ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, January 10, 1997 TAG: 9701100085
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-8 EDITION: METRO
BILL CLINTON didn't inhale. Now Rick Boucher doesn't remember.
"I do not recall that provision being part of the bill," says the congressman from Abingdon, referring to a law that allows medical use of marijuana in Virginia. Then a state senator, Boucher was the bill's chief sponsor.
Though unremembered, it was enacted two decades ago - as part of a general loosening of Virginia law against possession and distribution of very small amounts of the drug.
Now, unfortunately, Virginians will have to endure huge doses of grandstanding as politicians rush to stomp, kill and otherwise eliminate the provision, lest anyone accuse the state of being soft on drug abuse.
All this because California and Arizona voters had the temerity, in November, to approve ballot initiatives making it legal for patients acting on a doctor's advice to ingest cannabis for therapeutic purposes.
Rather than review and test the body of experience and medical opinion suggesting that cannabis may help ease the suffering of cancer-chemotherapy patients and people afflicted with AIDS and glaucoma, the Clinton administration has threatened to prosecute doctors who prescribe the demon drug.
The president has his points: Ballot initiatives are a clumsy means of setting policy. States can't simply opt out of federal laws they don't like. And some voters clearly supported the initiatives as a back-door route to legalization.
Americans ought to worry about the growing use of pot among teens. For one thing, it's more potent than the stuff their parents' generation tried.
Even so, whether marijuana helps the ill needs a serious answer, not the kneejerk response of an undiscriminating prohibitionism that has helped undermine the credibility of the war on drugs.
Now Virginia officials who are otherwise grand champions of states' rights will affirm the priority of federal regulation and scramble to exorcise the commonwealth's medical-marijuana provision, a dead letter exposed in the light of the California and Arizona initiatives but otherwise neglected and apparently never exercised.
It's such a danger, no one knew it was there. Oh well. Pot can induce political paranoia, don't you know, as well as memory loss.
LENGTH: Short : 47 linesby CNB