Since I have found a contrary statement, in a publication that I would expect to tell me the truth on this issue,
http://hightimes.com/news/ht_admin/295
"DEA OKs MEDICAL-MARIJUANA TRIALS
"Tue, Jun 11, 2002 12:00 am
"Peter Gorman WASHINGTON After nearly 20 years of refusing to approve a single medical-marijuana human research trial, the Drug Enforcement Administration has simultaneously approved three individual trials. All three patient trials will involve the use of smoked marijuana, and be conducted at the University of California's Center for Medicinal Cannabis Research (CMCR), at its San Diego and San Francisco campuses. The marijuana used will be supplied by the National Institute on Drug Abuse's (NIDA) federally approved Hattiesburg, Mississippi pot farm."
I would expect you to back up that statement if you want us to believe it.
I see from the expected Google Scholar search
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=marijuana trials
that marijuana clinical trials are going on somewhere, so if there is demonstrable medical benefit from taking marijuana that is not available from some other drug, the scientific community will eventually hear about it.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/19/health/policy/19marijuana....
[If] a researcher wants to use a variety of marijuana that the University of Mississippi does not grow -- and there are many with differing medicinal properties -- they are out of luck, Dr. Doblin said.
"As the National Institute on Drug Abuse, our focus is primarily on the negative consequences of marijuana use," said Shirley Simson, a spokeswoman for the drug abuse institute, known as NIDA. "We generally do not fund research focused on the potential beneficial medical effects of marijuana."
NIDA controls the supply, the strains available and the research on a proposal-by-proposal basis. They admit that their first priority is not accurate science, via their active discriminating against research into beneficial effects.
While I'm not going to declare all the research they've allowed is necessarily bad, it's clearly limited and incomplete to a dysfunctional degree.
[1]Source: Claudia Little in Psychedelic Salon podcast 218: http://bit.ly/doBrGA.
This non action is the opposite of leadership, and the Department of Justice taking a slightly less conservative stance on the issue isn't progress.
wtf line feeds
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I think it's safe to assume, given other laws currently on the books in the US, that this is always the case, no matter what you personally have or have not done.
Who has ultimate jurisdiction over this, then? If a State considers it legal to prescribe (and use?) marijuana, then under what circumstances/to what extent can the federal level of government enforce federal law? Shootout between federal agents and the local state police? :-)
All in all, however the Colorado system is very lax. The fact that it's now taxed gives it additional validation. It's very easy to get a card and dispensaries are abundant (I have several within walking distance of my house in central Denver).
This woman is a statistical outlier -- a person in one of a tiny handful of US states where it's even possible under state law to have it prescribed, and with a doctor who may well be putting his career on the line by prescribing marijuana. (Actual prescription is illegal under Federal law. They can "recommend", but I'm not sure if merely "recommended" pot is kosher with particular State laws)
Legally, the feds could walk into her house at any time, confiscate much of her property, jail her and her husband and send the child to child services.
It's great that some States are willing to press this issue, but the nation as a whole deserves no such credit and nothing but scorn.
The Federal government is the very reason that this mother is doing bad science personally to try and find out what works, rather than having trained experts doing it faster, more accurately and for the benefit of the nation.