YAHNIAN: Legalize it

The time has come for broad liberalization of marijuana laws

by Ben Yahnian

In July 2011, Lee Carroll Brooker was arrested for growing three dozen marijuana plants on his family’s private property. The 75-year-old veteran used the drug for purely medicinal purposes to treat chronic back pain stemming from his service in the U.S. Army. For his crime against the state of Alabama, he received a life sentence without possibility of release.

While Mr. Brooker spends the rest of his life in prison for using a drug which has been proven to reduce chronic pain by 64 percent, our government institutions have repeatedly failed to adapt existing policies that continuously misappropriate justice.

By refusing to make a concerted push to change existing cannabis policy, the federal government has completely failed its citizens. Last month, the Drug Enforcement Administration refused to remove marijuana from classification as a “Schedule 1” drug, a label reserved solely for “drugs that have a high potential for abuse with no offsetting, accepted medical use.”

Of 60 peer-reviewed studies on marijuana between 1990 to 2014, 41 of them found marijuana use yielded positive benefits, treating conditions ranging from pain and Parkinson’s to AIDS and MS. Only five found no use for treating the targeted condition.

Congress refuses to take action, electing instead to leave marijuana federally illegal under the 1970 Controlled Substances Act. Advances over the last 40 years in scientific research and public opinion — 54 percent of Americans support legalization — have been completely disregarded.

While the DEA continues to place marijuana on the same level as heroin, the Department of Justice sheds light on the complete hypocrisy of the system. Since a recent appeals court ruling, the DOJ has been prevented from using money to interfere with existing state medical marijuana law despite being congressionally ordered to do it. Even though cannabis is federally illegal, the Department allows states to enact wildly different policies, with half of the states legalizing the use of cannabis for documented medical purposes and four for recreational means.

Justice becomes a muddled aspiration in a system where an agency passes on enforcement of some laws yet vigorously prosecutes others. Where’s the fairness when our Justice Department allows kids in Washington to smoke pot with their friends but would forcefully prosecute a medical marijuana business in Alabama? The fault lies not with the department itself but rather with the hypocritical nature of our laws and institutions.

Yet it’s a little known program in the U.S. government that cements federal marijuana policy as the gold standard of hypocrisy: the Compassionate Investigational New Drug Program. Since the late 1970s, the federal government has sent pre-rolled marijuana cigarettes to patients with rare medical diseases in order to research the long-term effects of marijuana use.

While closed to new participants since 1992, patients who enrolled in the program still receive free marijuana every month from a lab at the University of Mississippi. Take, for instance, Irvin Rosenfeld who enrolled in 1983 with a rare blood disorder. Over the last 33 years, he has received and smoked over 125,000 marijuana cigarettes, all provided by American taxpayers.

In 2001, a study of four patients in the program who underwent a number of exams and laboratory tests found no adverse health effects after years of daily cannabis use. To be clear, I’m not suggesting that four cases be used as evidence to prove a conclusion. Yet is it not the definition of hypocrisy when our government sends nine ounces of marijuana to Mr. Rosenfeld every single month yet Mr. Brooker receives a death sentence?

In Brooker’s case, state law requires anyone with certain prior felony sentences must serve a life sentence without parole for possessing one kilogram of marijuana, irrespective of intent to sell. His plants were weighed — including all the vines and stalks — at 1.27 kg. While the state government and the executive and legislative branches of the federal government have failed Brooker, the courts have also proven useless.

The chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court called the legally required sentencing “excessive and unjustified” and that if he “could sentence [him] to a term that is less than life without parole, I would.” The U.S. Supreme Court rejected his appeal condemning another unjust punishment into the annals of history.

When government on both state and federal levels forsakes some to unjust and inefficient outcomes, it’s the duty of citizens to enact change. Voters in an unprecedented number of states — nine in fact — have the opportunity to ease restrictions on marijuana use in the 2016 election.

Thousands of fellow citizens remain in prison for nonviolent crimes including use or distribution of marijuana. Accountability in our laws necessitates that these restrictive punishments be relaxed and eventually removed. Citizens have a chance to send an unambiguous signal in just two months.