In 1970, the Controlled Substances Act placed illicit and prescription drugs into five categories. Marijuana was placed in ScheduleßI, defining it as having a high potential for abuse, no currently accepted medical use in the United States, and a lack of accepted safety for use even under medical supervision. Lisa Stein in U.S. News & World Report writes that since 1996, a majority of voters in Alaska, California, Colorado, the District of Columbia, Maine, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington voted in favor of ballot initiatives to remove criminal penalties for seriously ill people who grow or possess medical marijuana. In 1997, a panel of experts convened by the National Institutes of Health recommended additional tests to determine the medical benefits of smoking marijuana, in contrast to consuming certain active ingredients of marijuana in pill form (Stein, 2002, 20).
Elizabeth Frater writes in National Journal that in response to these ballot initiatives, the head of the Office of National Drug Control Policy commissioned a study to determine whether marijuana has legitimate medical applications in late 1997. The study released in March of 1999 confirmed that marijuana has medical uses for a number of serious medical conditions including reduction of intra-ocular pressure that can result in glaucoma, relief from nausea and increase of appetite for patients undergoing chemotherapy, and relief of certain types of chronic pain including pain (Frater, 2001, 808). People with the medical conditions listed above have only two options:
Continue to suffer from the ailment itself; or
Illegally obtain or cultivate marijuanaßand risk:
inflated prices, and impure product, or
theft or attack from suppliers selling them marijuana
Patients' efforts to bring change through the federal courts have made little progress. Efforts to obtain FDA approval of marijuana use or even clinical trials have been repeated
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