Pubdate: Mon, 21 May 2001
Source: San Jose Mercury News (CA)
Copyright: 2001 San Jose Mercury News
Contact:  http://www.sjmercury.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/390
Author: Karen de Sa, Mercury News
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/mmj.htm (Cannabis - Medicinal)

MEDICINAL POT WORRIES ADDICTS IN RECOVERY

Haight Ashbury Free Clinics founder David Smith oversees hundreds of 
group-therapy sessions each year for recovering drug addicts, but the woman 
who whipped out a marijuana cigarette at a recent gathering baffled even him.

"I'm smoking it because I'm HIV-positive," she said.

"She totally discombobulated the whole group," recalled Smith, who oversees 
the drug treatment of about 5,000 HIV-positive people; two-thirds got the 
disease from using drugs.

"Had she pulled out an inhaler that looks like medicine, then it wouldn't 
have caused a problem, but the marijuana she got from the cannabis buyers 
club that you smoke in a joint looks like dope."

It's a conflict under debate in recovery centers across the country. While 
legal experts, scientists and politicians wrangle over the Supreme Court's 
ruling last Monday that rejected marijuana as a medical necessity, people 
battling the human immunodeficiency virus and the lure of addiction have a 
much more personal choice to make.

They know marijuana offers relief for aching joints and the nauseating 
effects of AIDS and its arsenal of drugs. They know it stimulates the 
appetite to combat AIDS-related wasting disease.

But smoking pot may also mean breaking a pledge to stay drug-free and 
risking falling back into a habit that could kill them more quickly than 
any disease.

Noah Briones, a 40-year-old crisis counselor, told his future roommates he 
didn't want to smell pot smoke wafting from the bedrooms before he moved 
into a San Francisco cooperative for people with HIV and substance abuse 
problems.

"It was upsetting to me, so I said, 'Look, this is going to be a trigger 
for me,' " he said.

But Greg, a member of Briones' Redwood City HIV support group, swears by 
the marijuana he smokes every day. "It increases my appetite and puts me in 
a better state of mind," said Greg, who did not want his last name used for 
fear of being stigmatized. He isn't comfortable about smoking pot. "I've 
been clean for 15 years -- well I call myself clean -- but my buddy wants 
to beat me up" for using marijuana.

Like the woman who pulled out a joint at the San Francisco group therapy 
session, recovering addicts who choose to use pot are setting off a stir.

Some centers, such as the Sitike Counseling Center in South San Francisco, 
won't accept clients who reveal they use medicinal marijuana.

"The group doesn't want to connect with them; they want to stick with 
people who are clean and sober," said Rhonda Ceccato, Sitike's director. 
"Most of our clients have a lot of difficulty having anyone in their group 
who is under the influence, and they don't care why they're under the 
influence -- methadone, marijuana, Vicodin, whatever -- it doesn't fit well 
with a clear abstinence model."

Individual Choice:

Other centers are more flexible, like Redwood City's AIDS Community 
Resource Consortium, which encourages individual choice for the 400 
recovering addicts with HIV who visit the center each month.

"If pain or nausea or lack of appetite is such that it is killing them, 
they have to weigh between that and their recovery, then we help them 
through that analytical process," executive director Michael Edell said. 
"Does your body have to live so you can stay in recovery? Or do you stay in 
recovery and not live?"

Symptoms Tracked:

In San Mateo County, some of these conflicts may arise in a recently 
launched two-year study of medicinal marijuana. All of the HIV-positive 
participants have a history of drug use and suffer from neuropathy -- a 
largely untreatable symptom of AIDS that causes excruciating pain in the 
arms and legs.

Researchers want to see whether marijuana will relieve participants' 
symptoms. They also will track whether the 35 rolled joints passed out to 
study participants each week will be smoked as prescribed, or end up on the 
streets.

Word of the study has spread through the county's drug treatment centers, 
intensifying the debate about whether marijuana is safe for a person 
precariously perched between drug addiction and a deadly disease.

Nationwide, 237,000 injection drug users make up more than 31 percent of 
total AIDS cases among adolescents and adults, according to the Centers for 
Disease Control in Atlanta. The tally, which does not include HIV infection 
rates, includes cases reported from 1981 through June 2000. In California, 
9,600 AIDS cases among IV-drug users were reported through April of this year.

In the absence of effective legal remedies for many of HIV's maladies, many 
patients in recovery, such as 50-year-old Burton Stevens, resign themselves 
to live with the pain. Stevens was in a San Francisco hospital last week, 
undergoing treatment for pneumonia.

"I've toyed with this decision of medical marijuana a lot," said Stevens, 
who is two years in recovery and struggles with neuropathy. "Myself, I 
don't dare touch it -- it would lead to going back to using full time -- 
the speed, the meth -- because when I used marijuana, I used marijuana to 
get loaded."
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MAP posted-by: Terry Liittschwager