Medical marijuana is a legislative smokescreen

No issue may have consumed more of the General Assembly’s time more trivially in recent years than “medical marijuana.” Such legislation at last has cleared the state House of Representatives and Senate, and Gov. Malloy says he’ll sign it. But it’s not likely to make any difference, except maybe to let some legislators pose as more compassionate than some of their colleagues.The bill wouldn’t just decriminalize marijuana use by people afflicted with certain serious diseases for which the weed is said to have therapeutic value. It would license people to grow the drug for pharmacists and pharmacists to distribute it to patients. For the state to decriminalize marijuana wouldn’t violate federal law, as no state is obliged to match its criminal code exactly to the federal government’s. Indeed, Connecticut recently reduced to a mere infraction its penalty for possession of small amounts of marijuana, even as the federal government remains free to enforce its more punitive marijuana laws in the state.But the licensing and distribution sections of the medical marijuana bill are meant to facilitate violation of federal law and thus would be a form of “nullification” and “interposition,” the sort of thing the segregationist Southern states did to thwart federal civil rights laws in the 1960s and the sort of thing recently undertaken in New Haven with its issuance of city government identification cards to illegal aliens to facilitate their breaking federal immigration law. Connecticut has no business doing that, and, really, no need, marijuana being so widely available already and the state’s penalty for possession having been reduced. Even many of those who long have been pleading for medical marijuana from experience with sick relatives have acknowledged its availability in their circumstances.While public dispensaries would make things easy for medical marijuana users, it’s not likely that the proposed legislation would accomplish that anyway. For few if any pharmacists would risk federal prosecution and confiscation of their businesses by participating in a state licensing system. Medical marijuana legislation has been raised in the General Assembly for years without prompting the discussion Connecticut really needs — a discussion about drug criminalization generally. That policy causes infinitely more suffering than the lack of medical marijuana. An audit of drug policy generally is long overdue, and medical marijuana long has been the smoke screen for avoiding it.When Dannel P. Malloy was campaigning for governor in 2010, the universal preschool program he had instituted as mayor of Stamford may have been the part of his record of which he was most proud. He advocated a similar program for the whole state. As state government’s catastrophic insolvency crashed down on him, the governor sharply curtailed his ambition. Instead of universal state-funded preschool, he proposed state funding for 1000 more preschool seats for disadvantaged kids throughout the state. But anyone watching television lately in Connecticut might hardly know this, as 1000 new preschool seats figure heavily in the commercials being broadcast by the state’s biggest teacher union, the Connecticut Education Association, in opposition to the governor’s proposals, which include increasing teacher accountability and weakening tenure. So to disguise itself as a supporter of education reform, the CEA has its ads tout the thousand new preschool seats as if the idea was the union’s own, not the hated governor’s. Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester.