Pubdate: Thu, 09 Aug 2001
Source: Fort Madison Daily Democrat (IA)
Copyright: 2000 The Democrat Company
Contact:  http://www.dailydem.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1062
Author: Ellen Goodman

U.S. SHOULD IMPORT MARIJUANA POLICY

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 it 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: Kirk