New priorities drive Holder, Obama to permit medical marijuana use

WASHINGTON, March 20 (UPI) -- The Obama administration's decision to permit the local dispensation of marijuana in America if it is in compliance with local and state laws is a small move in a complicated jungle of conflicting U.S. legal regulations on drug policy. But many experts argue that it makes sense for a number of reasons and could lead to bigger changes down the road.

The decision by U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder will not make the dispensation or purchase of marijuana legal in any of the 37 states where it is still banned by state law. But it removes a long-embarrassing complication in the 13 states, including California, where the dispensation and sale of the drug for medical purposes has been permitted.

Up to now, in those 13 states, state and local authorities permitted this trade, but federal authorities were committed to shutting it down.

There were other complexities and contradictions. Because the FBI and other U.S. homeland security and law enforcement agencies are so stretched in dealing with violent crime and preventing terrorist attacks, the amount of manpower available around the country to battle the marijuana trade was very limited.

In practice, in those 13 states, the Drug Enforcement Administration turned a blind eye to operations that were relatively small-scale, conformed with local laws in their dealings and did not try to sell marijuana to children or teenagers. The DEA focused its efforts on large-scale operations that had broader criminal dimensions and links. Given the DEA's limited resources, there was little else it could do.

Marijuana appears to be quite effective in pain relief for cancer sufferers and also for some AIDS conditions. Although it is also often effective with victims of Alzheimer's disease, more negative symptoms -- such as loss of balance -- have been documented in such cases.

Holder's decision cannot be seen in a vacuum. The Obama administration believes that white-collar crime in the United States was disastrously neglected by its predecessors in the Bush administration. The FBI and other law enforcement agencies were given no political encouragement to go after such malefactors in a big way, and the issue was dropped to the bottom of the priority list in favor of the war on terror and the war on drugs.

The war on terror and issues of national security remain the top priority for U.S. law enforcement agencies. But the economic meltdown that has torpedoed the U.S. economy since September and the exposure of Bernard Madoff's $50 billion confidence trick investment scam have dramatically revealed the catastrophic ravages that such crimes and unregulated dealing have already inflicted on American society.

U.S. President Barack Obama is determined to clean up that mess, but it will require a lot of agents, resources and financing to do it, and they will have to be taken from other areas. Cutting down on homeland security and terror prevention is out of the question, so seeking to move resources from crackdowns on supposedly less harmful drugs, especially those that are being used for medical purposes, seems an obvious place to start.

Holder's move is a cautious and incremental one. The new policy will be monitored closely to see if it generates significant abuse or brings more widespread relief. It is likely to be initially broadly welcomed. And it may influence a significant number of state legislatures to liberalize their laws on medical drug use. If that happens, wider, bolder measures toward the decriminalization of marijuana or other currently banned substances may follow.

Holder's move should therefore be seen as a cautious testing of the waters in the direction of increased tolerance and decriminalization in the United States' overall drug policies. For the first time since President Richard Nixon discounted the recommendation of experts he had appointed that marijuana be decriminalized nearly 40 years ago, a change in policy may be on the horizon.