The Obama administration has been a disappointment in some ways, but by far the worst of its actions concern medical marijuana. What the federal government is doing now is nothing short of cruel and unfair, not to mention a gross waste of taxpayer dollars. It began with aggressive raids last March on legal Montana producers and providers who had been working to help worthy patients, and now has escalated to become a national scandal.
As a physician, I have issued more than 400 recommendations to patients who have benefited greatly from the use of medical marijuana. It seems to me that we are seeing the fruits either of colossal ineptitude on the part of Obama’s appointees or, much worse, an unconscionable double-cross that essentially amounts to deliberate entrapment by the government of good, law-abiding citizens.
Ogden memo
Consider that as a candidate in 2008, Obama promised to stop prosecuting patients and their providers who functioned legally under state medical marijuana laws. Once he took office, the Justice Department followed up with the “Ogden memo,” in which U.S. attorneys were advised not to spend scarce resources on patients and providers in “clear and unambiguous compliance” with state and local laws.
With these actions, the Obama administration itself invited a rapid increase in medical marijuana use in Montana and elsewhere. This included some problems, certainly, but states were responding, and Montana was working to improve its law.
Meanwhile, some of the Montana providers I got to know sought to operate with a high degree of professionalism. To ensure Obama’s required “clear and unambiguous compliance,” they worked closely with local law enforcement, gave them regular tours of their facilities and used practices that they knew conformed to local law enforcement’s interpretation of the rules.
Yet suddenly, out of nowhere and with no warning, federal agencies intruded, shutting down some of Montana’s finest model operations, thus implementing a radically altered “federal” approach to the issue. Thousands of Montana patients instantly lost access to medical marijuana — the safe medicine that had helped them more than the riskier drugs for which they no longer had prescriptions.
Public’s money wasted
Most shockingly, the federal government now is spending taxpayer dollars to prosecute many of these good Montanans, seeking to spend yet many more taxpayer dollars to imprison them for decades or longer. And, at the same time, the government is planning to deny these defendants the right to even mention in court their compliance with state law or their open-door relations with local and state law enforcement. So much for Obama’s campaign promises and the “Ogden memo.”
Good Montanans are now pleading guilty, no matter how professional, honorable and legal in the eyes of state law enforcement they may have been. While Congress is talking about sharply curtailing things like Medicare and Social Security because we can’t afford it, every taxpayer is funding this immoral “bait-and-switch” that the Obama administration itself perpetrated. It should make every Montanan who believes in the U.S. Constitution sick.
Dr. Edwin Stickney of Billings is a retired physician and past
president of the Montana
Medical Association and the Montana chapter of the American Academy of Family Physicians.
