Taking morphine is addictive, but we proscribe it for the dieing to ease their pain. This is good. Chemotherapy and radiation therapy are both practices in which we do things that kill all cells because they happen to kill cancer cells faster. We use these treatments on patients every day, we have nothing better, and sometimes they work. So I am very sympathetic with those who have been prescribed marijuana as a pain killer by a competent doctor. The doctor may be right, the cost of not taking it may be higher than the cost of the addictiveness and side effects.
But it is illegal. And everyone knows it is illegal, and so it is highly irresponsible for these doctors to be prescribing it anyway. And Mr. William F. Buckley is correct, it is laudable for the Supreme Court to refuse to legislate from the bench.[1] While I might question the constitutionality of the illegal drug laws themselves, I do not think I would win even with courts benched by constitutionalists. And given that, it was the right decision, it seems to me that a strong case can be made that this is interstate trade. Of course, if it were not universally illegal, perhaps it could be grown in California for use in California pharmacies, but that argument was not made here, or at least in the report of it I see.[1]
But Mr. Buckley does make one rhetorical error. He criticizes Mr. John P. Walters, President Bush's drug czar, for "dogmatic positions." I infer from this wording that Mr. Buckley thinks the positions are not backed by fact. That dogma is necessarily somehow less than science. An utterly bogus line of reasoning. Perhaps Mr. Walters' statements are dogmatic. Perhaps he is wrong, but he is not wrong because his statements are dogmatic.
Mr. Buckley then goes on to state that because you can find some people helped by marijuana, statements that it has not been "medically established that marijuana uniquely grants such relief as is being touted" must be inaccurate. I wonder if Mr. Buckley is familiar with the use of placebos in medical research. I wonder if he is aware that we do so because some people will experience relief simply because they think they should. The relief is no less real, it is not hallucination. It is simply evidence that the mind, the will, can act in ways science cannot explain. Mr. Buckley should also take a look at the current FDA rules and regulations, and how hard it is to get a new drug approved, before he criticizes the drug czar's statements in this manner. He should perhaps be talking about reforming FDA instead.
[1] http://www.townhall.com/columnists/wfbuckley/wfb20050607.shtml