The Hinchey-Rohrabacher
Amendment, little known to those who
aren't drug policy 'reform' insiders, has become an annually
recurring example of their blindness. It began as a well meaning
bipartisan plea from two California Congressmen with personal reasons
for endorsing the 'traditional' notion of 'medical marijuana' as a
reason to grant very ill or dying patients the privilege of
smoking pot. That this year's (predictable) defeat in the House was so
quickly followed by a crisp federal riposte has served to confirm at
least two of my suspicions. The first is that aside from their
opponents in government, the reform movement is relatively unknown to
the great mass of Americans.
The second suspicion is that the feds working assiduously to
protect current drug policy DO pay a lot of attention to reformers and
have carefully crafted their anti-marijuana campaign in California to
take full advantage of their ignorance. California's law, by far the
nation's liberal pot law, has allowed the largest numbers of ordinary
pot smokers to think of themselves as potential 'patients.' What I
learned shortly after starting to examine them in 2001, was that
virtually all those who would usually be dismissed as 'recreational'
users are actually self-medicating, with benefit, for very common
emotional symptoms which most people,especally young males, are usually
loathe to admit.
That concept had been a
tough sell, especially to the generationally blind, pot-smoking reform
community which clings stubbornly to the original 'seriously ill' model
their opponents are now using so skillfully to hoist them on
their own petards.
Yesterday's escalation of a state-wide federal and local police campaign was a case in
point; San Diego is the biggest city with a strident anti-pot
tradition and the carefully timed busts plus the accompanying
publicity involved all the elements of the recent 'moratrium'
campaign and added a new one: a renewed attempt to threaten physicians
who write recommendations with punishment by the Medical Board of
California.
Whether it will succeed in provoking the Board to resume its harassment
of physicians remains to be seen...
