The California marijuana vote - vote to authorize the medical use of marijuana - On the Right - Column

National Review, Dec 23, 1996 by William F. Buckley, Jr.

NEW YORK, NOVEMBER 15

The vote in California (forgetting, for the moment, the startling vote in Arizona) on the marijuana question mobilizes opponents on divers grounds.

Proposition 215, voted in by a heavy majority (56 per cent), imposes new laws respecting marijuana. It is probably unsafe to say that the law was "designed" to make marijuana available to sick people whose doctors recommended it as a tranquilizer or stomach settler, or whatever. Unsafe, because it is entirely possible that something else was intended by the voters, namely general judicial relief. Proposition 215 is as indefinite in the authority given to doctors to authorize marijuana as Roe v. Wade turned out to be to doctors who recommend abortion "for the safety of the mother."

Dazed opponents of 215 are prepared to fight on several fronts. The excitable California attorney general, Dan Lungren, has sent out the word that 215 is to be interpreted very strictly as something a doctor has to recommend on a case-by-case basis. Some opponents are citing federal laws. There is one such against the use of marijuana, and no doubt there will be a legal battle over the question. If so, we will hear from the solicitor general that although individual states may decide whether the sale of alcohol is legal, the Federal Government exercises preemptive rights when marijuana is at issue.

The California Medical Association has received 215 as a mandate to the National Institutes of Health to grow up. Many California voters were presumably soured into voting Yes by the notorious decision of the NIH a year or so ago to refuse to conduct studies on the medical value of smoked marijuana on the grounds that to do so would require experimentation on live people. Such was the reasoning, up until not so long ago, of some theologians, who stood in the way of men seeking to ascertain whether they were fertile on the grounds that to produce examinable semen would require masturbation. In fact, likely findings from the NIH could hardly confute the direct evidence of hundreds of witnesses to the effectiveness of marijuana in certain circumstances as a palliative. The Food and Drug Administration approved the active ingredient in marijuana (THC) years ago, to counteract the wasting effect of cancer. "But," the Orange County Register reminds us, "it's legally available only in pill form, which is criticized as expensive and of little help to patients too nauseated to swallow." It isn't likely that any judge in California will find means of freezing Proposition 215 until the NIH comes in with its finding.

Mourners over the success of 215 point out that opponents were vastly outspent. Yes, but we are talking nickels and dimes. Supporters of the reform raised $1.8 million, which in California politics is barely enough to squeeze in your middle initial. Opponents spent $28,000. But the plebiscite was noticed primarily by attention given to it in editorial and news coverage. You don't need a lot of paid time to advertise a conclusion a) that people who are sick and are helped by marijuana should be free to take it; and b) (if only indirectly) that it is time to say no to the Narcs who want to arrest and imprison anyone who uses the stuff.

It was so also in Arizona, where Proposition 200, the Drug Medicalization, Prevention, and Control Act, won 65 per cent of the vote. It says that Arizona's doctors can prescribe marijuana, heroin, and LSD for patients when there is "medicinal value." The proposition goes further, giving grounds to free some thousand prisoners provided that their only crime was drug possession. It eliminates criminal penalties for first-timers caught with small amounts of drugs, so long as they were not involved in violence (simultaneously, Proposition 200 stiffened penalties for violent crimes done under the influence of drugs).

At moments like this one really has to cheer the federal system. Ten years from now one should have the data with which soberly to assess the difference between life and health and justice in California under the new law and, say, New York under the old law. It is vital for those who welcome Proposition 215 to bear in mind that effectively eliminating the legal penalty against nonchalant pot is no reason to abandon educational warnings against its use, and medical warnings against its abuse.