Thursday, July 24, 2003
 
Todd Aiken Responds

El Guapo, an actual card-carrying Libertarian, has recently taken to writing to our shared Congressional representative Todd Akin to express his views as a constituent. El Guapo apparently e-mailed Representative Akin about his views on medicinal marijuana. Rep. Akin replied:
    Thank you for contacting me to express your support for legalizing medical uses of marijuana.

    I am not sympathetic with the movement to legalize marijuana for medical use. The active intoxicant in marijuana, THC, is already available by prescription in pill form. I am not aware of any convincing evidence that raw marijuana provides any notable advantage over this legal pill. On the other hand, I am certain that marijuana is a gateway drug for millions of teenagers. While not every marijuana smoker moves on to harder drugs, virtually everyone who abuses cocaine and heroine begins by smoking pot. I am hesitant to support any legislative initiative which might jeopardize the lives of youths, and undermine the efforts of conscientious parents, by legitimizing marijuana use in the eyes of the public. No one doubts that the legalization of medical marijuana use is the first step toward legalizing its "recreational" use; advocates of drug legalization openly admit this. To me, this first step constitutes an unwise gamble: risking the lives and health of teenagers to achieve a small-scale and dubious medical benefit.

    Please do not hesitate to contact me again with any thoughts or concerns.
A principled response, apparently to El Guapo's e-mail.

I wonder, though, if the answer was canned. After all, someone I know once wrote, with pen and paper and stamp, to Def Dicky Gep, her congressional representative, to protest that the government had made AVSCOM, a military command and her place of employment, into a smoke-free environment. She smokes. So she wrote her Congressman.

Someone in the Congressman's office scanned her letter, found the word AVSCOM, stamped the canned response letter with the Congressman's signature, and stuffed it into an envelope. The constituent received a nice letter addressing her concerns about the impending closure of the command to save the federal budget. Def Dicky Gep was against it, believe him.

So that, too, was a principled, well-reasoned response.

- posted by Brian J. @ 4:25 PM
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