Bad Medicine?

"For me, the law is about the promise of justice," John Ashcroft confessed in his opening statement to the Senate Judiciary Committee during his confirmation hearing in the early months of 2001. "All men and all women, all people are equal."

And so -- judging by the actions of the attorney general after that statement was issued -- are drugs. Although a wide expanse of independent and government-funded research into cannabis has proven the drug to be less dangerous than sometimes-lethal, but nevertheless legal, substances such as alcohol and tobacco, that accumulating body of evidence did nothing to shrink the growing impasse over marijuana (cannabis).

In fact, barely two years later, and in the midst of a frenetic Department of Justice scramble to secure America against the sort of terrorists that assaulted us on 9/11, there stood Ashcroft and his colleagues, announcing the arrest of...Tommy Chong. For selling -- what else? -- bongs.

Although Chong's son Paris was the chief architect of the company Chong Glass -- as well as its Nice Dreams series of smoking pipes -- it was Tommy (the stoner icon that helped make Cheech and Chong one of 20th-century counterculture's funnier experiments) that "was the more responsible corporate officer, because he financed and marketed the product," U.S. Attorney Mary Beth Buchanan told LA Weekly. The punishment came down on Chong, ironically enough, on September 11, 2003: Nine-month prison bid, $20,000 fine and more than $100,000 in personal assets seized.

And while some may not blink at that sentence, it's fair to rewind the clock some before moving onward into America's continuing war on weed.

In the mid-'90s, when Dan Burton, Jr., son of the virulently anti-drug U.S. Rep. Dan Burton (R-IN), was busted in Louisiana for transporting almost eight pounds of marijuana, and was found a scant six months afterwards in his Indianapolis residence with 30 cannabis plants and a shotgun nearby, the feds declined to prosecute the case. Instead, Burton was ordered by a Louisiana judge to engage in community service. (This is the same Rep. Burton who tried to pass a bill that would subject some drug traffickers to the death penalty, and who obsessively helped rake President Clinton over Monica Lewinsky's coals.)

When Republican congressman Spencer Bachus' son Warren was apprehended in 1993 for possession of cannabis -- as well as possession of the kind of drug paraphernalia that cost Tommy Chong nine months of his life and a suitcase full of $100 dollar bills -- the younger Bachus wasn't even convicted. In fact, he was set free after paying $56 in court expenses.

Fast forward several years later and nothing, as far as the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) is concerned, seems to have changed on the cannabis front.

Unless you ask the 500 law enforcement and child welfare service agencies across the 45 states that participated in the National Association of Counties (NACO) recent survey on drugs, in which over 58 percent of those polled argued that meth -- not marijuana -- is the nation's top drug epidemic. In fact, less than 20 percent polled named cocaine as a major culprit, and an even smaller contingency laid the blame at the feet of cannabis. All of which seems to conflict with the arguments of the DEA and Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) -- which is managed by the nation's drug czar, John P. Walters -- who contend that cannabis is still the nation's de facto drug problem.

This attitude seems to fly in the face of scientific facts, whether they are provided by cannabis anti-jail groups like the Marijuana Policy Project (MPP) and National Organization to Reform Marijuana Laws (NORML), or hard-science advocates like the nonprofit Institute of Medicine (IOM), a component of the National Academy of Sciences which conducts research and dispenses advice to the nation-at-large on medicine, biology and health.