Creeping Pot Legalization

TW: As I have stated previously if it were up to me legalization would not creep it would be swift and systematic. But elections do have consequences as evidenced by how a POTUS elects to enforce existing laws can have big impacts. I am not a big fan of these implicit policy changes but in our political environment where achieving sweeping legislation is very difficult both sides tend to find ways to implement policy through alternative means.

From Fortune Magazine:
"...Under President George W. Bush (and under President Bill Clinton before him, for that matter), the U.S. Justice Department treated state medical marijuana laws as nullities. Such laws were contradicted and therefore preempted by federal drug laws, the Justice Department reasoned, and the U.S. Supreme Court upheld that position in 2005.

Accordingly, the federal government has periodically raided and prosecuted defendants who at least claimed to be complying with state medical marijuana laws, and when it did, defendants were forbidden from telling juries about the existence of those laws.

In late February, President Obama signaled a new approach. His attorney general, Eric Holder, confirmed at a press conference that he would no longer subject individuals who were complying with state medical marijuana laws to federal drug raids and prosecutions.

This understated act -- a simple pledge not to act, really -- could have enormous consequences. It potentially leads to exactly the same endpoint as the Twenty-First Amendment, which repealed the federal prohibition on alcoholic beverage sales.

Here's how. When states make a legal loophole allowing medical use of marijuana, they must grapple with the messy question of what precisely constitutes medical use. After all, doctors regularly prescribe powerful drugs like Valium, Viagra, Prozac, and -- give us a break -- Botox to patients who are hardly at death's door.

If a state doesn't tightly limit what "medical use" means, the camel can get its nose under the tent.

That's what happened in California. Like most medical marijuana states, California permits doctors to "recommend" marijuana use for patients who suffer from specific serious diseases. (Drafters of the law avoided the word "prescribe" in an attempt to sidestep conflict with federal law.)

California's law then adds a catchall provision that lets doctors also approve marijuana use for "any other illness for which marijuana provides relief." In practice, doctors -- largely protected from second-guessing by confidentiality privileges -- have been free to make the final call as to which conditions those might be.

This is, after all, the norm vis-à-vis medicines. Once a pharmaceutical has been FDA-approved for one use, doctors can lawfully prescribe it for other, so-called off-label purposes, even though the drug has not yet been certified as safe or effective for them.

Accordingly, California doctors are authorizing patients to take marijuana to relieve such ailments as anxiety, headache, premenstrual syndrome, and trouble sleeping. "You could get it for writer's block," comments Allen St. Pierre, the executive director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws..."
http://money.cnn.com/2009/09/11/magazines/fortune/medical_marijuana_legalizing.fortune/index.htm