Rhode Island’s medical marijuana laws lets suffering people use pot (with a doctor’s permission) to relieve their pain, a humane idea in the Ocean State’s great tradition of respecting personal freedom. Before the law expires in June, the General Assembly should make it permanent — and do it in time to override Governor Carcieri’s promised veto.

As critics point out, there are plenty of problems with the law. Most center around the fact that buying and possessing marijuana, in most cases, remains illegal.

All sorts of thorny questions remain:

• How would patients obtain the 12 marijuana plants they are allowed to use to grow their medical marijuana?

• If they obtained their pot on street corners (where else?), how much would that contribute to crime?

• How safe and pure would the marijuana obtained be, given that the government bans pot rather than regulating it like pharmaceuticals?

• How would patients keep their plants from getting into the hands of neighborhood kids and others who are not supposed to be smoking marijuana?

• How would police easily distinguish between people using marijuana for medical purposes, and those just trying to get high?

• How would state bureaucrats verify that only sick people with their doctor’s approval were the ones trying to obtain cards to legally use marijuana?

Good questions, all. Yet compassion for sufferers leads us — and, it appears, will lead most of the General Assembly — to support reauthorizing the law anyway. Thus far, the law has had little apparent effect on drug abuse in the state.

As former U.S. Surgeon Gen. Joycelyn Elders noted: “The evidence is overwhelming that marijuana can relieve certain types of pain, nausea, vomiting and other symptoms caused by such illnesses as multiple sclerosis, cancer and AIDS — or by the harsh drugs sometimes used to treat them. And it can do so with remarkable safety. Indeed, marijuana is less toxic than many of the drugs that physicians prescribe every day.” Combating nausea can be of life-saving importance, since people who are able to eat can better rebuild their strength.

It is cruel to deny people in pain the right to choose to relieve their suffering with marijuana, a relatively benign drug. The moral compulsion to help the sick outweighs the danger to society posed by slightly spreading marijuana use.