My Friend Clarence

Let's face it--nothing in the American legal system approaches the idiocy and fallaciousness of its indictment of marijuana and those fiends who dare to use it. The marijuana proscription and severity of its penalties make the Iraq War seem like Providential Wisdom and Creationism like profound scientific insight. Once one accepts that it is a recreational drug, and therefore inappropriate for young people, no other argument against its use bears any validity. It does not cost a million deaths a year, as does alcoholism, alcohol abuse and drunken driving; it does not put one on the slippery slope to heroin addiction (if so, then Dubya would be shooting up as we speak). Yet thousands of smokers can be consigned to prison for decades.

When Richard Nixon assigned a committee to investigate the values and detriments of marijuana, he was so displeased by the sanguine findings that he squelched the report. He preferred, I suppose, to use as his source the movie "Reefer Madness," which speaks to the reality of marijuana abuse about as accurately as "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" does to the place of Jews in the world. I personally believe that marijuana should be regulated and sold in adult areas of stores much like liquor. But that would cause such a sea change in those horrendously embedded attitudes that really evolved from the efforts of the liquor lobby in the 1930s and anti-Mexican immigration prejudices of that same era.

But putting aside my libertarian views on the legalization of this (as well as other drugs), the use of marijuana as a palliative for suffering cancer and AIDs patients seems a perfectly valid and logical medical alternative. It does alleviate pain, settle the stomach, and enhance appetite. It also cheers you up. What better for a person undergoing chemotherapy? But no, despite massive anecdotal evidence, the Feds can't allow a chink in the armor of their draconian yet impotent War on Drugs. The situation is aggravated by designating marijuana as a Class One dangerous substance, on a par with heroin, and therefore, unlike morphine, unavailable for medical use. (Hey, have you ever been under morphine? Now that's a high; compared to it, pot has about as much kick as bubble gum). Yet despite a public outcry, to which several states responded by legalizing medical marijuana, the Feds won't even deign to finance a study. Hey, ignorance is bliss, especially for Republicans (not that Clinton and his cronies--"didn't inhale" my ass!--were any more helpful).

Then comes the recent Supreme Court ruling that stated that Federal law trumps state law in drug-enforcement policy, so if a cancer-ridden patient tries to get relief from her agony from a sympathetic physician, the Feds can ride right in and escort them both to the penitentiary. This makes the Moslem hand-chopping for theft seem enlightened in comparison. But the Supreme Court decision was not, strictly speaking, about compassion or license or foolish pseudoscience, but about states' rights. And here is where I was stunned--not by the decision, but by who came down on my side of the issue. The dissenters were William Rehnquist, Sandra O'Connor, and Clarence Thomas. Clarence Thomas!

Clarence has always been rather comical to me (in a sad way); I picture him in my mind as a sock puppet waved around by Antonin Scalia. But on this issue he diverged from Mastah Antonin for the sake of principle, though I believe he is also a severe opponent of marijuana's recreational use. So is O'Connor, but she placed the constitutional issue first, seeing a Federal restriction of an arguably effective medical treatment as beyond its intended scope. On the other side of the fence are the liberals (gasp) who believe current Federal policy overrules all, even if, as Stevens suggested, Congress might reconsider the laws. Namby-pamby bullshit, say I. People are going to suffer, and needlessly. The law is an Ass.

Well, eventually something will be done about the law, and frankly, in this world, if someone needs to get pot, they can get it. What confuses me most at the moment is that the Right wing of the Court has engaged, temporarily, my sympathies, and the Left my scorn. (Well, Scalia still has a perfect record of zero useful opinions). And as for the integrity of states-rights idealism as demonstrated by Thomas and O'Connor, where was it during Bush v. Gore in 2000? Didn't the Florida courts have the right to decide ultimately the nature of the state's electoral recount?

Well, we may not have easy access to pot, but there's plenty of hypocrisy still going around.