Elizabeth Warren Offers Support For Medical Marijuana, Citing Father's Battle With Cancer

Posted: 09/24/2012 7:13 pm EDT

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WASHINGTON -- Massachusetts Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren offered some support for legalizing medical marijuana inan interview Monday with Boston's WTKK-FM. She said her father's battle with cancer taught her the importance of using appropriate drugs to alleviate pain:

You know, I held my father's hand while he died of cancer, and it's really painful when you do something like that up close and personal. My mother was already gone, and I was very, very close to my father. And it puts me in a position of saying, if there's something a physician can prescribe that can help someone who's suffering, I'm in favor of that. Now, I want to make sure they've got the right restrictions. It should be like any other prescription drug -- that there's careful control over it. But I think it's really hard to watch somebody suffer that you love.

Warren was responding to a question about a Massachusetts ballot initiative seeking to permit the humanitarian use of medical marijuana. In a state poll released last week by Suffolk University, 59 percent of voters voiced support for the initiative.

In Colorado, meanwhile, former GOP Rep. Tom Tancredo outlined his support for his state's ballot measure to legalize the sale of marijuana in a letter to Republican lawmakers. "I have decided that it presents a responsible, effective and much-needed solution to a misguided policy,” Tancredo wrote last week. "Eighty years ago, Colorado voters concerned about the health and safety of their families and communities approved a ballot initiative to repeal alcohol prohibition prior to it being done by the federal government. This November, we have the opportunity to end the equally problematic and ineffective policy of marijuana prohibition."

Medical marijuana is already legal in 17 states and the District of Columbia. In addition to Massachusetts, Arkansas and Montana have medically focused measures on their ballots this fall. Like that in Colorado, initiatives in Oregon and Washington state would go a step further, decriminalizing pot for recreational and medicinal uses.

Viewpoint

Marijuana won’t be legalized anytime soon

Friday, September 21, 2012

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Baker Institute Viewpoints is a regular blog series that presents an array of views on a single issue. In this installment, five Baker Institute fellows and two guest experts will consider whether the United States should legalize marijuana. Each weekday from Sept. 17- Sept. 25, one of the seven writers — whose backgrounds include a biography of evangelist Billy Graham and a 30-year career in the Drug Enforcement Administration — will give his or her take on the issue. Today, Tony Payan, visiting Baker Institute Scholar for Immigration and Border Studies, writes that “no one should get excited about the prospect of marijuana legalization anytime soon” because the debate has only just begun.

The question of whether marijuana should be legalized is both easy and difficult to answer. It is easy to say yes, at one level, for several reasons. First, by the three most important measures of drug control success, we can say that marijuana control policies have failed: Marijuana is still widely available. It is cheaper than ever before. And thanks to genetic engineering technology, it is much more potent than in the past.

Second, its cultivation has spread to areas that range from the high mountains in Mexico to national parks in the United States to hydroponic gardens in the United States and Canadian suburbs. Its growth is now ubiquitous.

Third, there seems to be no relationship between the ups-and-downs in marijuana use and the steady increases in funding for illegal drug control enforcement.

Fourth, Americans are organizing at the local and state level to resist federal prohibitionist marijuana laws, complicating enforcement of marijuana laws. In this regard, there is something to be said for defederalizing marijuana laws and allowing the states to try different policies until a reasonable public policy emerges over time and marijuana control can be federalized again with that experience. The states, after all, have been the perfect laboratories for many an American public policy before the federal government unified it under nationwide mandates.

Fifth, there is broad agreement that marijuana provides the bulk of resources for traffickers and dealers; legalizing it would deny them an important source of income.

Finally, legalization of marijuana would allow us to refocus law enforcement resources on other drugs, such as cocaine and heroin, perhaps with greater success.

However, simply saying yes — even if there are powerful reasons to do so — does not make the decision easy given other uncertain issues that must be part of the debate. For instance, how much control should the state and federal governments have?  What should prevention and treatment efforts look like at the federal and state levels, assuming that the goal is still consumption reduction and marijuana laws will remain an issue within the realm of cooperative federalism? What to do with the thousands or hundreds of thousands of individuals who are currently serving sentences related to a substance that has suddenly become legal? Should they receive some kind of amnesty or be retried? Would legalizing marijuana make producers who are currently underground suddenly come to the light and become legitimate farmers? Would marijuana be a product that could be imported, say, from Mexico, or even exported? What agency would oversee marijuana regulatory efforts? Who would tax it, at what level, and where would the revenue go? What is the ideal taxation level? Would an underground marijuana market continue, particularly if taxes are too high and incentivize the underground (non-taxed) production of marijuana? What are the implications for other drugs, such as cocaine and confection drugs, after marijuana is legalized?

The debate on whether marijuana should be legalized or not has not even begun. The parties to the debate — the government with its apprehensive politicians and deeply vested law enforcement apparatus, on the one hand, and marijuana legalization advocates, on the other —are far apart and the political environment is not conducive to a dialogue. The issues are thorny and quite complicated. Hence, no one should get excited about the prospect of marijuana legalization anytime soon, but the national debate is slowly shifting, with 17 states and the District of Columbia having passed medical marijuana laws. The time to sit down to answer the questions posed here — and others — may not be that far in the future.

Read the previous posts in this series:

• “Marijuana: A case for legalization,” by William Martin, director of the Baker Institute Drug Policy Program.
• “In a contest with alcohol and tobacco, marijuana wins,” by guest writer Sylvia Longmire, an author and expert on Mexico’s drug wars.
• “Legalization of marijuana: When, not if,” by Baker Institute nonresident drug fellow Gary Hale, former chief of intelligence in the Houston Field Division of the Drug Enforcement Administration.
• “Regulations work: Lessons from California’s experience with medical marijuana,” by guest writer Tom Heddleston, Ph.D., whose dissertation examined the formation and development of the medical marijuana movement in California.

Tony Payan is the visiting Baker Institute Scholar for Immigration Studies

The Original Drug Czar

Sep 3, 2012 1:00 AM EDT

Carter’s top drug cop finds Obama’s pot policy ‘insane.’

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Dr. Peter Bourne is on a high these days. The self-described “first drug czar”—the first with full control over both the punishment and the treatment sides of federal policy—left the Carter administration under a cloud in 1978, accused of snorting cocaine at a party thrown by none other than NORML, the have-a-hit marijuana lobby. He hotly denied the charge, but not his attendance—and that was enough. The scandal ended the only truce in the nation’s 40-year war on drugs, a moment when Bourne—echoing the president and a majority of the country at the time—tried to end criminal penalties against pot.

Thirty-four years later, Washington hasn’t budged on the issue—but the states have, much to Bourne’s delight. Twelve now treat a personal stash like a minor traffic offense. Seventeen support medical marijuana. And this fall, if current polling holds, voters in Colorado and Washington will legalize the plant, making pot nearly as acceptable for adult recreation as Ping-Pong. “It’s quite gratifying,” says Bourne, speaking by phone from his farm in the English countryside.

But the urbane British-born psychiatrist is also disappointed. In a rare interview, he says the Obama administration’s approach to marijuana is “totally insane.” He thinks “they should be bolder,” urging Congress to decriminalize and considering an executive order if necessary. Currently, what they’re doing—raiding medical-marijuana dispensaries, defending pot’s classification as a drug as bad as meth—“doesn’t make any sense at all.”

Bourne may sound like a child of the ’60s—and he is. He smoked dope at Stanford during the Summer of Love, wrote an addiction column under the pen name Dr. Aquarius, and in 1974 praised cocaine as “acutely pleasurable.” Today, at 72, he drinks only “the finest of wines” at Oxford University, where he is a visiting fellow at Green Templeton College. He thinks pot is “overrated” as medicine and should be discouraged in general, which is why he opposes jail time for pot smokers but supports civil penalties, at least at the federal level.

Illustration by Riccardo Vecchio

The states, meanwhile, should have control over their own pot policies, he says. Just as the Obama administration allows “Neanderthal states” to continuelocking up smokers, Bourne believes it would be “wrongheaded” to fight those who want to legalize marijuana, whatever regulatory model they choose. He thinks the Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol ballot initiative in Colorado “makes a lot of sense,” even if, in practice, it were to become Sell Pot Like Cigarettes. “The tobacco companies have set up model programs, so that if it were to be legalized, they could immediately jump into marketing,” he says, citing “contingency plans” shared with him by executives who visited the White House.

But by far his biggest concern is a Romney regime—and another move rightward, à la Reagan. “It would mean a lot of people being victimized,” he says. And for what? “Nobody dies from marijuana use.”

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Tony Dokoupil is a senior writer at Newsweek and The Daily Beast.

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