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..all she wants now is to live the last of her life with dignity and to spend it with friends and family, especially her kids," Williams said. "If that means using marijuana to manage the pain, so be it"...

Where's the 'dignity', in spending your final days in a dope haze?

To this day I cannot understand the argument against the use of marijuana for medical purposes.

It can be controlled like any other controlled substance and prescribed like any other drug.

If anyone can recommend to me a source that provides a cogent, logical position, I would appreciate it.

I doubt that the Feds will ever be willing to change their methods which guarantee their revenue stream from the Drug War. Decriminalization would also drop the prices - which would hurt the DEA's bottom line in their sales as well. (Much less take away all of that protection and kick-back money that is 'off the books'.)

The entire DoJ is full of Clinton hold-overs that should be purged immediately.

How uncompassionate are people

Some other Freeper has used the term CINO....Christian in Name Only.

D*mn, I wish I could find that photo posted here several months ago from one of these rallies! It had two overaged hippies holding up a sign that said "keep your hands off our medicine!"

They had scraggly beards down to mid-chest, moth-eaten clothing--you could almost see the flies buzzing around them.

I thought "Uh-huh, the 'face' of the medicinal marijuana movement."

They need their "medicine" just like ol' grandpa needed his "medicine" from the backwoods still.

We are still a federation of states. Our states still have sovereign rights, or laws that the government cannot get involved with lest it overstep its constitutional bounds.

If California voters can enact gun restrictive laws that may not agree with our federal right to bear arms, it is my guess our government will not send in the Delta Force to make sure each resident of California has a gun. Therefore, the voters of California should have no problems legalizing marijuana.

And, if California voters want to, they can legalize it for any purpose they chose - whether it be for the sick, or for the purposes of breaking up a black market to allow for the state to profit legally from it via taxes as it does now with tobacco, alcohol, and any other perscription or over-the-counter drug that causes far worse side effects than marijuana.

Morpine coecaine etc are legal for pain management so what is the big deal about pot

bump

bttt

Her sister, a soccer mom

enough said

..we're talking sick, sick people," she said. "People who are pale and emaciated"...

Ever known a chronic dope smoker that wasn't 'pale and emaciated', JG?

I truly wish the FDA would put marijuana through the normal battery of tests, then legalize it (or not) based on those tests for medical use. Medical marijuana would be no different from any other prescription that has to be tightly controlled.

This just ran on the news wire:

South Dakota to Vote on Extending Jury Rights
Sun Sep 22, 4:05 PM ET
By ADAM LIPTAK The New York Times

In November, voters in South Dakota will decide whether to give tax protesters, medical marijuana users and other criminal defendants a new right. A proposed constitutional amendment would allow defendants there to concede their guilt but nonetheless argue for acquittal on the grounds that the law under which they were charged is misguided or draconian.

The South Dakota initiative, known as Amendment A, is the next step in a centuries-old debate about the role of juries in deciding not just the facts of a case but also the wisdom of the law in question. The shorthand term for the complex subject is jury nullification.

Proponents of the amendment say it is a necessary countermeasure.

"I'm concerned with the increasing criminalization of more and more behavior, of things that merely annoy other people," said Bob Newland, the Libertarian candidate for attorney general of South Dakota and the chief proponent of Amendment A.

Among recent misguided prosecutions in South Dakota, Mr. Newland said, were those of a man convicted of cruelty to animals for using his cane to fend off an attacking dog, and parents convicted of child pornography after taking pictures of their toddler in the tub. He said these people were guilty under the letter of the law but should have been able to argue to the jury that the laws in question made no sense.

The initiative's chances of passage are hard to assess. Some 34,000 people signed petitions to place it on the ballot, which is more than 10 percent of the people who voted in the last statewide election.

Robert E. Hayes, the president of the South Dakota Bar Association, which opposes the initiative, said it could appeal to voters.

"Jury duty is taken pretty seriously here," Mr. Hayes said, "and there is some sense that juries are fundamental, citizen-level government organizations, so we want to empower them more."

Mr. Newland has allies across the ideological spectrum. In South Dakota, much of his support comes from the libertarian right, including opponents of gun control. Elsewhere, some liberal academics say nullification may be a sort of civil right.

"I would observe that they are strange bedfellows — pro-marijuana, pro-gun, anti-abortion, pro-environment," said Andrew D. Leipold, a professor at the University of Illinois College of Law who has written about jury nullification. "This cuts very widely across many political groups. They are a very interesting collection of people who believe philosophically in the power of juries, plus a lot of single-issue people."

Mr. Newland said South Dakota was "the center of the universe for the informed jury movement now," adding, "Everybody is watching what is happening here."

Earlier efforts to pass jury nullification laws in Oklahoma and Arizona failed. Similar legislation is pending in Alaska.

Lawyers say the case that prompted Amendment A was that of Matthew Ducheneaux, who was convicted in Sioux Falls last month of marijuana possession. Mr. Ducheneaux, 38, who had been caught smoking at a jazz festival in 2000, said he used marijuana to alleviate the leg spasms that have tortured him since he became a quadriplegic after an automobile accident.

Mr. Ducheneaux, whose five-day sentence was suspended, was forbidden to argue to the jury that the law under which he was charged was unwise.

The jury in the case was troubled by the prosecution, said Chris Moran, Mr. Ducheneaux's lawyer. "All of them conclusively said afterward that they didn't want to find him guilty."

The prosecutor in the case, Matthew Theophilus, sounded relieved to have won. "I've never seen a defendant more sympathetic than Matthew Ducheneaux," he said. "Did I want to prosecute Matthew Ducheneaux? No. Did I have to? Yes."

Mr. Theophilus opposes Amendment A. "It's basically saying that the law should apply to one person one day and not to another person another day," he said. "They're trying to use Amendment A as an end run around the legislatures, as an end run around democracy."

Mr. Ducheneaux emphasized the medicinal power of marijuana. "It's instant relief for everything," he said. "It even stimulates the mind for thinking."

All he asked, he said, was to be able to make these arguments in court.

"I think they're violating my constitutional right of making my defense and proving my case," Mr. Ducheneaux said. He is appealing his sentence, which requires him to abstain from marijuana for a year.

The proposed amendment would add a few words to a list of familiar rights in the South Dakota Constitution, and its opponents say it is artfully drafted to appear innocuous. The amendment would allow defendants "to argue the merits, validity and applicability of the law, including the sentencing laws."

Opponents of the amendment, which include most of the establishment bar in South Dakota, say it is antidemocratic in allowing a small group of people to decide the wisdom of a law.

Mr. Newland said a more general approach was unrealistic, given the hundreds of new laws enacted each year.

"One option is to go to the Legislature and argue for the repeal of a single bad law," he said. "The other option is to allow people to argue during the defense portion of the trial that the law in question is flawed, misapplied, or that `yes, I did this, but if you convict me I'm going to jail for a long, long time.' "

Paul Butler, a former federal prosecutor in Washington who is now a professor at George Washington University Law School, supports the initiative. He said no one disputes the idea that juries have the practical power to nullify laws in given prosecutions, because their deliberations are secret and unreviewable.

"I have always thought that the current state of the law is perverse," Professor Butler said. "It's sort of like a secret power. To the extent these initiatives tell juries about a power they have, I'm in favor of them."

In his academic writing, Professor Butler has encouraged jury nullification in some drug possession cases as a sort of protest against what he says are draconian drug laws that disproportionately affect African-American men. He says he has mixed feelings about drug distribution cases and opposes nullification in cases involving violent crime.

Professor Leipold of the University of Illinois said creating a right to jury nullification while hoping it will be applied sensibly was wishful thinking.

"It's like giving someone a credit card with no limit on it and saying, `Be very careful how you spend it,' " he said.

In colonial times and in the early days of the Republic, American juries played a more active role in interpreting and applying the law. In the libel trial of John Peter Zenger in 1735, for instance, Mr. Zenger conceded that he had printed defamatory matter, which under the law at the time required conviction. His lawyer urged the jury to interpret the law to allow proof of truth as a defense. Mr. Zenger was acquitted.

Professor Leipold said it was a mistake to draw too many lessons from the Zenger case. "All we do is look back on the cool cases," he said. "We don't look back at the cases where juries refused to convict the killers of Native Americans."

Indeed, said David A. Pepper, who has written on the history of jury nullification, the American experience with the phenomenon has been decidedly mixed. Juries have acquitted people who harbored fugitive slaves and members of mobs that lynched black men. They have gone easy on people prosecuted on alcohol charges during Prohibition and on men accused of domestic violence.

More recently, courts have been almost uniformly hostile to nullification arguments.

"We categorically reject the idea that, in a society committed to the rule of law, jury nullification is desirable or that courts may permit it to occur when it is within their authority to prevent," Judge Jose A. Cabranes of the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in New York, wrote in 1997.

The lawyers in Mr. Ducheneaux's case have mixed feelings about it.

"I think there is some merit to his defense," Mr. Theophilus, the prosecutor, said, referring to the defendant's argument that he had a medical need for marijuana.

Mr. Moran, who represented Mr. Ducheneaux, says he is not sure how he feels about Amendment A.

"It could be very beneficial in some cases," he said. "But what sort of can of worms does it open?"