Reading some snippits lately that suggest the current pro-weed stuff is coming from Big Tobacco, who sees this delicacy as an ideal replacement for it's killer crop.
My own well reasoned position is that individual states need to vote on two separate issues. One, should maryjane be available to true medical patients like cancer victims? and Two, do states want to make the recreational use of marijuana legal? Conflating the two issues is what is causing the problems.
Here is an article about the subject. I think Big Tobacco was behind it. Did this doctor really take time to write it without any outside help or incouragment? I shortened and edited it:
Salem-News.com - November 29, 2009 - 2:01 am
Medical Marijuana: A California Success Story
Dr. Phillip Leveque, Salem-News.com
(MOLALLA, Ore.) - California was the first state which legalized marijuana for medical use in 1996 by way of an initiative legal process started by voters' petitioning, and has the most patients with 350,000.
Apparently the legislators were so shocked by the common people's effrontery they were paralyzed. No so the scotch drinking police and sheriffs - they howled like banshees, and have seemingly done everything they could think of to reduce or restrict their highly efficacious medicine.
The various cities and counties of California are in a schizophrenic stand-off about what to do about legally sanctioned marijuana use and dispensaries, (currently there are about 200) where marijuana and even hashish, (a concentrate) can be purchased by patients having a letter from a physician giving them approval for its use.
About half of the localities say its OK, others harass, close and confiscate medicine and money. The DEA and some local cops are going frenetic. They even raid legal grow sites. At the same time, the Mexican Mafia and others are farming it wherever they can, usually in remote national forest areas.
As this is written a plantation in northern Idaho was raided. It had 14,000 plants with a street value of $60 million. It is estimated the marijuana crop is the financially most important in the Unites States, and the cops are trying to stop it?
The cops with General Barry McCaffrey were working with the boards of Medical Examiners to harass physicians who are writing approval letters for sick patients. Many of the prominent physicians have been charged with violating the Standards of Medical Practice Act, but no one knows what the standards are.
One of the worst examples was a DEA agents' raid at a Santa Cruz cannabis using hospice where elderly disabled patients were handcuffed to their beds while the agents devastated the gardens and patient's rooms.
The local mayor dispensed marijuana on city hall steps the next day, in protest.
Despite all this, there are about 30 California physicians who openly advertise their services and some have as many as 19,000 patients though most are in the low two thousands.
Eleven states have some semblance of legal medical marijuana but individual state's rules and regulations are as varied as the state's geography.
It appears that Oregon has the most successful program per capita, but the regulations appear to be the most rigorous because physician and patient records are absolutely legally protected, neither the Board of Medical Examiners nor the police or district attorneys can snoop. Apparently this is not the case in California where police pose as fake patients with fake medical records are incessantly harassing the known medical marijuana physicians.
In the meantime, more and more patients are getting more and more doctors to sign their applications in all medical marijuana states.
THE FULL ARTICLE: http://www.salem-news.com/articles/may232007/leveque_ca_med_pot_52307.php
