The decisive victories for medical marijuana across the country send a powerful message to drug czar Barry McCaffrey and others: stop playing politics with issues of treatment of pain and medical care generally. Marijuana may be an unconventional medicine, but it works. If morphine and far more powerful and dangerous drugs can be prescribed legally, so should marijuana.

Medical marijuana was not, however, the only drug policy issue on the ballot yesterday. In Oregon, the first of eleven states to decriminalize marijuana during the 1970s, voters rejected - by a margin of two to one -- an effort by the state legislature to recriminalize marijuana possession. No need, they made clear, to spend millions of taxpayer dollars prosecuting and jailing Oregonians for breaking a law which eighty million Americans already have broken.

Similarly, in Arizona, citizens rejected the state legislature's efforts to undercut Proposition 200, the drug policy reform initiative enacted in 1996. The language on the ballot was crystal clear:

A "no" vote shall have the effect of retaining the provisions of state law allowing doctors to prescribe Schedule I drugs, including heroin, LSD, marijuana and analogs of PCP, to seriously and terminally ill patients without the authorization of the Federal Food and Drug Administration or the United States Congress.

58% of Arizonans voted "no." They want doctors and patients, not Congress or politicized bureaucrats, deciding who gets which drugs for medicine.

Collectively, these election results sent a clear message. It wasn't pro-marijuana, and it wasn't pro-legalization. Rather, it was a message for pragmatism and common sense in dealing with drugs. No one wants kids smoking marijuana, but that doesn't mean we have to lock up people who do smoke, or deprive sick and dying people of access to this medicine.

There was one other message to the politicians: stop mucking about with the will of the people. The three referenda in Arizona and Oregon, as well as the vote on medical marijuana in Washington, D.C., where Congress has prohibited the counting of the ballots, all represent repudiations of legislative acts. The public will support pragmatic and sensible drug policies if given a chance. Politicians should take heed.