Source: Seattle Times Contact: Pubdate: Wed, 22 Oct 1997 Copyright © 1997 The Seattle Times Company Wednesday, Oct. 22, 1997 If pot is legal, will state grow it? by David Postman Seattle Times Olympia bureau David Postman's phone message number is 3609439882. His email address is: OLYMPIA If voters approve an initiative to loosen Washington drug laws, supporters say they then will push for a stateregulated marijuana growing and distribution system. Also, sponsors of Initiative 685 say seriously ill patients whose doctors recommend marijuana as medicine would be allowed to grow it themselves if the measure passes Nov. 4. "If it's legal to possess a dead plant, it should cover a growing plant," Jeff Haley, a Bellevue attorney and chairman of the initiative committee, said yesterday. "If you can possess it, you can grow it." Opponents of I685 have been critical of a campaign commercial that says the measure would "free doctors to relieve the suffering of their patients." Concerned Citizens Against Dangerous Drugs issued a statement yesterday saying that no distribution system would be created by the initiative and that it would provide no way "patients suffering from serious illness could legally and safely obtain the drugs from their doctors or anybody else." For a short time nearly 20 years ago, the state provided marijuana to patients. The experiment was billed as a scientific study but was designed largely to get around federal restrictions on using marijuana as medicine. Haley and initiative sponsor Rob Killian, a Tacoma physician, say they want to see the government back in the marijuana business. "We are going to go to the Legislature, if the initiative passes, and ask them to put in place a governmentregulated distribution network to make sure we get pure product," Killian said. "We have to make sure that some drug dealer isn't shafting some patient's family with a product that is cut with something else." He says he already has a plan, outlined in a recent Washington State University study, that says a state growing facility could be built for $1 million and run for $393,000 a year. Measure covers LSD and heroin Initiative 685 would make it legal for seriously ill patients to use an illicit drug including marijuana, LSD and heroin if two doctors recommend it and there is scientific evidence that it works as medicine. It also would make people in prison for drug possession eligible for immediate release and send people to treatment instead of prison for the first two drugpossession offenses. The initiative would require people in prison for committing violent crimes while on drugs to serve their entire sentences. The WSU study Killian cites, released in February and financed by a $70,000 legislative grant, actually recommends against allowing people to smoke marijuana as medicine. Written by Mahmoud AbdelMonem, dean of the WSU School of Pharmacy, the study says smoking marijuana isn't the best way for patients to get THC, the active ingredient that controls nausea and pain. AbdelMonem said it's better to use synthetic forms of THC because if a patient smokes marijuana, it is difficult to regulate the dosage, purity and strength of the drug. "We don't know enough to either promote the use of marijuana or speak against its use in therapy," AbdelMonem said yesterday. "But the use of cigarettes is not the most appropriate delivery form." But AbdelMonem's report outlines options for getting marijuana cigarettes to seriously ill patients, in case legislators disagree with him. The first recommendation is to get the drug from the federally controlled marijuana farm at the University of Mississippi and have cigarettes manufactured at a private plant now doing work for the federal government in North Carolina. The state as marijuana grower But the report concedes that may be difficult because the National Institute for Drug Abuse, which controls the facilities, has refused to provide the governmentgrown marijuana to researchers whose work does not meet the institute's goals. The report's second choice is Killian's first: raising it in Washington as a medical crop. The report's cost estimates for the facility are "grossly excessive," according to a peer review of the study done by Rick Doblin, director of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies and an advocate of medicinal use of marijuana. Doblin's review says the estimates that each patient would smoke 10 marijuana cigarettes a day every day of the year are excessive. "What was actually needed was a report that evaluated the costs of developing production facilities that ranged from very small to large," Doblin wrote in his critique. Doblin also criticized the participation in the study of Mahmoud ElSohly because he is the director of the University of Mississippi growing facility and holds a patent on THC suppositories. Haley said that if the initiative passes, people initially will grow their own marijuana. But if Washington becomes the third state in the past year to change its drug laws, he says, the federal government soon would drop its longstanding opposition to medicinal marijuana. An earlier experiment It's been a long fight. It was Haley's father, former state Rep. Ted Haley, RTacoma, who pushed through the state's 1979 experiment in medicinal marijuana. Between 1979 and 1981, more than 500 patients were given marijuana cigarettes by 30 doctors, said Roger Roffman, a University of Washington professor of social work and a marijuana researcher, who was an adviser on the project. Ted Haley, a surgeon now living out of state, was able to win wide legislative support for a bill to study the medicinal uses of marijuana. The bill was supported by Brad Owen, then a state legislator and now lieutenant governor, who is leading the campaign against I685. Roffman said the bill passed because of Haley's hard work over two legislative sessions and the personal lobbying of Corleen "Corky" Hapeman, a cancer patient who told lawmakers that marijuana helped control her nausea and vomiting. "The traditional expectation of the Legislature would be this is a young, counterculture person's idea of how to make marijuana more acceptable to society," Roffman said. "But who shows up at the doorstep of each legislator but a very conventional grandmother who, in very eloquent and personal terms, described what her experience had been." Haley's bill was called "The Controlled Substances Therapeutic Research Act," and the study was run like a scientific experiment. The marijuana came from the federal government, before a late 1980s crackdown on such studies. But Roffman said the real goal was to get marijuana to ill patients, not to study the drug's effects. "It was a compassionate way of getting around the prohibition of marijuana being prescribed by doctors under federal law," he said.