Doctors Want Us To Smoke Pot Legally

The Obama Administration may be clamping down on California’s medical-pot shops, reneging on its one-time states' rights posturing, but damned if that's harshing the efforts of the California Medical Association. The state's largest body of physicians, which boasts over 35,000 individual doctors, is calling for marijuana's legalization and regulation, the Los Angeles Times reports, even as it questions the herb's medical value.

Current policy puts physicians in an "untenable situation," the Times adds, forced to decide whether to prescribe to their patients a substance that under federal law is a Schedule 1 drug alongside heroin and LSD and a litany of psychedelics. CMA did not support landmark 1996 legislation that decriminalized weed for medicinal purposes in California, and the group still calls the botanical a "folk remedy." Yet it claims the consequences of continued criminalization dwarf the potential physiological and societal perils.

"CMA may be the first organization of its kind to take this position, but we won't be the last," CMA President-Elect James T. Hay said Sunday in a press release. "This was a carefully considered, deliberative decision made exclusively on medical and scientific grounds."

Which points to the dearth of data behind all that Granddaddy Purple you've been using for your "bad back." Until the sticky stuff is reclassified, CMA argues, its pharmacological properties will remain largely obscured. "There simply isn't the scientific evidence to understand the benefits and risks of medical cannabis," CMA Board Chair Paul Phinney said in the group's statement.

Rescheduling takes top priority, then, as denoted in the policy recommendation overview of the group's white paper, Cannabis and the Regulatory Void (PDF):

•'Reschedule' medical cannabis in order to encourage research lending to responsible regulation.
•Regulate recreational cannabis in a manner similar to alcohol and tobacco.
•Tax cannabis.
•Facilitate dissemination of risks and benefits of cannabis use.
•Refer for national action.

The group is getting political and medical pushback, of course.

"I wonder what they're smoking," California Police Chiefs Association spokesman John Lovell tells the Times. He says that if you consider weed's negative physiological impacts – its affect on the developing brain, say, or the number of accidents linked to impaired driving – CMA's weekend reveal is "an unbelievably irresponsible position." And Robert DuPont, a Georgetown Medical School professor of psychiatry, says the group's call for legalization is “a reckless disregard of the public health." He tells the Times that this would only spark more use, "and that, to me, is a public health concern. I’m not sure they’ve thought through what the implications of legalization would be.”

But flip that on its head. Legalizing marijuana could, you know, reign in a runaway prison culture, create jobs, or maybe even help Americans fight fascists.

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Reach this writer at brian@motherboard.tv.