As Allen St. Pierre of NORML – who alerted me to this – remarked, it is really odd to see a conservative representative introduce a resolution at the federal level to denounce what polls show that his constituents in his home state clearly favor. Of course, I am old enough to remember when "states' rights" was a mantra for Southern Congressmen.

Hearings on the formal markup of the Resolution are scheduled for Wednesday morning, but I have obtained a first draft of the mess, which touches all the bases.

The "Whereases" include

1. "Whereas marijuana – along with crack cocaine…. have long been classified as a Schedule I drug… " --- (Of course, cocaine is a Schedule II, but we won’t go into that, will we.)
2. "Whereas a review by the Annals of Internal Medicine of more than 6,000 articles from the medical literature concluded that marijuana is not a medicine….. that the use of crude marijuana for medical purposes is unnecessary and inappropriate." (Finger prints! This is from an article by two notorious prohibitionists – Voth and Schwartz -- published in the Annals, and not a "review by the Annals of Internal Medicine." It represents nothing more than a shameful lapse in editorial standards by the Annals, and predictably, their name is being misused as the authority for this gross misstatement of fact.)
3. "Whereas the States of Arizona and California, through state initiatives in 1996, legalized the sale and use of marijuana for "medicinal" use, while the state of Washington in 1997 rejected an initiative to legalize the sale and use of marijuana for "medicinal" use:" (Note the misrepresentation of the Washington state initiative as being about just medical marijuana. It involved all Schedule I drugs and a complete overhaul of the state's drug laws.)
4. "Whereas after the initiative in Arizona, the legislature, with the support of the majority of the citizens of the state, passed legislation to prevent the dispensing of of any substance as medicine that had not first been approved … by the FDA …" (Wow! In fact, the Arizona legislature did pass such a bill, but it was immediately stayed by a petition signed by more than twice the legally required number of Arizonans. As with this resolution, it is fascinating how politicians will lie to thwart the will of the people. It would be inspiring if they were standing up for the truth to defend a minority, but when they lie to justify using the power of the state to persecute the most vulnerable members of society, it is a sickening spectacle.)
5. "Whereas some individuals and organizations who support "medical" marijuana initiatives do oppose drug legalization, (A major concession!) prominent pro-legalization organizations have admitted their strategy is to promote drug legalization nationally through State "medical" marijuana initiatives, and as such are seeking to exploit the public’s compassion for the terminally ill to advance their agenda." (This is untrue, illogical and irrelevant. Marijuana really does cause paranoia.)

The rest of the "whereases" are all about how teenage marijuana use has gone up and how users are 85 times more likely to use cocaine, a Schedule II drug, than non-marijuana users and it is all because of the medical marijuana movement.

So it is resolved that the House of Representatives is "unequivocally (an inappropriate word) opposed to the legalizing of marijuana for medical use."

It will be more interesting to see what comes of the next part which calls for the Attorney General to report on "the annual number arrests and prosecutions for marijuana offenses during the period beginning with 1992 through 1997." It is probable that they really don’t know. The Republicans may think that they are going to find that Clinton has personally failed to arrest enough marijuana users. But when they see the real numbers they will just bury them along with all the other facts.