Introduction
Much like their feelings toward alcohol, Americans have exhibited ambiguous feelings about marijuana. Some view it as little different from heroin, while others see it as no more harmful than tobacco. These views have been reflected in changing social policies toward marijuana. The question of just what constitutes a medicine is not as easy or as cut-and-dried as it might seem at first glance. Critics admit that there is a conflict between federal and states laws concerning marijuana and its medical use.
Thesis Medical marijuana should be legalized on the state level because it will help the state to control a black market, collect taxes and free up the police and federal court from minor crimes, and protect the patients and doctors from criminal responsibility.
Main text
The USA is one of the countries where marijuana is used for medical purposes. In the case of marijuana, especially of smoked marijuana, the scientific difficulties are compounded by the fact that the substance has a recognizable psychoactive effect—making most of those who take it “high”—and a taste and aroma many Americans recognize from experience. Marijuana is one of the most popular drugs prescribed for cancer and Aids patients. “The Federal Government, however, does not recognize their legality and on occasion, the DEA has raided these medical distribution centers” (Belio 62).
With the substance being prohibited by federal law, it is difficult to procure marijuana of sufficiently reliable quality and consistency to make the results authoritative. The federal government maintains a marijuana plantation in Mississippi, which supplies marijuana at taxpayer expense to the eight patients authorized under federal law to use marijuana medicinally and for research projects. Research studies show that marijuana has great value for medical practice. Many advocates of medical marijuana believe that the various compounds in the natural plant act synergistically to produce better healing results than a single-molecule preparation.
For instance, the state laws are crucial for the legal status of medical marijuana because: “All the state medical marijuana laws treat wasting syndrome as a qualifying medical condition, with the exception of the more restrictive states of Washington and Vermont. (Boire and Feeney 58). In the USA, marijuana is already used for medical purposes and its legal status on the state level will help doctors and patients to avoid criminal responsibility (Belio 119).
Marijuana or cannabis is regulated at the federal level of government by the 1970 Controlled Substances Act, which provides a spectrum of “schedules” for prescription drugs, from outright prohibition of use to uses that require extensive recordkeeping by pharmacists to relatively unrestricted use by prescription. Over-the-counter drugs that can be obtained without a prescription can also be described as “unscheduled” drugs (Boire and Feeney 54).
In the 1980s, the federal laws dealing with marijuana became complex and strict. Terms of imprisonment and fines for various offenses were greatly increased and the powers of forfeiture were strengthened as the result of several laws, the Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984, the AntiDrug Abuse Act of 1986, and the Anti-Drug Abuse Amendment Act of 1988.
The discussion here focuses primarily on those charges and issues relevant to this research study: manufacture and distribution of marijuana, possession of marijuana, conspiracy, forfeiture, and denial of federal benefits (Fox. 2004). Also, to simplify the discussion, the penalties described are generally those applied only to first-time offenders (none of the growers in this study had prior arrests for growing); in most cases, penalties are doubled for people with prior offenses (Boire and Feeney 65). The main problem is that these laws and regulations have not reduced the number of people who use marijuana for medical purposes.
Under federal law, which was upheld by a 2001 U.S. Supreme Court ruling, it is illegal for anybody to possess or use marijuana even if someone claims “medical necessity. Therefore, state laws permitting medical use have come under fire by federal officials” (Fox 2004).
Thus, inspire political debates and conflicts between federal and state laws concerning criminal responsibility for its use (Belio 119).
One of the main arguments in favor of the legal status of marijuana on the state level is that the state will be able to reduce and limit black market operations and collect taxes. Researchers estimate that the illegal status of marijuana causes a $1.6 billion loss each year. For instance, money can be made from harvesting wild marijuana, but the $50 to $100 a pound it yields is small when compared with the $700 to $2,000 a pound from cultivated sinsemilla (Belio 52).
Several factors make harvesting wild marijuana a bad deal for professional growers. First, the legal penalties are the same for wild and cultivated plants, but wild marijuana is far more bulky, increasing the risk of detection. Because it is less lucrative, the seller must deal with a larger pool of buyers to make a comparable income, and this also increases his risk of arrest. Second, the seller of wild marijuana is forced to deal with less discriminating users, often teenagers.
As a group, they are a less dependable outlet, requiring a larger pool of customers. These customers are also less likely to have any personal ties to the harvester (Belio 23). Thus, they present a greater risk of official detection than a smaller group of friends who are seasoned and selective consumers. Finally, harvesting wild marijuana offers none of the opportunities for pride in growing skills or for experimenting with growing.
The concern with producing a “quality product” makes little sense for marijuana that is so low in potency that the user is more likely to receive a headache than a high (Belio 119). The harvester has no personal stake in his final product. It was previously noted that the domestic marijuana market may actually be two markets. The other marijuana market caters to seasoned, selective users who are somewhat older and have more disposable income. These interviews suggest that running parallel to these two distinct user groups may be two distinct supply mechanisms (Richard and Trevino 91).
The legal selling of the drug, accepted on the state level, will allow the government to fight the problem of domestic marijuana cultivation which is fundamentally an economic problem. Official policies that focus on forfeiture and the seizure of assets have had an impact on large-scale growers and have proved a boon to law enforcement agencies. “Buying Medical Marijuana Even though it is illegal at the state and federal level to sell marijuana, the act of purchasing marijuana Selling pot is not itself defined as a crime” (Boire and Feeney 90).
These policies have the greatest impact on growers who plan to become wealthy from their activities and probably have minimal impact on those who begin growing precisely because they have few resources (Belio 56). Current federal policies are also more reactive than proactive. Their utility for prevention is less clear, although they may serve a preventative function when applied to suppliers of growing equipment and materials. For those driven to growing by economic necessity, programs designed to provide alternative employment might be valuable supplements to existing policies (Belio 25; Berg and Smokescreen 29).
The state legislature had twice voted to make known its desire to authorize marijuana for medical use, aware that it might precipitate a legal tussle with the federal government and willing to take that risk, only to have the legislation vetoed time by Republican Governor Pete Wilson. Few polls were done on the issue prior to Proposition 215 being circulated, but those polls showed at least majority support for allowing marijuana to be furnished to people through a doctor (Belio 122).
They wanted something similar to the state just passed by the state legislature, which provided a defense in court for people who had a doctor’s recommendation for a small list of diseases against marijuana possession charges, along with a preamble to explain the purposes and intent of the new state and a bit wider latitude for patients than the legislature had approved. In fact, a number of people who favored full legalization of marijuana had serious doubts about the efforts to permit marijuana to be used medically, either through action at the state level or by pushing to have it rescheduled at the federal level so it could be prescribed by physicians under tight controls, as cocaine and morphine can be (Fox 2007).
Another benefit of the legal status of marijuana on the state level is that the drug is entirely the state operation. the main problem for these organizations is a lack of finance and support. There is little significant private money or support either for expanding the drug war or for opposing efforts to modulate it (Boire and Feeney 98). Even many of the “grass-roots” parents’ organizations that sprang up during the 1980s were heavily subsidized by government agencies and so were unaccustomed to scrambling to raise money through voluntary means.
The larger and more effective and savvy national pro-prohibition organizations, like Joseph Califano’s Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University and the Partnership for a Drug-Free America (PDFA), which sponsored and got free air time for anti-drug television commercials, were ostensibly nonpolitical nonprofit organizations that could not get involved directly in a political campaign. The legalization of medical marijuana will help to redirect money (taxes) from the local to the state system.
Also, it will reduce the number of court cases and free up many patients and doctors from criminal responsibility. “Consequently, changing state law will have the practical effect of protecting from arrest” (Boire and Feeney 145). It might be expected that police feel “handcuffed” by rules of criminal procedure and that most would recommend easing procedural protections for defendants as a way to make their job easier. In fact, none of the officers involved complained about procedural restrictions, although several would have liked harsher penalties.
At the same time they argued for more resources, nearly all were pessimistic about the willingness of the public to increase taxes to fund further marijuana eradication efforts. They were also very skeptical about the ability of the police to stop marijuana growing even if they had all the resources they needed (Boire and Feeney 146).
The only aspect of marijuana that scientists accept as being a remotely respectable connection between it and more dangerous illicit drugs is the fact that marijuana is illegal. This implies that keeping it illegal means that a larger percentage of innocent children will go on to use more dangerous and addictive drugs sometime in their lives, quite possibly doing great damage to their psyches and to their potential to develop to their fullest as human beings (Boire and Feeney 34).
This, in turn, means that those who insist on keeping marijuana illegal should bear—morally if not necessarily legally—a huge portion of the responsibility for that suffering and heartache. In contrast, the strength of state officers is in their ability to see the “big picture” and to have more resources at their disposal. The best policies would seem to be those in which local knowledge is combined with state and federal resources, and in which local authorities have some role in directing activities.
In particular, manpower for local agencies was frequently cited as a pressing need (Boire and Feeney 36). There are clear interstate and intrastate variations in the nature of the marijuana industry and these variations are very much the product of climate, economics, and local culture. These differences suggest it would be the right step to develop a single national strategy for eradicating cultivated marijuana unless that policy is flexible enough to take these local variations into account.
Some critics suppose that medical marijuana legalization could greatly increase the level of cocaine abuse and the level of alcohol abuse, thus creating a double pharmacologic source of crime increase to set off against the likely decreases in economic and systemic crime. Even if these facts are true, the motivation of drug users does not have a great impact on the number of crimes committed because of drugs.
Some conservatives, such as William F. Buckley, Jr., saw the criminalization of marijuana as an unnecessary intrusion of government into the lives of citizens. A more vocal group of conservatives, however, moved into power in the late 1970s. In contrast to those taking a libertarian approach, these conservatives were more concerned about the use of marijuana for simple hedonistic pleasure and the possibility that it might have serious harmful effects. For them, marijuana use was not simply a practical problem, it was a moral issue.
Within the medical marijuana reform movement, these general tendencies have found expression in the campaigns run by Americans for Medical Rights, funded by wealthy people, and campaigns that grew within a state and either needed little outside assistance or even resisted outside assistance from an organization perceived as an expression of corporate culture and corporate interests ((Boire and Feeney 37).
This positive attitude toward state-licensed casual marijuana use may have reflected a more general tolerance toward marijuana use among the general populace. Physicians who recommend marijuana cannot be penalized.
Nonmedical use of marijuana remains explicitly prohibited. Property associated with medial use of marijuana “shall not be harmed, neglected, injured, or destroyed” while in possession of the state, and property associated with medical marijuana cannot be seized by forfeiture. Registered patients are not allowed to use marijuana “in a way that endangers the health or well-being of any person,” to use marijuana in public, or to sell or distribute marijuana to anybody who does not have a registry card or doctor’s recommendation. Insurance companies are not required to reimburse for medical marijuana, nor does medical marijuana use have to be accommodated in places of employment (Boire and Feeney 38).
Summary
In sum, medical marijuana should be accepted on the state level because it will help to reduce the number of court cases and protect citizens from criminal responsibility. Marijuana is used for medical purposes and federal laws and agencies cannot prohibit the medical use of marijuana. The conflict between the state and federal laws discriminates against many marijuana users and adds an additional burden on the state court system.
Works Cited
Belio, J. The Benefits of Marijuana: Physical, Psychological & Spiritual. Life services Press; 3nd Rev. edition, 2007.
Fox, R. J. Medical pot pits states against feds. 2007. Web.
Berg, J. Smokescreen: The FDA Struggles to Keep Control. The Hastings Center Report, 36 (2006), 49.
Richard, A.J., Trevino, R.A. Attitudes towards Drug Legalization among Drug Users. American Journal of Drug and Alcohol Abuse, 28 (2002), 91.
Boire, R.G., Feeney, K. Medical Marijuana Law. Ronin Publishing; 1 edition, 2007.