Chapter 15
illustration © Stephen Saunders
After 15 days of taking testimony and more than a year’s legal deliberation, DEA Administrative Law Judge Francis L. Young formally urged the DEA to allow doctors to prescribe marijuana. In a September 1988 judgement, he ruled: “The evidence in this record clearly shows that marijuana has been accepted as capable of relieving the distress of great numbers of very ill people, and doing so with safety under medical supervision.… It would be unreasonable, arbitrary and capricious for the DEA to continue to stand between those sufferers and the benefits of this substance in light of the evidence in this record. In strict medical terms, marijuana is far safer than many foods we commonly consume…marijuana in its natural form is one of the safest therapeutically active substances known to man.”
Yet former DEA Administrator John Lawn, his successor, Robert Bonner, who finally resigned in November 1993, and current DEA Administrator John Constantine—non-doctors all!—have all refused to comply and have continued to deprive persons of medical cannabis, based on their own personal discretion and claims like the following:
alternative version of a picture
the authorized on-line version of Jack Herer’s “The Emperor Wears No Clothes”
