Brookhiser on Medical Marijuana

Radley Balko | November 29, 2006

Brian's post below reminds me of something Rick Brookhiser wrote at National Review Online last year:

Chemotherapy, which I had in 1992, wasn't all bad. I looked very cool bald; it gave a nice grey perm when my hair came back (why couldn't it bring more hair back? can't they cut it with menoxydil?); and it did stop my unpleasant visitor.

But the nausea was not cool, and only the illegal drug worked once the legal ones had failed.

[ONDCP Director] John Walters says there is no medical evidence for marijuana's effects. He is a liar or an ignoramus, probably both.

Brookhiser, a credentialed conservative, has in fact long been an eloquent supporter of medicinal marijuana.  I like this quote, pulled from Wikipedia, that apparently came from Congressional testimony he gave in 1996:

My support for medical marijuana is not a contradiction of my principles, but an extension of them.  I am for law and order. But crime has to be fought intelligently and the law disgraces itself when it harasses the sick. I am for traditional virtues, but if carrying your beliefs to unjust ends is not moral, it is philistine."

Given that according to our unnamed Weekly Standard writer, marijuana "provides no health benefits, especially for sick people," and that supportera of medical marijuana laws are nothing more than corn chip-munching, Cheech & Chong-watching radical hippies, I wonder what he'd say to a guy like Brookhiser?  Would the Weekly Standard argue that Brookhiser was wrong about his own illness?  That it was all in his head?  That they, more than he, know what made his nausea go away? 

Perhaps they'll argue what drug warriors usually fall back on when they run out of arguments -- that he's part of an elaborate scheme concocted by George Soros.