Wheres Bushs compassion for medical marijuana users?
Wednesday, March 27, 2002 By JEANNE KOHL-WELLES STATE SENATOR Along with 18 members of the Legislature, I have joined a national coalition of hundreds of state legislators, physicians, religious leaders, medical organizations — and such notables as Walter Cronkite, Hugh Downs and Milton Friedman — to ask President Bush to allow seriously ill patients to have legal access to medical marijuana under federal law. This coalition published its request to the president in the form of a full-page ad in The New York Times on March 6. Bush, who campaigned as a “compassionate conservative,” said during the 2000 campaign that states should be able to decide the medical marijuana issue “as they so choose.” But his administration has pursued a different course, allowing the Drug Enforcement Administration to raid medical marijuana providers in California, where voters approved medical use of marijuana in 1996. Such a policy is inhumane and unnecessary. In 1978, the federal government created a pr
