The weird politics of medical marijuana
A British pharamaceutical company plans to have a cannabis extract approved for medical use in the UK by no later than this summer. [Technical details and links here.]
That’s good news for patients. It’s also probably good news for the drug warriors. If that seems paradoxical, it just shows that nothing is too strange to be true in the topsy-turvy politics of drug policy.
Like almost all drug policy issues, the medical marijuana fight has been dominated by two groups: the drug warriors, for whom illicit drug policy is just one aspect of the greater cultural war against liberalism in all its forms, and the anti-prohibitionists (they don’t want to be called “legalizers” any more, perferring “drug policy reformers”) for whom drug policy is primarily about curbing the repressive power of the state, and secondarily about reasserting the value of the pleasure principle in the face of puritanism.
In this struggle, the drug warriors have almost all of the advantages. Not only do they have the law and the agencies of government (including agencies that ought to be scientifically neutral, such as the National Institute on Drug Abuse) on their side, but they also enjoy overwhelming popular support, along with such hegemonic control of the mass media that even their most dubious claims are usually recited by reporters as if they were facts.
But medical marijuana is an exception: relentlessly opposed by the drug warriors — Clinton’s drug czar, Barry McCaffrey, once referred to “Cheech and Chong medicine” and compared dismissed research into the medical efficacy of cannabis to studying whether banana peels cure cancer — it is nonetheless overwhelmingly supported by the voters.
That led the “drug policy reform” groups to latch on to the medical marijuana issue. Having litigated futilely for many years, they have won referendum after referendum on the question, most famously Proposition 215 in California.
While both sides routinely appeal to “science,” neither one has been actively pursuing research. The federal government has used its monopoly of the tiny supply of licit cannabis to make made it next to impossible to conduct medical cannabis research in the U.S.
With the exception of a group called MAPS, headed by Rick Doblin (who studied at the Kennedy School during the time I taught there) the “drug policy reform” community has been almost equally unenthusiastic about getting the research done. It turns out that when voters are told that research is needed, they become less willing to vote for medical marijana by referendum. Moreover, research doesn’t deliver the same organizing and fund-raising punch as politics.
So most of the “drug policy reform” community has continued to insist that medical research is either unnecessary or impossible. Meanwhile, a commercial outfit has gone ahead and done it, and as a result a product containing all of the active agents in natural cannabis will soon be available to patients in Europe and Canada, and will probably be available to patients in the U.S. within two or three years.
While some of the anti-prohibition leadership, including Doblin and Ethan Nadelmann of the Drug Policy Alliance, is welcoming this development, others are grumbling that the means of administration (a sublingual spray) might not be as effective as smoking joints. A cynic might even think they were worried about being deprived of their pet issue.
On the other hand, the drug czar’s office is cautiously receptive to approving Sativex, as the new medication is called, for use in the U.S. That reflects, in my view, good political judgment on the part of the drug warriors. Medical marijuana is a pure loser politically, but backing off by approving the inhaled use of whole cannabis would be just too embarrassing. Sativex provides a graceful exit from a losing position, and it appears that the warriors are inclined to take it.
February 3rd, 2004 at 12:51 pm
The weird politics of medical marijuana
I offer some thoughts on The American Street, following up on this earlier post about Sativex….
February 4th, 2004 at 8:10 am
Is it just brutally cynical of me to note that large pharm corporations can make a lot more profit off of Sativex than they can off of marijuana?
(Of course, I personally would like to see the government legalize and tax the hell out of marijuana for recreational use, while simultaneously putting tobacco growers/marketers on notice that they ought to strongly consider switching to marijuana in the next 10 years.)
(And I’m not even a pot smoker.)
February 4th, 2004 at 11:29 am
As usual Prof Kleiman, you have it half right, unsurprising as your remarks are premised on half-truths.
It’s indisputable that the prohibitionists have the advantage legally, financially and in their access to a complacent mass media that eagerly trumpet every flawed study as fact. However, their success which is pretty much limited to the incarceration of hundreds of thousands of non-violent drug offenders, is based on fear and not popular support among the electorate.
I also respectfully suggest, that you do a little more research before you make blanket pronouncements about the motives of the drug policy reform movement. Trotting out the same tired prohibitionist fallacy that medical marijuana and other harm reduction organizations are a merely a front for closet legalizers is not only a specious argument, it’s absurd in light of the facts and implying that the movement does not support research into the medical benefits of cannabis is irresponsible. There are no less than three reform organizations in Massachusetts right now, still attempting to get the DEA to act on UMASS’ application to conduct a serious study. The decision has been inexcusably withheld for years. It’s the government that blocks the science; the activists welcome valid unbiased inquiry.
As for Sativex, it is hardly the panacea you hold it up to be. It’s a chemical concoction designed to mimic cannabis, not an unadulterated medicinal herb. One needs look no further than the recently reported ill effects of prescribing Paxil to depressed teenagers, another medication rushed to market under FDA approval for the benefit of pharmaceutical company profits. Further, since the ill effects of smoking marijuana can be obviated by vaporization, there appears no good reason to develop the product other than to give your drug warriors an acceptable political out and to further increase the already obscene profit margin of the pharmas.
Finally, look around you. Legalization is not a dirty word within the movement and many reformers embrace it as the only fiscally sane and socially responsible solution to drug abuse. My own Last One Speaks is proud to stand with organizations like Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, Marijuana Policy Project and many others in demanding full legalization of all drugs and it’s not because we want to use them ourselves. The drug war has so miserably failed that access to drugs has never been easier and it would be much simpler for us to just shut up and get high.
It’s not about drugs; it’s about personal sovereignty and the criminal waste of our tax dollars on inhumane and counter-productive policies. Call us reformers, call us anti-prohibitionists or call us legalizers, labels cannot diminish the validity of our arguments. But it would more beneficial to join us in finding realistic answers to the age-old problem of drug abuse.
Sincerely,
Libby Spencer
February 4th, 2004 at 9:41 pm
Re: Drug Policy ‘reformers’. I’m not sure that reformers *ever* wanted to be called “legalizers”, anymore than pro-choice folks want to be called pro-abotionists. That perjorative term appears to be more the hysterical appellation by prohibitionists who assume that any move towards depenalization or regulated use of marijuana will open the doors to a dystopia of widespread drug use or abuse.
Re: Wierd politics of medical marijuana. Indeed. Wierd politics. Forget reformers, they’re just wacky. Why do the *prohibitionists*, who, as you say who are driving the locomotive, and who seem to have overwhelming popular support, feel so threatened if this particular drug can be used as a medicine, and why it so important that someone must use the sublingual pharma extract rather than grow and smoke or vaporize one’s own common garden plant (but for our harsh laws contra)?
I think it is because the “overwhelming popular support” you state is based on political smoke and mirrors and, as you say, on conservatives’ war on all things liberal and non-puritanical. Thirty year’s of WoD up-ratcheting has produced ‘collateral damage’ in terms of significant costs to our human capital and the meaning of supposedly cherished concepts as ‘justice’ and ‘freedom’. I’m not so sure there’s overwhelming popular support anymore for incarcerating people for marijuana use either, whether medical or ‘recreational’.
I think the prohibitionists fear medical marijuana as a modern day “domino theory”, that if any part of the prohibitionist, WoD theology is questioned in any way, the whole house of cards will not withstand that critical, truthful examination, and will be swept into the dustbin of history. Kind of like when Eastern Europe started to break away from the Soviet Union, and suddenly the ideology of Communism collapsed everywhere. Medical mj is the prohibitionist’s Maginot Line which cannot be breached.
I thought your own explanation of this phenomenon about the WoD putting all of their eggs into the “reefer madness”-marijuana-is-Public-Enemy No.-1 basket was quite insightful, Professor Kleiman, when you wrote about the meth crisis that the politics of the drug warriors was such that a meth prevention campaign was not a feasible public health intervention, given the driving politics behind the WoD (from FAS 1996 http://www.fas.org/drugs/issue1.html :
“The current concern about the upsurge in adolescent marijuana use may create resistance to devoting significant resources to prevention messages aimed specifically at methamphetamine. The politics of drug prevention is dominated by the parents’ anti-drug groups, whose concern tends to focus on marijuana, the illicit drug most widely used by minors. Not only would a renewed “Speed Kills” campaign compete for resources with anti-marijuana messages, but an accurate description of the horrors of methamphetamine would tend to make marijuana look relatively unthreatening. Emphasizing that some illicit drugs are much more dangerous than others is logically consistent with a message that all drug use is to be avoided, but it is psychologically inconsistent. Simply adding meth to the list of no-no’s in a generic campaign against “drugs” would likely attract little opposition, but it would also likely do little good.”
J
February 5th, 2004 at 6:20 pm
Around the web…
“bullet” Walter in Denver has discovered two drug war victims from 1989 that I’ll have to add to my Drug War Victims page.
November 30th, 2004 at 2:17 pm
At last, some real progress on medical cannabis
A British company called GW Pharmaceuticals has developed a sublingual spray called Sativex which contains all the psychoactive chemicals in natural cannabis, and that medicine is likely to be approved in Britain for the treatment of MS within months. …