"If medical marijuana isn't causing any problems for society at large (aside from offending the author's sensibilities), then really, what's the problem?"

Deceit is the problem, it has nothing to do with sensibilities, and the issue is not "medical" marijuana per se but the rampant abuse of the terms under which it became available.

MM was not sold to the public as the first step in recreational use. Indeed, most of its sponsors took pains to say that, whatever their personal preferences might be, the initiative itself was not a springboard to undifferentiated personal use. The pitch instead was that marijuana was to be made available only for its medicinal value, and only then for people in serious need for whom standard medications were of no use. In addition, so we were told, it was going to be tightly regulated to insure that these limited medical goals were the only ones getting served.

As the UC study shows, this was all baloney. The principled way to expand on MM is, say, to have it for a few years as the carefully regulated and restricted regimen it was loudly promised to be. Legalization proponents could then return to the voters saying, "Look, it's worked so far. There have been tax revenues and people have been helped. The controls we promised have been enforced. Now we ask you to try one more step, allowing recreational use for persons over 21 and limited to possession of X amount."

It's just astoundingly cynical for MM proponents to have gone into such detail about the measures they planned to take to screen out fakers, and now say, as the article does, well, if there are fakers, "does it even matter?"

If fakers weren't going to matter, the voters should have been told that up front. Instead they were told the opposite. If a private businessman tried a stunt like that, he'd go to jail for fraud.

Finally, you say (correctly) that crime has dropped significantly in Califonia in the last 15 years, slyly implying, without claiming directly, that MM is the cause.

The reason you use implication is that, as you probably know, there isn't a smidgen of evidence that MM caused the dropoff in crime. The most significant factor in long-term crime reduction has been the increased imprisonment of criminals.

What's really going on is that you want Prop 215 to be vastly and silently expanded, and distorted, so that it will effectively overrule Californians' REFUSAL, last November, to embrace recreational use. Prop 19, which would have allowed such use, went down big time. Now, unhappy with the voters' choice, you want to brush past it by claiming that a far more limited choice they made 15 years ago should be sub silentio expanded by allowing people to fake medical conditions.

If you have no problems with fakery, that's up to you. I have plenty of problems with it.

"What's worse? Using deceit and hyperbole to deny truly ill patients access to a potentially beneficial course of treatment, or using deceit to provide access to these patients as well as the less-than-truly ill?"

I intend to answer this question directly, along with the rest of your response, but before I do, I need to know two things:

1. You seem to acknowledge that deceit is in fact involved in the present lax administration of the MM statute, in which access is granted to healthy people simply so they can get stoned. Are you acknowledging that?

2. Do you approve of deceit's being used in addressing the voters about the circumstances under which they should allow access to marijuana?

"However, my question to you, Bill, is why have you got it in for weed and not alcohol?"

Because there is no ongoing debate about the extent to which alcohol should be available, but very much an ongoing debate about the availability of pot.

In a blog about legal questions, I tend to address things that actually ARE questions. Dope is. Alcohol isn't. That issue got settled long ago.

Of course there's a question beneath your question, to wit, am I not being a hypocrite for criticizing only pot while many of the same arguments could be raised about drinking.

I appreciate your good manners in not putting it quite that way, and to reward those good manners, I'll answer the question:

Let's assume arguendo that I'm a hypocrite. Indeed, let's assume that I'm an axe murderer. None of that changes the important facts you acknowledged in your first paragraph, to wit, that there's rampant lying going on under the auspices of the so-called Compassionate Use Act, and that such lying is a complete betrayal of the assurances Californians were given when they approved the Act. The lying is also a de facto nullification of the defeat of Prop 19 last year. What good does it do for the voters to reject wholesale legalization when people who want to get blasted can achieve the same thing by just lying about their supposed "medical" needs?

It's a scam. I called it a scam, and, from what you say in your first paragraph, you apparently agree.

In order for a person to take my position on the abuse of California's MM law, one only need oppose scams. That's hardly a bridge too far.

And I would note that at least no one is pretending that gin, et al., is good for you or is "medicine."

I would point out that the Equal Protection Clause does not apply to substances. That is, there is no rule of law known to me that requires the state to treat dope as it treats alcohol, even though the two in some ways are similar.

Finally, it has alway struck me as odd, if not a little crazy, to say that, because we (mostly) tolerate one substance with harmful effects that, in the name of balancing things out, we should tolerate YET ANOTHER substance with harmful effects. I would have thought that, if the point is to reduce harm, the pre-existing tolerance of one harmful substance would make us more reluctant, not more eager, to add to the list.