The DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) classifies marijuana as a dangerous drug with no medical value. That classification contradicts mounds of evidence showing marijuana to be a very safe and effective medicine. Marijuana is more effective, much less expensive, and much safer than many drugs currently used in its place. Marijuana can provide excellent relief for those who suffer from cancer, AIDS, glaucoma, multiple sclerosis, chronic pain, arthritis, rheumatism, asthma, insomnia, and depression. If knowledge of marijuana's many medicinal uses, its remarkable safety, and hemp's enormous potential as a natural resource become widely known, the DEA fears that support for Marijuana Prohibition will collapse, and thus threaten the DEA's budget. To maintain the myth that marijuana/hemp is useless and dangerous, the DEA prohibits medicinal use of marijuana, denies researchers access to marijuana for use in clinical studies, and rejects all applications to grow industrial hemp. In 1988--after reviewing all evidence brought forth in a lawsuit against the government's prohibition of medical marijuana--the DEA's own administrative law judge (Judge Francis Young) wrote:
"The evidence in this record clearly shows that marijuana has been accepted as capable of relieving the distress of great numbers of very ill people, and doing so with safety under medical supervision. It would be unreasonable, arbitrary and capricious for the Drug Enforcement Administration to continue to stand between those sufferers and the benefits of this substance in light of the evidence." Judge Francis Young of the Drug Enforcement Administration went on to say:
"Marijuana, in its natural form, is one of the safest therapeutically active substances known. In strict medical terms, marijuana is safer than many foods we commonly consume." Judge Young recommended that the DEA allow marijuana to be prescribed as medicine, but the DEA has refused.
Although the federal government claims marijuana has no appropriate medicinal use, the federal government contradicts itself by supplying government-grown, FDA-approved marijuana cigarettes to 8 seriously ill Americans remaining from its discontinued medical marijuana program. The federal government closed its medical marijuana program in 1992 after the AIDS epidemic created a flood of new applicants. In November 1996, California voters approved an initiative (Proposition 215) that re-legalizes the personal use and cultivation of marijuana for medicinal purposes.
