Marijuana Policy Project

A tiny Joplin, Mo., suburb has rolled itself a fat one.

Cliff Village — population 34 or 55, depending on who does the counting — weighed in on the national debate about medical marijuana by passing its own go-ahead earlier this month.

But before you bring your bong to town, consider that Cliff Village has no illusion that it has become a doobie sanctuary.

“This is symbolism, pure and simple,” said Mayor Joe Blundell. “I would like to be the brave one who grows the first plant, but they’ve built a lot of cages for the people who stick their necks out.”

Rather, his ordinance was intended to show grassroots support for a measure that has been repeatedly introduced — and consistently doomed — in the Missouri General Assembly.

Like that bill, Cliff Village’s ordinance allows someone with a physician’s approval to possess a few ounces of marijuana and grow a few plants.

Even as federal agents make arrests and seizures in states where marijuana has been made legal for the sick, the number of states moving toward legalization has only increased.

In November, Michigan voters made their state the 13th to allow relatively small amounts of marijuana for personal medical use. The Cliff Village ordinance takes the same approach.

“The pattern across the country is for cities to pass these things as a resolution or some toothless statement,” said Allen St. Pierre of the National Organization to Reform Marijuana Laws, or NORML. “This is usually a precursor to the state action.”

San Francisco approved medical marijuana and then California. Denver and then Colorado. Missoula and then Montana.

“It’s not Kansas City, (but) it still shows that people on the community level usually want this,” St. Pierre said of the Cliff Village ordinance.

Columbia passed a similar ordinance in 2004, and not just for show. Dan Viets, a Columbia lawyer and the Missouri coordinator for NORML, said that the ordinance had the practical effect of “lowering the anxiety of patients about possessing marijuana” and that police in the college town have played along with the local law.

Cliff Village is no college town. It’s barely a town at all. It has no employees and levies no taxes. It gets about $1,300 a year in distributions of state fuel taxes for road repairs and $120 to $200 more in cable TV franchise fees.

The 30-year-old mayor said the law came from his own frustration with pharmaceutical painkillers to deal with the aftermath of a train accident that left him in a wheelchair.

“When I got introduced to this flower, it not only alleviated my pain, it got me out gardening,” Blundell said. “I’m not just stoning myself out. It allowed me to function.”

Although Blundell said he’s not smoking dope these days — he thinks the ordinance raises his profile too much to risk it — he wanted to make a statement.

For his ordinance, Blundell mostly cut and pasted language from a bill now pending in Jefferson City. The Cliff Village ordinance passed Feb. 1 by a 3-2 vote. (The mayor’s father was one of the council members to back him.) Newton County Sheriff Ken Copeland, whose deputies patrol Cliff Village, was unimpressed:

“My advice would not to be run out and start growing marijuana, or you’ll be a guest of mine. As long as the law of the state says it’s illegal to possess or grow or distribute marijuana, that’s the law I’m going to enforce.”

That, in turn, reflects the country’s uneven approach to medical marijuana.

Consider California. Since voters passed Proposition 215 in 1996, state law has made it legal for those with prescriptions to buy pot and for it to be sold in retail stores and nonprofit collectives. In some places in the state, marijuana is available through vending machines. St. Pierre estimates 70 percent of marijuana purchases in the Golden State are recreational, not medicinal.

Yet just this month the federal Drug Enforcement Administration raided four dispensaries in Los Angeles and seized 500 pounds of weed. A holdover from Bush administration policies?

A spokesman for President Barack Obama recently answered a question about medical marijuana by saying that “federal resources should not be used to circumvent state laws.”

The benefits of medical marijuana — as an appetite stimulant for AIDS patients or an antidote for the side effects of cancer treatments — are hotly debated.

Skeptics say research is slim to support its medicinal benefits and call it a ruse for the partying crowd. Advocates offer testimonials and say empirical research into marijuana’s gifts has been hampered by federal opposition and the difficulty in using a placebo that mimics the pot-smoking experience.

Said NORML’s St. Pierre: “Cliff Village is just the latest to get involved.”