Section 5. Scope, Duration, and Significance of Use.

The legislative history of the Controlled Substances Act indicates that scheduling decisions must include consideration of the costs of law enforcement attendant to a drug or substance's scheduling, as well as a consideration of the impact of such law enforcement on the young.

The absolute yet unenforceable schedule I prohibition contributes to an unfavorable set and setting accompanying school-age access and exposure to marijuana. Not only are students provided access to marijuana, they are also grossly uninformed and misled about the substance and its use.

Adherence to the polarized and unscientific 'use = abuse' model obstructs the development of effective, research based policy and drug-abuse prevention programs; this restrains progress in protecting school-age youths from the dangers presented by all drugs, legal or not.

Marijuana prohibition makes criminals out of patients who use marijuana for legitimate therapeutic purposes, and forces patients to choose between honoring the law and honoring their own health.

The absolute yet unenforceable schedule I prohibition creates tremendous ethical problems for physicians and health-care-providers, professionals well-aware of the widening gap between existing governmental policies and the developing support for marijuana's therapeutic potential in scientific and medical literature, and professionals who are seemingly instructed by law to discourage their patients from using marijuana even if such use has obvious therapeutic benefits.

The failure of the Department of Health and Human Services, and of the National Institute on Drug Abuse specifically, to address this widening breach between recent research about marijuana and the findings required to sustain marijuana's schedule I status unfairly and inappropriately makes our federal law enforcement officials, particularly officials of the Drug Enforcement Administration, appear to be heartless, insensitive, self-serving idiots.

The federal failure to reconcile marijuana's schedule I status with contemporary medical and scientific evidence places an unfair and expensive burden on state criminal justice agencies and their limited budgets.

Marijuana's schedule I status and the high priority it places on domestic and international marijuana eradication has the unintended effect of transforming domestic law enforcement activity into a massive market and price support mechanism for entrepreneurs here and abroad.

Marijuana's schedule I status mandates high priority for domestic marijuana eradication efforts; the nearly impossible task presented to law enforcement results in extreme measures and increasing federalization of local and state judicial authority.

One of the results of the DEA's domestic marijuana eradication program is that in the mid 1990's domestic marijuana cultivation is now so extensive and decentralized that the DEA admits they can no longer estimate how much marijuana is grown in the United States. If they have lost hope of even estimating how much is grown, they have abandoned hope of ever eliminating marijuana cultivation in the United States, and of ever enforcing marijuana's schedule I status as a completely prohibited substance. The purpose of schedule I is to regulate the manufacture of drugs and substances with the highest potential for abuse; without control of domestic marijuana cultivation such regulation is impossible.

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