Dan Bernath: I think any reasonable person would look at these stories and agree that justice has not been done here. Folks who favor keeping marijuana illegal would rather talk about whether the drug is good or bad; what they don’t want to talk about is that marijuana prohibition is much worse [than criminalization] and that real people, innocent people, get hurt as a result of prohibition There are awful stories.

For example, there was a young man in Florida, who will remain anonymous. He was only serving a weekend [in prison]. He had a very small amount of weed; he was caught at a concert. The prison was overcrowded, and they housed him with a violent offender, and he was raped. Even though small marijuana offenders don’t really belong in prison, here’s something in our society that wants to put them there anyway., and this is the result of that.

There’s a family named the Naulls, who I consider friends, Ronnie Naulls is a valid, qualified medical marijuana patient. He also ran two medical marijuana dispensaries, paid all his taxes, and contributed all his profits to charities related to cancer. Last year, cops came into his home, arrested him and his wife and took his children. They charged him as a drug dealer and they charged his wife with child endangerment. He was completely aboveboard according to California law, but the police told him and his wife that they were endangering their children, who spent over a month in foster homes. They’re never going to forget that experience, and they’re probably not ever going to understand it either.

TI: You said that “innocent” people are arrested under marijuana laws. Can you explain what that means?

DB: What I was referring to there is that there are folks who are responsible, law-abiding citizens except that they prefer to use marijuana as opposed to, say, alcohol or tobacco.

But there are also situations where people who have broken now laws get caught up in prohibition. A terrible illustration of that is a 92-year-old woman named Kathryn Johnston. Almost two years ago she was in her home in Atlanta, a SWAT team came in – she thought her house was being robbed -- she took an old antique pistol and started shooting and was killed. The cops had gotten [a tip] from an informant that crack was being sold from that house. When they found that out, they planted a small amount of marijuana to try to impugn her. An investigation showed that she had no drugs in her house. They just messed up.

The case made huge headlines, and I think it led people to see that there may be a problem with our drug laws, particularly marijuana laws.

TI: Is it common practice for cops to plant marijuana when they suspect other criminal activity is going on?

DB: I’m not really qualified to say that, but it’s done. Two of the cops were arrested and were sentenced to ten years in jail. But I think it would be a mistake to see this as just a law enforcement problem. It’s a bigger problem than a few dishonest cops. These kinds of situations are really inevitable.

Often the victims are the police officers themselves. They’re put in danger in situations where they probably don’t need to be there in the first place.

Every year marijuana arrests go up, but for the most part marijuana use rates go up as well. I think that the last 35 years, this experiment with the war on marijuana, has proven that this isn’t a problem we can solve by arresting people.

TI: Can you explain that a bit more?

DB: Let’s compare the way we handle marijuana to the way we handle alcohol. We tried to outlaw alcohol; it’s a dangerous drug that causes many societal problems. What we found was that by making it illegal, use rates went up, criminal activity went up, we could no longer control the quality of the product; people were poisoned because bathtub gin was made improperly. Prohibition lasted roughly a decade, and it’s largely viewed as an absolute failure. So we shouldn’t be surprised that we’re having the same problems with marijuana.

What we learned from alcohol is basically true of marijuana, which by most measures is less dangerous than alcohol. There’s never been an overdose death caused by marijuana, and addiction rates are far lower than alcohol. There’s less violence associated with marijuana, and the associated violence seems to stem from the fact that it operates on the black market. The second we regulate how marijuana is manufactured and sold, it ceases to become profitable for organized criminals. Not only that, but we can more efficiently ensure that children don’t have access to it, the way we do with tobacco and alcohol. To do that, we have to take responsibility for this product away from criminals.

TI: And you think that legalization or decriminalization would achieve that?

DB: It’s tough with the terminology, because when you say legalization a lot of people imagine marijuana being available everywhere, and I don’t think anybody wants that. I think want people want a sensible [policy] where it’s taxed and regulated.

TI: Are there potential medical benefits to marijuana other than pain relief?

DB: We should be doing more research about the potential benefits of medical marijuana, and one exciting avenue for that is anxiety and depression, where a lot of the drugs that are approved by the FDA can be dangerous and addictive. More and more doctors are recommending it, they can’t prescribe it of course, but patients are finding comfort in it.

TI: Is there research being done on whether marijuana is potentially more helpful than prescription drugs for certain illnesses?

DB: There is good research that’s coming out and being published, there could be a lot more. There’s one federal source of research marijuana; it’s grown at a facility at the University of Mississippi. The DEA and the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) control that pot. So basically it’s controlled by people who only approve research on the dangers of marijuana. It’s rare to impossible for people who want to do research on its benefits to get access to marijuana. There’s open resistance and animosity from the federal government to do that kind of research. But it still gets done. After California approved medical marijuana, they also opened a federal research facility on medical marijuana.

The American College of Physicians just published a 13-page paper calling on the government to stop arresting people and respect the laws in states where marijuana is legal. They also said that more research is called for and that we need to start looking at the possible applications of this medication.

TI: What do you think the real reason for the resistance to this research is?

DB: I personally think that a lot of it has to do with the stigma that marijuana has had in this country for the last seventy years as a result of fear mongering and propaganda starting with the “reefer madness” of the ‘30s. It makes it very difficult to have a reasoned, rational conversation about how we want to handle this drug, not just medically, but as a society.

TI: It seems that part of the stigma has to do with the ‘60s hippie stereotype, and we’re still so locked in that culture war, socially and politically, that marijuana has kind of gotten woven into that debate.

DB: Richard Nixon declared war on drugs in the early ‘70s. He commissioned a panel, all picked by him, to study all aspects of marijuana. They took 2 years, they went all over the world, they reviewed all the research available at the time, and what they concluded in the Shafer Report and what they presented to Nixon was that it does not make sense to arrest people for this drug. That was the advice he was given by his people, and yet, when he declared war on drugs he made marijuana a main part of it. There’s really no evidence to suggest that he even read the report. I think that that’s telling

To read the full content of the Institute of Medicine's 1999 report on medical marijuana, click here.