Pubdate: Thu, 12 May 2005
Source: Ft. Worth Star-Telegram (TX)
Copyright: 2005 Star-Telegram, Fort Worth, Texas
Contact:  http://www.star-telegram.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/162
Author: Eric Bailey

GOING TO POT

SEATTLE -- Betty Hiatt's morning wake-up call comes with the purr and 
persistent kneading of the cat atop her bedspread. Under pre-dawn gray, 
Hiatt blinks awake. It is 6 a.m., and Kato, an opinionated Siamese who 
Hiatt swears can tell time, wants to be fed.

Reaching for a cane, the frail grandmother pads with uncertain steps to the 
tiny alcove kitchen in her two-room flat. Her feline alarm clock gets his 
grub, then Hiatt turns to her own needs.

She is, at 81, both a medical train wreck and a miracle, surviving cancer, 
Crohn's disease and the onset of Parkinson's. Each morning Hiatt takes more 
than a dozen pills. But first she turns to a translucent orange 
prescription bottle stuffed with a drug not found on her pharmacist's shelf 
- -- marijuana.

Peering through owlish glasses, Hiatt fires up a cannabis cigarette with a 
wooden match. She inhales. The little apartment -- a cozy place of 
knickknacks and needlepoint -- takes on the odor of a rock concert.

"It's like any other medicine for me," Hiatt says, blowing out a cumulus of 
unmistakable fragrance. "But I don't know that I'd be alive without it."

With the U.S. Supreme Court poised to rule soon on whether medical 
marijuana laws in California and nine other states are subject to federal 
prohibitions, elderly patients such as Hiatt are emerging as a potentially 
potent force in the roiling debate over health, personal choice and states' 
rights.

No one knows exactly how many old folks use cannabis to address their ills, 
but activists and physicians say they probably number in the thousands. And 
unlike medical marijuana's younger and more militant true believers, the 
elderly are difficult for doubters to castigate as stoners.

Their pains are unassailable. Their needs for relief are real. Most never 
touched pot before. As parents in the counterculture '60s, many waged a 
generation-gap war with children getting high on the stuff.

Now some of those same parents consider the long-demonized herb a blessing.

Patients contend cannabis helps ease the effects of multiple sclerosis, 
glaucoma and rheumatoid arthritis. It can calm nausea during chemotherapy. 
Research has found that cannabinoids, marijuana's active components, show 
promise for treating symptoms of Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's, 
perhaps even as anti-cancer agents.

A recent AARP poll found that 72 percent of people age 45 or older believed 
adults should be allowed to use cannabis with a physician's recommendation. 
(The poll found a similar proportion staunchly opposed to legalizing 
recreational pot.) Even conservative elders such as commentator William F. 
Buckley and former Secretary of State George Shultz have supported 
marijuana as medicine.

Hiatt and those like her are "more and more the face of the marijuana 
smoker," says Ethan Nadelmann of the Drug Policy Alliance, which advocates 
treating cannabis like alcohol: regulated, taxed and off-limits to teens.

"There's this sense that when you get old enough, you've earned the right 
to live your own life," Nadelmann says. "The mantra of the drug war has 
been to protect our kids. But the notion of a drug war to protect the 
elderly? That's ludicrous."

Stories of suffering elders are not lost on John Walters, President Bush's 
point man for the war on illegal narcotics. But as he beats the drum for 
psychotropic abstinence, the drug czar doesn't mince words.

"The standard of simply feeling different or feeling better" does not make 
pot safe and effective medicine, says Walters, director of the White House 
Office of National Drug Control Policy. People who abuse illegal drugs such 
as crack cocaine feel a similar burst of euphoria, he notes, "but that 
doesn't make crack medicine."

Congress and federal drug regulators have repeatedly rebuffed pleas to 
legalize medical use of cannabis, which is classified as a dangerous 
Schedule I drug, along with heroin and LSD. Walters argues there is not a 
whiff of clinical proof qualifying smoked pot as medicine. Any beneficial 
compounds that do exist in the leafy plant, he said, should be synthesized, 
sent through the rigors of the regulatory process and packaged as a 
pharmaceutical, not smoked like black-market weed.

"This is not like growing a rosebush in your yard," Walters says. "This is 
a plant the products of which are used for serious and expensive abuse 
among illegal drugs."

Hiatt isn't seeking a recreational high at this early hour, with much of 
Seattle asleep.

She received a diagnosis of breast cancer in 2001. Chemotherapy left her a 
wreck. She threw up anti-nausea drugs, so her oncologist suggested 
cannabis, legal for medical purposes in the state of Washington.

"I thought he was a little off-track," she recalls. "I had never done 
anything like that. I was very uneasy."

A few puffs of pot smoke each morning help quell the nausea caused by her 
prescription drugs, she said. Her appetite is restored, and she never gets 
high.

Her two granddaughters, ages 18 and 20, display a ho-hum attitude about 
Granny toking up.

"It's just totally the norm," says Jessica, the older of the two.

Hiatt's son Doug, a defense attorney, endorses his mother's use of medical 
pot, picking up her cannabis every few weeks from a collective.

Her other son doesn't share that unfettered faith. Dan Hiatt, an assistant 
district attorney in Atlanta, was shocked to learn his mother was seeking 
relief from a drug that has landed many a pusher behind bars, his mother 
recalled. (Dan Hiatt declined to be interviewed.)

But he never tried to talk her out of it, Betty Hiatt said. "I don't think 
he likes it, but he accepts it."

Hal Margolin, 73, claims the same dependency drove the Santa Cruz, Calif., 
man to the drug. It began a decade ago, as the cervical vertebrae at the 
top of Margolin's back calcified, strangling a bundle of nerves and 
producing a searing sensation in his extremities. His feet can feel as if 
scalded by boiling water.

Margolin tried to address the unrelenting agony the standard way, buying 
maxi-packs of Advil and Aleve. An operation made things worse. He lost the 
feeling in his fingers and the soles of his feet, and at times he was 
reduced to crawling to the bathroom. Despite a prosperous retirement, a 
good marriage and two happy grown children, Margolin contemplated suicide.

He tried pot at a friend's urging. A few tokes and the pain seemed to 
recede to the background, Margolin says. "I was no longer obsessing" about it.

Finding marijuana early on was no easy task. At times, the bald and 
bespectacled retiree was forced out on the streets to score his weed.

Dressed in a cardigan sweater against the coastal cool, he would amble 
along the ramshackle blocks adjacent to the town's beachfront Boardwalk. 
Mustering his courage, Margolin would approach one of the street kids he 
figured was dealing. Most of the time they scoffed.

"They thought I was some kind of undercover cop," he says.

Now he gets his cannabis from a Santa Cruz dispensary serving 200 patients, 
many terminally ill. In a decade of operation, the cannabis cooperative has 
lost more than 150 clients to cancer, AIDS and other ills. A woman who used 
pot to tame the painful aftereffects of polio died last year at 93. 
Margolin now is among the oldest.

For him, marijuana has been "the difference between clinical depression 
from the pain, and carrying on with my life."

Although it was part of the U.S. pharmacopeia early in the 20th century, 
cannabis was outlawed during the Depression. In recent decades, advocates 
have repeatedly failed to gain federal approval for doctors to prescribe 
the herb.

An exhaustive 1999 study by the National Academy of Science's Institute of 
Medicine concluded that marijuana can help curb pain, nausea and 
AIDS-related weight loss. The study warned against the toxic effects of the 
smoke, but said cannabis could be given under close doctor supervision to 
patients who don't respond to other therapies.

Now several small drug companies are pressing forward with prescription 
forms of the drug, such as the cannabis mouth spray that G.W. 
Pharmaceuticals of Britain is expected to soon begin marketing in Canada.

During the buildup to prescription forms, the raw plant shouldn't be 
ignored, says Dr. Raphael Mechoulam, a pioneer in cannabinoid chemistry at 
Hebrew University of Jerusalem. If it helps the elderly fight pain until 
prescription drugs are available, he says, why not?

Although controversial even in states that have approved it, medical 
marijuana remains illegal in most of the United States, including Texas. 
But even outside safe havens such as California and Washington, a few 
marijuana patients have enjoyed a free pass.

For nearly three decades the United States has provided cannabis grown on a 
University of Mississippi farm to a tiny sampling of seriously ill people 
in a special federal program. The effort, launched in the mid-1970s to 
settle a "medical necessity" lawsuit brought by glaucoma patient Robert 
Randall, was shut to newcomers in 1992 as a flood of AIDS patients sought 
entry. Over the last decade, others have sued to get in but failed. All 
that remain are seven survivors, many pushing their golden years.

Randall died in 2001, but Elvy Musikka of Sacramento is 65. The oldest is 
Corinne Millet, 73, a Nebraska grandmother suffering glaucoma. The wife of 
a surgeon, Millet credits the government marijuana with saving her sight.

Irvin Rosenfeld calls their little band the nation's most exclusive club 
aside from living ex-presidents. At 52, Rosenfeld is the youngest -- and he 
expects to be smoking pot as medicine for decades to come. A dozen joints a 
day curb riveting pain from a rare disorder that causes bony protrusions to 
poke like cattle prods into his muscles.

Despite his copious marijuana consumption, Rosenfeld has prospered as an 
investment banker in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. His longtime boss marvels at his 
energy. Without marijuana, Rosenfeld said, "Instead of being a productive 
member of society, I'd be a burden."

Among medical marijuana's biggest blocs are AIDS patients, including many 
longtime survivors edging toward old age.

Keith Vines received his diagnosis of the disease in 1986. He nearly died 
in 1993, as AIDS stripped him of 60 pounds. When pills didn't help, his 
doctor suggested marijuana.

For years an assistant district attorney in San Francisco, Vines felt like 
a "fish out of water" skulking into a medical marijuana dispensary the 
first time. But pot increased his appetite. Nausea from his medications 
ebbed. At 55, he has smoked it for a decade, limiting use to a few times a 
week.

Now this law-and-order guy would love to sit down with Walters or the 
president, close the door and talk.

He'd tell them about losing friends and feeling despair. He would talk 
about retiring early from a job he loved, after AIDS compromised his 
short-term memory. He'd ask that they stop fighting the sick and elderly.

"Survival," Vines says, "is struggle enough."

In Texas

Texas law does not permit the use of marijuana for medical purposes.

House Bill 658, filed this session by state Rep. Elliott Naishtat, 
D-Austin, would create a defense to prosecution for patients being treated 
by a licensed physician and who use marijuana to relieve the effects of a 
legitimate medical condition. It offers protection for doctors who discuss 
marijuana as a treatment option, but it would not allow them to write 
prescriptions for it.

The bill is pending in committee and, with less than a month left in the 
session, its prospects are increasingly dim.

- -- Star-Telegram
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MAP posted-by: Elizabeth Wehrman