Grass Roots: The progress of medical marijuana.

Mr. Sager is a reporter in Reason magazine's Washington, D.C., office.

If you think legalizing medical marijuana would be a Reefer Madness-style catastrophe for society, don't tell Oregon grandmother Stormy Ray. For Ray, who was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1985, Oregon's legalization meant something entirely different: Instead of being forced to use a harsh, legal medication-one that left her in a constant haze-she can now gain pain relief much more easily. Medical marijuana, she says, "has literally saved my life."

Ray is just one beneficiary of a growing state-by-state movement to give patients with illnesses such as multiple sclerosis, cancer, and AIDS legal access to the drug. The legalization drive began in 1996, when voters in Arizona and California approved the first medical-marijuana initiatives. In 1998, voters in Oregon, Washington, and Alaska jumped on the bandwagon by passing their own initiatives. All of these laws protect patients from state prosecution for marijuana possession, as long as they obtain a doctor's recommendation.

The California model has proven extremely successful in keeping patients out of trouble with the law. As Chuck Thomas of the Marijuana Policy Project explains, fewer than one out of 70 marijuana-possession cases are handled at the federal level. This means that the main concern of patients is with how state law will treat them. "Fortunately," says Thomas, "the federal government really doesn't have the resources to go after patients." While a few patients have found themselves facing federal charges, these cases have usually involved large amounts of illegally grown marijuana. In general, if you are a legitimate patient in an initiative state, chances are you will face little risk if caught growing or possessing a small amount of marijuana.

This is a big step forward. When California and Arizona passed their initiatives, enraged politicians in Washington, D.C., called for a crackdown on the rebellious westerners. The Clinton administration denounced the new laws, and Utah senator Orrin Hatch convened a special hearing of the Judiciary Committee to condemn them. At the hearing, Hatch lambasted the Arizona initiative as the work of "pothead doctors . . . [who] want to legalize drugs," and DEA officials proposed a plan for a crackdown. This plan would form the nucleus of official policy: Any patient using marijuana, and any physician prescribing it, would face federal prosecution; the physicians, in addition, would lose their drug licenses and might even be banned from Medicare and Medicaid.

This response, immediate and harsh, was designed to show the states who was boss. Unfortunately for the drug warriors, however, it was also too Draconian to survive court scrutiny. Four months after the policy was announced, a federal district court forbade federal prosecution of the doctors. This left prosecutors facing the logistical Everest of cracking down on individual patients, which would require the cooperation of state law-enforcement officials.

In California, attorney general Dan Lungren-a vehement medical-marijuana foe-found he was unable to go after individual patients, so he mounted an aggressive campaign against the still-illegal "buyers' clubs." While state law allows patients to possess marijuana, it does not allow them to buy it, sell it, or grow it in large quantities-though all these things were being done on a large scale before California passed its initiative. Previously, the clubs had gone unmolested, as local law enforcement looked the other way; but Lungren began an aggressive campaign of prosecutions. Many of the clubs were shut down. Today, under the more sympathetic Gray Davis administration, some of the clubs are resurfacing; but the sad irony remains that after California voters gave patients much-needed legal access to marijuana, the politicians' response led to a decreased supply of the drug.

Despite these setbacks, voters and activists in Oregon, Washington, and Alaska were encouraged by the victory in California. And in these second-wave states, medical-marijuana legalization encountered a far different response than it had in the first wave: No reaction at all. Clearly, the political tide is turning in favor of medical marijuana. Another state may be about to join the list of legalizers: Polls estimate support for Maine's November medical-marijuana initiative at 70 percent, and opponents of the measure have yet to organize.

Activist Chuck Thomas envisions a number of possible strategies for legalizers, after the Maine vote. One possible route is approval by the Food and Drug Administration; this proposal gained ground last March, when a report from the Institute of Medicine confirmed that marijuana has medicinal value. Another approach Thomas would like to see is a campaign for state legislation, which would be a less expensive fight than collecting the signatures required for a ballot initiative. Hawaii and Minnesota have recently come close to passing legislation-and Thomas believes these states may yet be won over.

While the drug warriors have become quieter, they have not disappeared, and some are mounting as vigorous a campaign as ever. "The American people don't want federal money used to hold a referendum on the use of mind-altering drugs," snapped Georgia congressman Bob Barr in November 1998, explaining why Congress should override the will of voters in the District of Columbia. Washington, D.C. (or, to speak more precisely, its political class, since D.C. voters approved a medical-marijuana initiative with a stunning 69 percent majority), has never taken kindly to the idea of marijuana as medicine. To them, the idea seems dangerous-and quite correctly so. It risks inviting the public to reconsider years of the drug-war dogma, which has labeled all illegal drugs unequivocally evil. A fresh look at this dogma would be a Pandora's Box that-once opened-could end up rattling the faith of the drug warriors themselves.

Stormy Ray, for her part, doesn't care what the politicians think. She is too busy watching her six grandchildren grow up. Asked what she would tell people in Washington, D.C., who try to keep marijuana out of the hands of patients, her answer is simple: "If they ever, God forbid, became ill, I hope they would never have to fight for these drugs like patients have had to in the past."