, director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, may cause prosecutors to think twice before indicting them. Jay McCloskey, the federal attorney for Maine, says he is in any case after the dealers, not the small-time users. “We don’t go after the people with three plants or six plants or even 60 plants,” he says.

One federal court has ruled that the first amendment to the constitution, the right to free speech, allows doctors to recommend marijuana to a patient. Nonetheless, the federal criminalization of marijuana in all circumstances is unlikely to change any time in the near future. Barney Frank, a famously liberal Democratic congressman from Massachusetts, has twice introduced bills to reclassify marijuana as a Schedule II drug, which allows medical use. His latest attempt never got out of the committee, and the House recently passed, 310 – 93, a joint resolution expressing strong opposition to legalizing efforts in the states.

Yet the trend is likely to continue – and, in some cases, to move beyond mere approval of marijuana for medical use. Governor Gary Johnson of New Mexico, a Republican in a state full of superannuated hippies, is convinced that the drug war is a failure and that some drugs, particularly marijuana, should be legalized. “We need to make drugs a controlled substance just like alcohol,” he says. “Perhaps we ought to let the government regulate it; let the government grow it, let the government manufacture it, distribute it, market it; and, if that doesn’t lead to decreased drug use, I don’t know what would.”

The governor is now considering how the state’s 21-year-old, never-used medical-marijuana law might be put to use without getting the feds excited. But they already have their eye on him. In October Barry McCaffrey, director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, gathered New Mexico’s congressional delegation for a public show of opposition to the governor’s legalizing ideas.

Allowing medical use is seen by Mr McCaffrey as a smoke-screen for ideas of that sort. Before the Maine vote he wrote in the Maine Sunday Telegram that the proposed new law was “unnecessary and dangerous”. He pointed out that the psychoactive component of marijuana tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), has long been available as a drug under the brand name Marinol. “Just as people who are ill don’t grow their own penicillin from mouldy bread,” wrote Mr McCaffrey, “individuals can’t guarantee the purity and dosage of THC by growing crude marijuana.”

Marinol has its drawbacks, however. Nauseous patients find it hard to keep down; others find it ineffective or, by contrast, too potent. “It turns you into a zombie,” says one AIDS patient for whom it was prescribed. Patients smoking marijuana find it easier to regulate their dosage themselves. Marinol is also expensive, at $10 a tablet (normal dosage is two tablets a day), and is not covered by health insurance. It has recently been reclassified as a Schedule III drug, meaning that it is available on repeat prescription. This is not the first time, says Sam Smith, editor of the liberal Progressive Review, that “a drug has been legalized after the pharmaceutical corporations figured out how to do artificially and at a big profit what nature once offered for the picking.”

(From ‘The Economist’, abridged)