Pubdate: Wed, 07 Dec 2005
Source: Anderson Valley Advertiser (CA)
Column: cannabinotes
Copyright: 2005 Anderson Valley Advertiser
Contact:  http://www.theava.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/2667
Author: Fred Gardner
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/mmj.htm (Cannabis - Medicinal)

OREGON NORML HONORS GROWERS

For a long time C Notes naively assumed that a "cannabis cup"
competition was simply an excuse to indulge.

We wondered how anybody, after sampling one strain, could judge the
effect of any strain sampled subsequently?  Oregon NORML resolves this
fool's paradox by doing the judging over the course of several weeks
(patients get about one gram a day to evaluate) and announcing the
results at an awards dinner preceded by a day of medical and legal
panels.

This year 25 growers entered the competition by donating strains and
28 patients served as judges.

Strains were evaluated on a scale of 1 to 10 for "appearance,"
"aroma," "taste," "smoothness (is it easy on your lungs?)", "potency
(how strong is the strain?)," and "medicinal effect (how well does it
work for your individual condition?)." Medicinal effect was given
double weight in the scoring.

The awards dinner was held on the Saturday after Thanksgiving at the
Ambridge center in downtown Portland. First-prize winner David V.
said, "This is a dream come true," as he accepted a blue ribbon from
organizer Madeline Martinez, and you could tell he meant it. (His
"Dynamite," the overall winner, also took first prize in smoothness,
taste, and aroma.) The winners will make cuttings available to
patients through Oregon NORML later this month.

Many growers wish they had access to an analytical lab so they could
determine the true content of their plants and breed strains in which
different cannabinoids predominate. Rick Bayer, MD, a Portland
internist who chaired the legal and medical panels, was asked by a
patient in a wheelchair about the best strain for spasticity. "That's
a good question," Bayer reflected in an interview afterwards, "and you
don't want to recommend a strain that's uninformative or misleading or
named after somebody's cat." According to Bayer, the strains that
scored highest for medicinal effect were relaxants rather than
stimulants, Indicas rather than Sativas.

More than 70 people attended the panels -including 11 lawyers who will
earn 5.0 hours' worth of continuing-legal-education credits from the
state bar. A highlight of the medical session was a report by nurse Ed
Glick concluding that Oregon patients who use cannabis to treat
various physical conditions also experience reduced anxiety,
depression, and insomnia. Oregon's Medical Marijuana Program, which is
administered by the Department of Health Services (DHS), does not
recognize that psychiatric problems can be alleviated by cannabis.

Glick's data will be presented to DHS, which is authorized by law to
expand the list of conditions treatable by cannabis. DHS turned down a
request to add anxiety in 2000.

Oregon law will change on January 1, 2006, when Senate Bill 1085 takes
effect. (Its author, State Sen. Bill Morrisette, was thanked profusely
at NORML's awards dinner.) Patients and caregivers will be allowed to
possess a pound and a half of dried herb and to grow six flowering
plants and 18 vegetative plants under one foot tall. SB 1085
recognizes the reality of the grower -"the person responsible for the
growsite"- who needn't be a patient or caregiver.

It limits to four the number of patients the growsite can serve.

Thus the maximum number of plants in a garden will be 24 flowering and
72 starts -just below the number that triggers a mandatory-minimum
sentence under federal law.

One provision calls for "a system to assist law enforcement in
identifying legal medical marijuana patients and the addresses of grow
sites... law enforcement must identify themselves to access
information. The information may only be used to verify registration
under OMMA, and law enforcement may not share that information for any
purpose with any other entity (for example, the federal Drug
Enforcement Administration)."

Under the revised law, growing and distributing medical marijuana must
be a non-profit enterprise -literally. "Patients and caregivers may
reimburse the person responsible for a marijuana grow site for the
costs of supplies and utilities associated with the production of
marijuana for the registry identification cardholder. No other costs
associated with the production of marijuana for the registry
identification cardholder, including the cost of labor, may be
reimbursed."

To date the Oregon Medical MJ Program has registered more than 12,000
patients and 5,790 caregivers (in a state with about three million
people, 1/10th the population of California). Grant Higginson, MD,
whose office oversees the program, took part in NORML's panel on the
revised law. The Oregon hosts were grateful for his presence, but a
participant from California, Tod Mikuriya, MD, came away critical of
the OMMP for failing to revisit the decision in 2000 to exclude
psychiatric conditions. (A hitherto reliable source says that decision
was probably made not by Higginson but by then governor John
Kitzhaber, himself a physician.)

Some Oregonians who use cannabis to treat depression, etc., tell their
doctors they're experiencing nausea from taking Prozac or some other
corporate antidepressant. The docs then approve cannabis use to treat
the nausea and the patients keep filling their Prozac prescriptions to
provide the all-important documentation. The whole loop is ridiculous,
dishonest, costly, demeaning to all involved, and legally necessary.

Documentation talks, reality walks.

Mikuriya decries "the increase in collection of certain kinds of data
-especially grow-site addresses" that Oregon's revised law will mandate.

He calls it "a perfect set-up for prohibitory pogroms." He also
objects to OMMP's stated policy of "increased scrutiny" of doctors who
approve cannabis use by more than 250 patients. "Excessively elaborate
practice standards are now mandated" for doctors, he notes, "yet
International Classification of Diseases coding is not required.

It is simply incompetence not to include this information, which is
required on all insurance claims and would be extremely useful for
research purposes. OMMP's priorities and overall preoccupation with
eligibility, exclusion, and surveillance reflect improper priorities
that were not intended or mandated by Oregon voters."

Mikuriya also criticizes Oregon's program for failing to establish a
testing program to protect patients from herb contaminated by
pesticide residue, fungi, molds, and bacteria. "If surveillance is
desirable," he comments, "it should be for the purpose of protecting
the health and safety of the patient and the health of the
environment." Above all, Mikuriya wants to see the Oregon program
"collecting data that will enable research to be conducted for
evidence-based treatment."

As for the new law's non-profit clause, Dr. Tod diagnoses
"Institutional denial. Denial that this medicine is a fungible
commodity at the level of gold in value.

Setting in place legislatively that there should be no compensation of
growers for anything except supplies and utilities guarantees that
there will be illicit transactions. This institutional denial provides
both a breeding ground for covert compensatory activity and forestalls
any taxation.

It's straight out of Gulliver's Travels."

Mikuriya e-mailed his thoughts, off the top, to some of his Oregon
friends. Not everyone appreciated them or understood the spirit in
which they were sent. Although Mikuriya has been an outspoken critic
-and victim-of California law enforcement's reluctance to implement
Prop 215, he favorably contrasted "California's anarchy" with OMMP's
"administrative rule," and some Oregonians considered this
chauvinistic and raining on their parade.

For all their differences, California and Oregon have about the same
number of people, proportionally, authorized to use or provide
cannabis as medicine -18,000 there, an estimated 180,000 here. In
California, some 30 doctors have practices devoted to cannabis users;
in Oregon there are four or five.

ZOLOFT, ZOLOFT, RAH RAH RAH

College cheerleaders are coveted by drug companies as sales reps,
according to an 11/28 story by Stephanie Saul of the New York Times.
Campus "cheering advisers" and companies such as "Spirited Sales
Leaders" are part of the recruiting pipeline.

Six-figure incomes await;  no science courses are required.

"They don't ask what the major is," according to a University of
Kentucky adviser, because cheerleaders have more important
attainments: "Exaggerated motions, exaggerated smiles, exaggerated
enthusiasm, they learn those things and they can get people to do what
they want." (Let that be a reminder to those who dismiss our
cheerleader-in-chief as an idiot.)

The drug companies deny that sales reps get hired based on looks or
sex appeal. (They also deny that fancy dinners, exorbitant speakers'
fees, invitations to conferences in Capri, etc., influence doctors'
prescription-writing patterns.) The truth, of course, is that lust is
an excellent motivator.

Saul describes a former Eli Lilly salesman "who remembers a sales call
with the 'all-time most attractive, coolest woman in the history of
drug repdom.' At first, he said, the doctor 'gave ten reasons not to
use one of our drugs.' Then 'she gave a little hair toss and a tug on
his sleeve and said, "Come on, doctor, I need the scrips." He said,
"Okay, How do I dose that thing?" I could never reach out and touch a
female physician that way.'"

A Pittsburgh urologist, James McCague, reported in Medical Economics
that 12 of 13 female drug company reps he questioned claim to have
been sexually harassed by doctors.

Writes Saul: "Penny Ramsey Otwell, who cheered for the
University of Maryland and now sells for Wyeth in the Dallas area," says...
'We have a few of those doctors in our territory.

They'll get called on by representatives who can handle that kind of
talk, ones that can tolerate it and don't think anything about it."

Novartis is being sued by a saleswoman who allegedly was "encouraged
to exploit a personal relationship with a doctor to increase sales in
her Montgomery, Ala., territory." Novartis denies the charge.

Add Valley Lookalikes: Judith Miller and Johnny Depp in Charlie and the
Chocolate Factory; Woody Allen Greenspan and Woody Allen Dershowitz.