Censorship Backfires

Back in February the AARP posted the results of a poll they commissioned asking questions about medical marijuana. The exercise revealed that 72% of people over the age of forty-five support the right of adults to use medical marijuana with a physician’s recommendation. The AARP also announced plans to print an article on marijuana in the March/April issue of their magazine. However, the article failed to appear. As the Drug Policy Alliance puts it “The editors had apparently pulled the article in response to malicious attacks by a"media watchdog" organization, Accuracy in Media, and a pressure campaign by fanatical anti-drug groups with a long history of engaging in malicious and dishonest attacks.”

Now, happily, sometimes efforts at censorship can backfire. Today I received an e-mail telling me that The Los Angles Times, Boston Globe, the Detroit News and Free Press and the San Francisco Chronicle, papers with a combined circulation of 2.9 million readers, have all printed the article in question by Eric Bailey.

The issue of medical cannabis is complicated one for classical liberals. It very well could, as Thomas Szasz and Jeff Schaler fear, contribute to the growth of the therapeutic state or it could, as I hope, make the demonization of marijuana users much more difficult, thereby enabling a policy changing discussion of the arbitrary nature of cannabis prohibition and the folly of treating vices as crimes.

Either way, Bailey’s piece makes two important points. First, there is real relief from pain to be had by smoking marijuana. Perhaps it is a placebo effect in some cases, but so what. If your pain is gone, it is gone, and the state has no right to interfere with whatever process works for the person suffering.

Secondly, he has a quotation from a patient, 94 year old Catherine Ballinger, which nicely illustrates one of the main reasons why government is not a positive good but rather a necessary evil and sometimes I am not really so sure about the necessary part. She says "If those guys in Washington had the pain I suffer they wouldn't put up all these legal barriers for patients to obtain medical marijuana." I ask you , how many additional examples of those in government pursuing policies that harm other people but do not affect themselves could we name?