Marijuana Policy Project

The Inland Valley Drug Free Community Coalition's representative, Roger Anderson, grossly distorts the truth about the state's compassionate medical-marijuana law and those who support it ("Pot law: a scam," Sept. 3).

Anderson's organization claims to be concerned that California's medical-marijuana law is prone to abuse, but it applauds San Bernardino and San Diego counties for suing to overturn a portion of the law that is designed to limit any abuse.

The state's medical marijuana ID card helps Riverside County's law enforcement officers to identify those who are bona fide patients - that is, people who are using medical marijuana in compliance with the law.

A recent memo released by the California attorney general's office and praised by the state's Police Chiefs Association says the ID cards "represent one of the best ways to ensure the security and nondiversion of marijuana grown for medical use." But Anderson and his ilk seek to make the jobs of criminal-justice officials more difficult by tossing out this valuable program.

And Anderson is flat wrong when he claims that the medical-marijuana ID card program is operated at the expense of taxpayers. As a quick read of the law easily reveals, application fees paid by the patients themselves cover the cost of the program.

Scrapping the program, as suggested in Anderson's reactionary tirade, would in fact be a drain on Riverside County tax dollars. It costs a lot of money each time a medical-marijuana patient is arrested and dragged through the judicial system - only to have his or her case later dismissed because there was no violation of state law.

Costly spin

Additionally, another representative of the Inland Valley Drug Free Community Coalition has been quoted in the media as saying that she is seeking federal grant funding. That's right, the group wants taxpayers to bankroll its misinformation campaign against our popular medical-marijuana law.

Riverside County has issued a little more than 1,000 medical-marijuana IDs since the program was launched nearly three years ago. According to Anderson, this number is "nonsense" and somehow indicates the program is being abused. Let's put that number into perspective, shall we?

According to the 2006 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, Riverside County is home to more than 85,000 regular marijuana users. Of those, about 500 - or less than 1 percent - were state medical marijuana ID cardholders that year. These figures strongly suggest that this program isn't being abused in any significant way but is instead doing exactly what it was intended to do: protect a very small number of seriously ill people from unnecessary arrest.

Anderson would have people believe that only a small cadre of "drug legalization" groups support safe and legal access to medical marijuana. He fails to mention that these groups include organizations like the American Public Health Association, the American College of Physicians, the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, and the American Academy of HIV Medicine.

These medical organizations' statements leave no doubt as to what the research really shows.
 
Clinical proof

For example, the American College of Physicians - 124,000 neurologists, oncologists and other doctors of internal medicine - "strongly urges protection from criminal or civil penalties for patients who use medical marijuana as permitted under state laws" and reclassification under federal law to allow medical use, "given the scientific evidence regarding marijuana's safety and efficacy in some clinical conditions."

These organizations and nearly 80 percent of the nation's voters understand that only an extremist minority still believes in arresting patients for medical-marijuana use.

F. Aaron Smith is the California field liaison for the Marijuana Policy Project, a marijuana policy reform organization based in Washington, D.C. He is a resident of Santa Rosa.