Just days after Massachusetts Democrat Rep. Barney Frank, along with 13 cosponsors, reintroduced HR 2835, the Medical Marijuana Patient Protection Act of 2009 in Congress, Republican Rep. Mark Kirk (Illinois) has called for federal legislation to sentence certain first-time marijuana offenders to up to 25 years in prison.
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The bill, entitled the Medical Marijuana Patient Protection Act of 2009, seeks to amend the discrepancy between federal law and the laws of over a dozen states that have enacted regulations governing the therapeutic use of cannabis.
The Obama Administration had signaled that it will not seek prosecutions and raids against medical marijuana dispensary owners who are acting in accordance with state laws. Charles Lynch couldn’t have followed state laws more scrupulously, but that is a moot point in the federal courthouse, where defendants cannot even mention the medical nature of their legal state-approved business.
Statewide efforts to enact medical marijuana law reform still remain in play in nearly a…
Even though California’s Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has joined the calls for a debate on marijuana prohibition itself, there is still a lot of confusion about the legal status of the supposedly less controversial topic of “medical marijuana”.
Equally ironically, the research is taking place at Temple University in Pennsylvania — where any use of natural cannabis (bad!) as a medicine is criminally illegal, but where research into the use faux cannabis (good!) is embraced.
Yesterday’s NORML blog post notwithstanding, a number of state legislatures continue to move forward in…