Putting a lid on the pot issue

By refusing to take up the Bush administration's appeal of a ruling protecting doctors who recommend medical marijuana to their patients, the U.S. Supreme Court has taken away one of the tools Attorney General John Ashcroft has used to try and assert federal authority over an issue that should be left to the states.

Ashcroft has made it a personal crusade to place legal roadblocks in the path of states that have chosen to legalize medical marijuana. He has aggressively dispatched federal agents to raid farms where marijuana designated as medicine is grown; and he has continued a wrongheaded Clinton-era policy of warning doctors that they risk losing prescription-writing privileges by discussing the medical applications of marijuana with patients.

The action by the Supreme Court on Tuesday means Ashcroft's threats to doctors are now mostly empty. The court allowed to stand a 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that bars the Justice Department from punishing doctors for giving such advice.

Many experts believe that marijuana provides substantial relief to those suffering from symptoms related to a variety of afflictions including glaucoma, HIV/AIDS and cancer. People with chronic diseases are not necessarily using marijuana as a way to get high but as therapy. It has been said to revive the appetite of an AIDS patient suffering from the wasting syndrome and to relieve the nausea accompanying chemotherapy treatments, among other therapeutic uses.

There are seven states within the nine-state jurisdiction of the 9th Circuit that have legalized medical marijuana. The direct consequence of the ruling is that the doctors from those states may now freely recommend the drug to their patients. As to the three additional states that allow the use of medical marijuana - Maine, Colorado and Maryland - but do not fall within the 9th Circuit, their doctors too should take some comfort in the ruling and the Supreme Court's action. It is hard to fathom that after this rebuff by the courts, the Justice Department would continue to pursue doctors outside the 9th Circuit, although we wouldn't put it past this attorney general.

Ashcroft continues to try to subvert the voters' will in California and elsewhere where medical marijuana was legalized through an initiative process. His interest in state's rights, so evident when he was a public official in Missouri, seems to have dissipated since he ascended to the top federal law enforcement job.

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