Gore Favors More Leeway for Medicinal Marijuana

Vice President Al Gore said Tuesday night that the government should give doctors greater flexibility to prescribe marijuana to relieve medical suffering, as he broke once again with Clinton administration policy on a contentious social issue.

Campaigning in advance of the New Hampshire primary in February, Gore told a town hall audience here of his late sister’s struggle with cancer in the mid-1980s and said suffering patients and their doctors “ought to have the option” of using marijuana to alleviate the pain.

“Where the alleviation of pain in medical situations is concerned, we have not given doctors enough flexibility to help patients who are going through acute pain,” Gore said. “Many of us have seen that ourselves.”

The comments marked the second time in two days that Gore has taken issue with administration positions that he has publicly supported in the past. On Monday, the vice president criticized President Clinton’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy on gays in the military.

Meeting with reporters after Tuesday night’s forum, Gore sought to backtrack from his comments and appeared to come closer to the official administration position, which supports medicinal marijuana only in tightly controlled research settings. The vice president emphasized that he opposes legalizing marijuana and believes more research is needed to determine whether medicinal marijuana works.

Gore made no such qualification when talking before the audience earlier in the evening, and in fact he acknowledged that White House drug policy chief Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey held a different opinion from the one he was expressing.