Jan. 26, 2013

Judges refuse to overturn the 40-year-old federal classification of pot as a Schedule I Controlled Substance
by Howie Katz
Retired Professor of Criminal Justice

A three judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia unanimously ruled Tuesday that marijuana is a highly dangerous drug under federal law with no accepted medical uses.

The court was ruling on a case filed by the marijuana advocacy group Americans for Safe Access which argued that federal officials had a duty to reexamine the medical evidence and reclassify marijuana as a drug that has clear benefits for those who are suffering and in pain.

The DEA countered by arguing: "To establish accepted medical use, the effectiveness of a drug must be established in well-controlled, well-designed, well-conducted and well-documented scientific studies [with] a large number of patients. To date, such studies have not been performed."

The judges sided with the DEA.  Judge Harry Edwards, writing for the panel, said they were not willing to overrule the DEA because they had not seen large "well-controlled studies" that proved the medical value of marijuana.

As far as I'm concerned, medical marijuana is nothing more than one gigantic hoax on the magnitude of Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme that has been perpetrated on a gullible public by the proponents of pot.  I suspect that many of the doctors who swear by the healing powers of marijuana do so to justify their past, if not present, use of pot.  Hence the junk science.  A couple of good shots of Jack Daniel's or Jim Beam will give the same results in relieving pain.

Medical marijuana has made its growers, dispensers and pot prescription-writing doctors  filthy rich.  In California and most other states that have medical marijuana laws, those laws have led to the de facto legalization of marijuana, and that is exactly what the proponents of pot were after in the first place.

It pleases me that the judges in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia had their heads screwed on straight.  Had this case been heard before the San Francisco based U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, the judges probably would have ruled otherwise.

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