Pubdate: Thu, 06 Jun 2002
Source: Arizona Republic (AZ)
Copyright: 2002 The Arizona Republic
Contact:  http://www.arizonarepublic.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/24
Author: Andrew Weil, M.D.
Note: Andrew Weil, M.D., director of the Program in Integrative Medicine of 
the College of Medicine, University of Arizona, is the author of many 
scientific and popular articles and is an expert on medicinal plants, 
alternative medicine and the reform of medical education.

STOP THE WAR ON MEDICAL MARIJUANA

TUCSON  Today, in Tucson, Phoenix and dozens of other cities and towns 
across the U.S., something remarkable will happen: Thousands of people 
battling cancer, AIDS and other terrible illnesses will deliver "cease and 
desist" orders to the federal Drug Enforcement Administration to stop it 
from blocking their access to a needed medication.

Their request is so simple, so obviously correct that it is heartbreaking 
that people, many very seriously ill, are forced to deliver their message 
in this way, perhaps risking arrest.

But as individuals who have found that medical marijuana relieves their 
symptoms when conventional medicines fail, they feel they had no choice: 
The federal government continues to fight an irrational war against medical 
marijuana, and the sick and struggling are its principal victims.

Make no mistake: The government's demonization of marijuana is irrational. 
When I first published a study in Science on marijuana's physical and 
psychological effects back in 1968, I was certain that medical use of the 
plant would be legal within five years. This is, after all, a medicinal 
plant for which no fatal dose has ever been established and which has been 
used in folk medicine for millennia.

Like all medicines, marijuana has its drawbacks, particularly when smoked. 
It is not a panacea. I support research into safer delivery systems such as 
low-temperature vaporizers or inhalers, which offer the fast action of 
inhaled medicine without the irritants found in smoke.

Still, I have seen in my own studies that marijuana is less toxic than most 
pharmaceutical drugs in current use, and is certainly helpful for some 
patients, including those with wasting syndromes, chronic muscle spasticity 
and intractable nausea.

Unfortunately, the only legal substitute available now - a prescription 
pill containing a synthetic THC, marijuana's main psychoactive component - 
is not good enough for many patients. I hear regularly from patients that 
the pill does not work as well as the natural herb, and causes much greater 
intoxication.

I am not alone in this view. The Institute of Medicine, in a report 
commissioned by the White House "drug czar," concluded in 1999 that there 
is convincing evidence of marijuana's value in relieving nausea, weight 
loss and other symptoms caused by AIDS, cancer and multiple sclerosis, as 
well as by the harsher drugs often used to treat these conditions.

The institute concluded that, for some patients, the potential benefits 
clearly outweigh the risks, and that ways should be found to make marijuana 
available to them.

As a physician, I am frustrated that I cannot prescribe marijuana for 
patients who might benefit from it. At the very least I would like to be 
able to refer them to a safe, reliable, quality-controlled source.

But both the Clinton and Bush administrations have pursued a policy that 
the New England Journal of Medicine has called "misguided, heavy- handed 
and inhumane."

They have declined to act on the Institute of Medicine's recommendation, 
and have conducted a series of raids on medical marijuana cooperatives 
operating legally under California law - depriving patients of precisely 
the safe, secure source of medicine they need. Sick people are forced to 
turn to street sources, or simply suffer.

So it comes to this: Desperately ill people, their friends, families and 
loved ones, standing outside DEA offices, pleading with their government 
not to deprive them of medicine that relieves their suffering.

It should never have been necessary, and one can only hope that the 
administration and Congress will listen.
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MAP posted-by: Beth