Reefer madness: why the Clinton administration is terrified by medical marijuana.

• Author: Postrel, Virginia I.

When California and Arizona voters gave substantial majorities to the proposition that sick people ought to be allowed to use marijuana (and, in Arizona, other illegal drugs) if it might ease their suffering, the reaction in Washington was predictable: utter horror. Propositions 215 and 200 struck not only at the heart of drug war propaganda but also at the most sensitive assumptions underlying the regulatory state. (See "Prescription: Drugs," February 1996.)

For drug warriors, Propositions 215 and 200 are terrifying because these laws recognize that marijuana is not especially dangerous. "We have a problem," said Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala at the Clinton administration's anti-initiative press conference. "Increasing numbers of Americans believe that marijuana is not harmful." Indeed.

Like the once-common insistence that steroids do not help athletes bulk up, the oft-repeated lie that marijuana is some kind of deadly poison leads people - especially young people - to suspect all suggestions that drugs may be dangerous. It's hardly surprising that drug use has turned up among the most propagandized generation in history, or that almost all the upswing is accounted for by casual pot smoking. You don't have to smoke marijuana yourself, or even have a very wide circle of friends, to find plenty of anecdotal evidence that the drug is neither particularly hazardous to health nor the gateway to drug-abuse hell. If she doubts this commonsensical observation, Shalala could ask the president or vice president, among numerous other administration officials with marijuana smoking in their past. Or she could consult mountains of scientific research, much of it aimed at proving the dangers of dope.

As Lester Grinspoon and James B. Bakalar wrote in a 1995 editorial in The Journal of the American Medical Association: "One of marihuana's greatest advantages as a medicine is its remarkable safety. It has little effect on major physiological functions. There is no known case of a lethal overdose; on the basis of animal models, the ratio of lethal to effective dose is estimated as 40,000 to 1....It is true that we do not have studies controlled according to the standards required by the FDA - chiefly because legal, bureaucratic, and financial obstacles are constantly put in the way. The situation is ironical, since so much research has been done on marihuana, often in unsuccessful attempts to prove its dangerous and addictive character...