Why was Proposition 215 important in the crusade to legalize medical marijuana?
Prior to the passage of Proposition 215 in California in 1996, which was the first actionable medical marijuana law, the first enforceable medical marijuana law among the states in terms of this issue; prior to that time what you saw were quote “compassionate use laws” in certain states. Which basically said that medical marijuana has some value and it can be prescribed to a patient. Well for anybody who knows about how doctors write prescriptions of course that is a federally licensed thing, they're licensed by the Drug Enforcement Administration physicians. Even if they are state they're licensed by their state level medical board, when they're writing those prescriptions to you they have a DEA registration number that they have to put on their prescription pads, they're tracked. And they are not allowed to write prescriptions that are illegal under federal law they're not allowed to write prescriptions for compounds that are listed in Schedule One of the Controlled Substance Act. So those laws that were passed prior to 1996 which said state level laws, which said that a doctor could prescribe it, were basically inoperable because the doctors of course in those states are not going risk losing their licenses to write a prescription for a drug that a pharmacy couldn't fill. So there was this concept and this percolation of the issue of medical marijuana prior to the passage of Proposition 215 in 1996 but it wasn't really an effective way of addressing the issue of getting medicine to the people who needed it, it was purely symbolic.
