TheDC Interview: Drug Czar Gil Kerlikowske on Mexico, pill mills, and the medical marijuana stalemate

The marijuana issue isn’t going away: Will the government change its approach?

TheDC: I want to switch gears. You’ve said before that you don’t see medical benefits to smoked marijuana and also that the jury is still out on medical marijuana. What sort of scientific consensus does the ONDCP require? How many studies have to come out arguing for medical benefits? What do you need to see?

KERLIKOWSKE: One thing that’s helpful to understand is that the Institute of Medicine has said that smoked marijuana — inhaling smoke — is not something that we would use in medicine.

TheDC: Because of carcinogens?

KERLIKOWSKE: Exactly. And you know there are over 100 groups doing marijuana research, and they’re getting their marijuana from the University of Mississippi. There are several things in clinical trials right now. So we’ll just have to wait for those.

But it isn’t like researchers and pharmaceutical companies are beating down the door to say that their profit margins are going to be around marijuana.

TheDC: Would that make more of a difference, if pharma were asking for reform? As opposed to advocacy groups?

KERLIKOWSKE: You know, this started in California in ’96 and has been off the radar until the last few years. When I became police chief in Seattle in 2000, it had passed in 1999 in an initiative, and until the last year that I was there, medical marijuana wasn’t even a subject of any discussion about anything.

But in the last two or three years, it has just exploded. What has been made extremely clear is that the legalization community has made it patently clear that marijuana drug is a gateway for legalization. I think they’ve made that intention clear.

TheDC: Do you think they are complicating the debate? Do you think that’s hurting them?

KERLIKOWSKE: I think it hides the debate. If you call it medicine, if you call the people using it patients and the people distributing it caregivers, it completely masks the debate. I think that sends a bad message to young people, and I’ve heard that from high-school students we’ve done focus groups with.

I think it came back to hurt them in the legalization push in California, where dispensaries are more ubiquitous than Starbucks. They’re on every corner. They’re outside waving signs. I think people got pretty tired of having it jammed down their throats. And it isn’t a constitutional right, the last time I checked.

TheDC: While Prop 19 failed in California, Arizona successfully passed a medical marijuana initiative in November, and more state organizations plan to do so in 2012. Do you think your office — and the entire federal government — is at a stalemate with this issue? And at what point do you have to say, What do we do next?

KERLIKOWSKE: The states that have contemplated it — their mantra is, “We don’t want to be like California.” They don’t want the friction, and they see cities passing moratoria against additional dispensaries, plus those that are operating outside of whatever state law happens to be. There are indictments by the United States government pretty regularly. Arrests are made, cases are made in Nevada.

I think there was a belief that when the attorney general issued those guidelines

TheDC: — deprioritizing raids on medical marijuana

KERLIKOWSKE: Well, essentially saying, We have limited resources, like every police department in the country, and we’re going to use those limited resources in effective ways. So, you’re seeing cases being made against dispensaries that are not operating within state law.

TheDC: How concerned are you by the supposed rise in legal alternatives to illegal drugs? Are Spice, K2, bath salts and the like as big a threat as the media make them out to be?

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