cannabisnews.com: National Charade To Keep Patients from The Joint National Charade To Keep Patients from The Joint Posted by CN Staff on December 01, 2004 at 13:51:29 PT By Pierre Tristam, News-Journal Editorial Writer Source: News-Journal Both my parents are retired, scoping 70, in poorer health than they deserve and living in so-called assisted-living facilities. Their room, board, supervised pill-popping and shepherded time-killing add up to a $300-a-day raid on their life savings. It's remarkable that they've eluded the bills' side effects so far (strokes, heart attacks, monthly bouts of post-traumatic stress disorder). It's just as remarkable that they somehow manage to live with the pains of their illnesses, day after day, agony on top of anguish. If it were up to me, and if they so wished, and if I could get past my case of boy-scout respect for the law (for them, I could), I wouldn't hesitate to find a way to provide them with any drug they wished to ease their days -- pot, hashish, cocaine or whatever. I wouldn't do it on medicinal grounds. That would be patronizing, as if relief from physical pain was acceptable, but pleasure for its own sake wasn't. I'd do it on moral grounds, and as a matter of choice -- their choice. They're past the age when anybody has the right to tell them what is and what isn't morally responsible so far as their personal, private indulgences are concerned, least of all the government they've gorged with taxes all their life or the care facilities they're gorging with dollars now.As it is, my mother isn't the crack-pipe type and my father has never smoked a day in his life. He's not about to develop a yen for reefers now. They're both sticking to their regimen of "legal" drugs. These differ from the illegal kind in addictive characteristics and mind-altering content only in so far as they're approved by the Food and Drug Administration, they're advertised on TV and their sales profit shareholders instead of pushers.It's all part of the greatest truth-altering charade since Prohibition. A drug like marijuana, which has never killed anybody and probably never will (you'd need to smoke 900 joints in one sitting for it to be lethal) is the Ahab-like obsession of a government that spends more money chasing after its dealers and punishing its users than it does on anti-terrorism. Drug peddlers push performance-enhancing opiates and amphetamines on children with one hand while wagging at them to stay off drugs with the other. Millions of Americans inhale anti-depressants as they would orange juice even though the anti-depressants are more mind-altering, and usually more dangerous, than marijuana. Some anti-depressants' side effects include a tendency to go homicidal on others or oneself. Meanwhile the desperately sick who use a joint once in a while to improve their appetite or counter the nauseating effects of chemotherapy are branded criminals.Unlike my parents, Angel Raich is in the prime of her life, but also ravaged by diseases and pains that include tumors, seizures, spasms and nausea. Prescription drugs don't help. Marijuana does. Raich lives in California, where it is legal to use marijuana for medical purposes, as it is in 10 other states. So she uses. She is married and has two children. The marijuana eases her pains and makes life easier for everyone. The freedom-preaching Bush administration wants to stop her. Attorney General John Ashcroft, whose moral code mimics mullahs' more than Solomon's, has been on a tear against marijuana users and suppliers in those states despite local laws that made them legal. Federal prohibition, he claims, trumps local choice. Raich and others sued. On Monday, their case went before the U.S. Supreme Court.Three years ago the court banned "marijuana clubs" from serving patients. But it didn't address the issue of state laws legalizing medical marijuana use. The case puts the court in a squirm. This is the court that has codified the war on drugs' dopiest rules and repressions. This is the court that has legitimized the longest, most deceitful war the United States has been involved in, the most damaging to the Constitution and the costliest to the nation, bar none, a war that has cost the nation upwards of half a trillion dollars since it was declared by Richard Nixon in 1969. This is also the court that considers states' rights sacred -- up to the point where those rights clash with the court's political prejudices. Halting a state's electoral recount is OK, for example, for the same reason that overturning blatant discriminatory laws like same-sex bans isn't: Politics speak louder than constitutional principle.And much louder than compassion and dignity. Angel Raich is no criminal, and a marijuana joint is no more a threat to America's morals and safety than a can of beer. But the war on drugs is a $40-billion-a-year industry. Government isn't about to let compassion and dignity, let alone individual liberty, get in the way of such a popular and expedient addiction.Tristam is a News-Journal editorial writer. Complete Title: Mind-Altering National Charade To Keep Patients from The Joint Source: Daytona Beach News-Journal (FL)Author: Pierre Tristam, News-Journal Editorial WriterPublished: November 30, 2004 Copyright: 2004 News-Journal CorpContact: letters news-jrnl.comWebsite: http://www.news-journalonline.com/Related Articles & Web Site:Angel Raich v. 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