Pubdate: Tue, 07 Aug 2001
Source: Birmingham Post-Herald (AL)
Copyright: 2001 Birmingham Post Co.
Contact:  http://www.postherald.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/46
Author: Ellen Goodman

CANADA REJECTS U.S. REEFER MADNESS

BOSTON - And now from our northern neighbors, the allegedly staid 
Canadians, a new antidote to our reefer madness.

The Canadian government has just increased the number of its people who can 
use marijuana as medicine. As of this month, the terminally ill and those 
with chronic diseases from cancer to AIDS to MS can turn their back yards 
into their medicine cabinets.

With the approval of a doctor, they can either grow it or get it free from 
the government, which is paying a company to nurture the plants in an 
abandoned copper mine in Flin Flon, Manitoba.

Where does that leave us? U.S. citizens, who routinely cross the border for 
cheap prescription drugs, won't be allowed access to the Manitoba 
motherload. But if Canadians can't export their medical marijuana, it's 
time for us to import their policy.

The northern light on the subject comes in the wake of a Canadian Supreme 
Court ruling that any patient suffering terminal or painful illness should 
be allowed access to marijuana when a doctor says it may help. Our own 
Supreme Court has moved in exactly the opposite direction. In May, our 
Supremes ruled on narrow grounds that federal drug law allows no exception 
for medical marijuana.

So the Canadians have implicitly recognized that marijuana has uses as well 
as abuses. But our government supports the idea that marijuana has no 
medicinal value worth the social risks.

Our law not only differs from Canada's, It's on a collision course with the 
policies in nine states - Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Hawaii, 
Maine, Oregon, Nevada and Washington. More to the point, it's on a 
collision course with patients who are looking for relief without looking 
for trouble.

Is anyone hallucinating?

Marijuana has a medical history that goes way back beyond the time when the 
straight-laced Queen Victoria took it for menstrual cramps. It was used 
widely in the West for pain and sleep, until aspirin and barbiturates came 
along. It was demonized in the 1930s with "reefer madness" propaganda and 
in the 1960s when Haight-Ashbury was covered in a stoned haze.

Today, thousands of patients from paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould to your 
neighbor's grandmother have reported on pot's value in relieving the nausea 
of chemotherapy or improving the appetite of an AIDS patient. Many doctors 
still wait for scientific proof, the double- blind studies that have become 
the gold standard of research. But no such studies existed when penicillin 
or even aspirin were accepted.

The few studies available show mixed results. A recent survey in a British 
medical journal reported that marijuana was no better than other available 
drugs for severe pain and somewhat better for nausea. But these were 
marijuana-based medications, not smoked marijuana. The patients still 
preferred the marijuana medications by a large margin.

Marijuana, like most drugs, has side effects, although worrying about the 
effects of smoking on the lungs of a terminally ill patient seems a bit 
absurd. One of the other side effects is what medical researchers label 
"euphoria," or in street parlance, a "high." But as Leonard Glantz, a 
Boston University professor of health law asks, "If someone is terminally 
ill, and they can eat and be euphoric, why is that bad?"

Here we get to the heart of the matter: the drug war in which marijuana has 
played a starring role with 700,000 arrests in 1998. There is a fear that 
if grandma can smoke it legally for her health, granddaughter will smoke it 
to get high.

"We're seeing America's war on drugs being taken to an extreme that begins 
to make no sense," says Glantz. Politicians are so afraid of appearing soft 
on drugs they can't draw any distinctions.

Compare this to morphine. We don't allow morphine on the street but we 
permit it in the doctor's arsenal for the treatment of pain. Imagine the 
uproar if we made morphine illegal. There is no logic in treating marijuana 
differently.

The Canadian system has its own critics: doctors who worry about being 
gatekeepers and marijuana activists who think there are still too many 
hurdles. But we are in a marijuana muddle.

The feds aren't likely to crack down on the terminally ill, nor are law 
enforcers eager to rip joints out of the hands of AIDS patients. Asa 
Hutchinson, the Bush pick to head the Drug Enforcement Administration, said 
prosecuting the medical marijuana dealers wasn't "a priority." But 
meanwhile, patients are using drug dealers as doctors. And a treatment for 
suffering is a crime.

Is that a whiff of sanity from cross the border? Or just a contact high?
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom