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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
Did the White House drug office go too far in trying to stop the spread of medical marijuana initiatives?
Jul 27, 2000 | When voters in California and Arizona passed ballot measures legalizing medicinal marijuana in November 1996, White House drug czar Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey mobilized his troops to combat the spread of what he had previously called "Cheech & Chong" medicine.
McCaffrey quickly proposed that doctors who "recommend or prescribe" marijuana be stripped of their DEA registration -- that is, their ability to write prescriptions for controlled substances -- and be excluded from treating Medicare and Medicaid patients. But a group of California doctors and patient advocacy groups sued to enjoin those restrictions, and a federal judge agreed.
Now that same lawsuit provides evidence of a more ambitious, but less well-known, effort by McCaffrey's Office of National Drug Control Policy to stop the spread of state initiatives legalizing medical marijuana -- an effort that, among other achievements, helped inspire the ONDCP's controversial taxpayer-funded, anti-drug media crusade.
The cooperation of the ONDCP and its key ally, the Partnership for a Drug-Free America, in the fight against medical marijuana is a little known chapter in the annals of the nation's ongoing drug war. In the last few years, drug warriors have attempted to slow the spread of medicinal marijuana initiatives, and, with varying success, block their implementation in states that passed them -- even as data about the therapeutic uses of cannabinoids, the chemicals that appear in marijuana, to treat nausea and pain is increasingly well documented. In fact, for nearly 20 years, the federal government sought to curb medical marijuana research, and McCaffrey has been among the most zealous bureaucrats on that front.
But the documents uncovered by the California lawsuit reveal the extent of McCaffrey's role in spearheading the political fight against medical marijuana -- and in turn, the role played by the pot initiatives in strengthening the drug warriors' determination to mount a paid media campaign, at least in part to keep similar initiatives from passing in other states.
Within days of the California and Arizona pot initiatives' passage, for instance, McCaffrey convened a high-level meeting of some 40 government and private sector drug warriors to plan a response to the medical marijuana threat. At least one participant knew at the time that the meeting -- convened by federal officials to counter the will of state voters -- would be controversial if word of it ever became public.
"The other side would be salivating if they could hear [the] prospect of [the] Feds going against the will of the people," commented Robert Wood Johnson Foundation vice president Dr. Paul S. Jellinek, according to notes of the meeting taken at the time and uncovered by the California doctors' lawsuit.
Daniel Porterfield, who is currently vice president of communications for Georgetown University, attended the meeting as a deputy assistant secretary in charge of coordinating various anti-drug efforts within Health and Human Services. He told Salon, "The reason for the meeting was to organize the effort for the other 48 states."
One outcome of the meeting was a determination to step up the media war against drugs, which helped lead to ONDCP's paid media campaign. Salon revealed earlier this year that television networks, TV producers and some magazine publishers inserted anti-drug messages into television shows and nonfiction magazine articles in order to fulfill ONDCP's requirement that it get ads on a two-for-one, half-priced basis -- or that programming or editorial content satisfy this stipulation.
The White House drug office stumbled back into the headlines a few weeks ago, when McCaffrey told members of the House subcommittee on Criminal Justice, Drug Policy and Human Resources that his office plans to expand its media campaign to influence the content of movies, not just television and magazines. Elaborating on the plan and referring to potential financial credits for films with anti-drug motifs, ONDCP spokesman Bob Weiner told the Los Angeles Times, "But if the movies choose to do that, they can submit it to our contractors after the movie is completed for review for credit."
Meanwhile, ONDCP critics question whether the federal agency or the tax-exempt PDFA should have been seeking to influence state elections at all. "The use of government resources to politic on controversial issues is clearly against ethics, as well as the law stating that federal employees can not take public positions for or against legislation under consideration," insists Thomas H. Haines, head of the Partnership for Responsible Drug Information, a persistent McCaffrey critic.
American Civil Liberties Union president Nadine Strossen believes the meeting convened by McCaffrey, which according to an attendance record included no medical-use proponents, raises "at the very least a moral and political question. It raises First Amendment-type concerns about the nature of a free society, and what an open debate should be in a democratic society."
McCaffrey declined to comment for this story, but Weiner told Salon: "Consistently throughout this process, Gen. McCaffrey has been aware of the [political] restrictions, and has honored them." Weiner wouldn't comment directly on the November 1996 ONDCP meeting. But when asked about whether the paid media campaign had the potential to create a national political climate inimical to the passage of medical marijuana initiatives, he responded, "If it has a peripheral effect, so be it."
Steve Dnistrian, executive vice president of PDFA, also denied that the National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign was designed to combat medical marijuana legalization. "The NYADMC is focused on teens, pre-teens and parents. No ads or other pieces of communication have anything to do with medical marijuana," he said in an e-mail. Dnistrian told Salon that discussions about the paid media campaign began long before concerns about medical marijuana initiatives "were even on the radar."
But even some of those invited to McCaffrey's November 1996 meeting now say that there were concerns about the political nature of the discussions, and questions about whether the campaign's organizers should be seeking to sway public opinion against medical marijuana initiatives.
