Source: Toronto Star
Contact: 29 November 1997
Author: Sidney Katz, Special to the Star
Section: E1E2
Website: http://www.thestar.com/
MARIJUANA AS MEDICINE?
AARON HARNETT: Lawyer says marijuana is a ``medical necessity'' for
Terry Parker.
For 20 years, Terry Parker has been fighting to have marijuana legalized
because it controls his epileptic seizures
Should Terry Parker, a 42yearold Torontonian, be permitted to use
marijuana legally to control his severe epilepsy?
Judge Patrick Sheppard of the Ontario Court, provincial division, will
provide Parker with the answer to this politically and legally
sensitive question on Dec. 10. Two months earlier, Parker went on
trial charged with the cultivation and possession of marijuana with
the intention of trafficking. He pleaded not guilty.
Parker's lawyer, Aaron Harnett, argued that for his client, marijuana
was a ``medical necessity.'' As such, he pointed out, the Charter of
Human Rights included ``a right to access to a medical treatment for a
condition representing a danger to life without fear of criminal
sanction.''
With good reason, Parker is restless and anxious as he awaits
Sheppard's decision. ``For me, it's a matter of life and death,''
Parker explains. ``I have everything at stake. I'm an epileptic whose
seizures cannot be controlled by conventional drugs. They can be
controlled by marijuana. Without marijuana, I have no future. I might
as well be dead.''
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`It hasn't been a very pleasant ride but what other choice do I have?'
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Slightly built, Parker's face and eyes reflect the inner turmoil of a
man who, during his entire lifetime, has endured the ravages of an
intractable and severe form of epilepsy.
``My life has always been in grave danger because I've had so many
seizures in public,'' Parker says. He has been robbed while lying
unconscious in a subway station; he was hit on the street by a
speeding ambulance and required a week's treatment in a hospital
intensive treatment unit; he has been repeatedly arrested because his
seizure symptoms were viewed as drunkenness. Says Parker: ``I can't
drive a bicycle or car; I can't work with heavy machinery, I can't
hold down a job because my seizures are not under control.''
Since smoking marijuana enables Parker to lead a relatively normal
life, it's understandable why he has spent the last 20 years crusading
for the right to have legal access to cannabis.
At times, Parker has paraded through busy streets, carrying a sign,
and explaining his plight to anyone who would listen. He has written
countless letters to health and government officials. He has
participated in an endless round of press interviews. On one occasion,
he allowed himself to be used as a guinea pig for a test of the
effectiveness of synthetic marijuana conducted by the Addiction
Research Foundation in Toronto. His apartment has been repeatedly
searched by police. He has been arrested, jailed, fined, harassed and
reviled.
``It hasn't been a very pleasant ride,'' says Parker, ``but what other
choice do I have?''
After one arrest in 1987 for possession of marijuana, Parker obtained
a lawyer and offered ``medical necessity'' as a defence. He won his
case and an appeal court upheld the decision. But it was an empty
victory.
``It was a crazy situation,'' explains Parker. ``The courts said I
could use marijuana because it was a bona fide medicine for my
epilepsy but I had no way of legally obtaining a supply. So I
continued to be busted by the police.''
Parker's most recent arrest was the result of a search of his
highrise apartment in the west end of Toronto on the evening of July
16, 1996. Police found 14 marijuana plants, 1.2 metres tall, growing
in his bedroom in a hydroponic setup; 57 additional plants on the
balcony and a white plastic shopping bag half full of harvested
marijuana. Parker was charged with cultivating and possession of
marijuana with the intention of trafficking.
Why did he so flagrantly risk arrest by filling his apartment with
marijuana plants? Parker has a ready answer.
Buying marijuana on the street, he explains, is even more risky. ``You
are dealing with people who may cheat you or rob you.'' But more
important, street marijuana is an unknown quantity. It may be tainted
with pesticide, laced with heroin or contain some other noxious
substance. ``Marijuana is my medicine and I don't want to poison
myself,'' says Parker. He's a fastidious marijuana grower. For
example, to get rid of insect pests, he uses ladybugs and soap instead
of a toxic insecticide. ``My stuff is absolutely pure,'' says Parker.
Economic considerations are also important. Because he's unable to
work, Parker's only income is his disability pension. ``I can't afford
to spend $500 a month for street marijuana so I grow my own at a
fraction of that cost.''
Parker's view that marijuana should be a legitimate medicine is shared
by many people. The demand for access to marijuana as a medicine is
increasingly becoming a political, legal, medical and ethical hot
potato.
A recent poll indicated that 83 per cent of Canadians agreed that
marijuana should be made legally available for health purposes. In
London, Ont., Lynn Harichy, a 36yearold mother of four who suffers
with multiple sclerosis, awaits trial for smoking marijuana to relieve
her pain and muscle spasms. In the small community of Sooke, B.C., the
local court acquitted a man who was using marijuana oil to soothe his
psoriasis. In finding him not guilty, the judge urged him ``to share
your knowledge with the medical profession.'' Two states, California
and Arizona, recently passed a law permitting citizens to cultivate
and possess marijuana on the recommendation of their physician. And,
in a recent twoweek period, three TV network shows in Canada and the
United States featured cancer and AIDS patients relating how marijuana
had alleviated their disease symptoms where conventional medications
had failed.
A wide array of witnesses testified at Parker's trial, either in
person or by affidavit. The preponderance of evidence was
promarijuana. Typical were the observations of Dr. Lester Greenspoon,
associate professor of psychiatry, Harvard Medical School: ``There is
now a growing body of evidence that marijuana is a medically valuable
treatment. . . It appears that the medical dangers of marijuana have
been vastly overstated while the medical value grossly understated and
ignored.'' The sole dissenting witness at the trial was Dr. Harold
Kalant, a distinguished researcher in pharmacology at the University
of Toronto. He urged caution because marijuana had not been fully
investigated. It had not yet been fully proven, he pointed out, that
cannabis was harmless or nonaddictive.
But the most impressive testimony was Parker's recital of how his
wretched, miseryladen existence was transformed by the simple act of
smoking marijuana.
Parker began having epileptic seizures at the age of 4 as many as 10
to 14 a day. The usual anticonvulsive drugs were prescribed for him
Dilantin, Mysoline, Tegretol and various tranquillizers but they did
little to alleviate his symptoms. Instead, his health worsened because
of the massive adverse effects of the drugs extreme drowsiness,
slurred speech, blurred vision and a drop in his white cell blood
count. Hospitalized 100 times, Parker was forced to drop out of school
when he was in Grade 6.
In desperation, when he was 14, Parker agreed to submit to two
operations frontal lobotomies which involved the removal of brain
tissue. Unfortunately the operations didn't stop the seizures. ``I had
a beauty of a grand mal seizure coming out of the anaesthesia and they
just kept coming after that,'' says Parker.
At the age of 22, Parker began to smoke marijuana to get ``high'' and
thus escape from his state of constant depression. After a few weeks,
he had made a fabulous and joyous discovery: ``Marijuana practically
put an end to my epileptic seizures. It happened just like that!''
When Parker gave the happy news to his family physician at the time,
Dr. Michael Rachlis, he was somewhat skeptical and urged him to keep a
daily health diary.
Parker's diary for the fourmonth period between December, 1980, and
March, 1981, indicated that on the days he did not smoke marijuana he
had several grand mals and petit mals; on the days he did smoke
relatively few seizures occurred. Later, Rachlis noted in a written
statement that ``marijuana makes a significant difference in Mr.
Parker's seizure control and the quality of his life.''
Six years later, in 1987, when Dr. D.M. Cider had become Parker's
family doctor, Cider made a similar observation. And, at Parker's
trial, his mother, 61yearold Helen Lake, testified: ``Marijuana has
been effective in treating my son's epileptic seizures. I have
observed this phenomenon hundreds of times.''
At Parker's trial, a wide variety of people presented their
experiences with marijuana patients, family doctors, medical
specialists and researchers, judges, pharmacologists and sociologists.
Valerie Corall, 45, who runs a farm near Vera Cruz, Calif., described
how she had been treated for 10 years with anticonvulsive drugs for
her epilepsy. The drugs had the unusual effect of actually increasing
the frequency of her seizures and the accompanying side effects were
so severe she had to be sent to hospital on several occasions. ``My
doctor ordered me to get off the drugs,'' said Corall. She replaced
them by smoking marijuana. ``I have now been smoking marijuana every
day for 10 years and during that time I have been entirely free of
grand mal seizures,'' she testified.
A research team from Hebrew University in Jerusalem and the University
of Sao Paulo in Brazil conducted trials with ``the eight worst
epileptic patients we could find.'' All of them had failed to respond
to conventional forms of therapy. When their regular medication was
supplemented by 200 milligrams of CBD a synthetic form of one of the
cannabinoids found in marijuana it was noted that four of the eight
patients showed ``remarkable'' improvement, three ``partial''
improvement and one patient remained unchanged. The researchers noted
in their report in the Journal Of Clinical Pharmacology, which was
tabled at the trial, ``the results are very exciting, representing a
success rate of 80 per cent.''
But, according to witnesses at the Parker trial, epilepsy patients are
not the only ones who might benefit from marijuana. The plant may also
play a valuable role in the treatment of people with AIDS and cancer.
Patients with AIDS and cancer are subject to prolonged nausea and
vomiting, caused by the disease and the heavy doses of powerful,
prescribed drugs. ``They can't drink, eat or keep down their
medication,'' observed Dr. John Goodhew, a Toronto family doctor whose
practice includes several AIDS patients. Deprived of food and
medicine, such patients can waste away. ``Smoking marijuana appears to
be an effective and practical way of dealing with this situation,''
said Goodhew. After smoking, their nausea quickly subsides and their
appetite returns. Goodhew noted, ``I had one patient whose immune
system efficiency rose from 5 per cent to 50 per cent after smoking
marijuana.''
As an alternative to marijuana, a legal antiemetic drug called
Marinol is available. It is the synthetic form of THC one of the
several cannabinoids to be found in marijuana. But nearly all patients
have a strong preference for smoking. ``The Marinol takes much longer
to act and has unpleasant side effects,'' says Goodhew. In a 1990
survey of 2,000 members of the American Society of Clinical
Oncologists, the majority stated that ``smoking is more effective as
an antiemetic than Marinol and just as safe.''
The marijuana issue poses a legal, ethical and professional dilemma
for conscientious and lawabiding physicians like Goodhew. He
explained, ``I can't advise a patient to smoke a forbidden substance,
but based on my clinical observations, I feel that the law against
marijuana works against the welfare of some patients.''
At the Parker trial, marijuana therapy was strongly endorsed for the
treatment of multiple sclerosis (MS), a degenerative disorder of the
central nervous system. In his affidavit, Greenspoon stated that
``cannabis can alleviate the pain and muscle spasm'' associated with
this disease. To make their point, Greenspoon and other witnesses
submitted material which contained several graphic case histories.
Greg Paufler, 37, was a case in point. He suffered severe weight loss,
excruciating muscle pain, and could no longer walk due to his
inability to control his limbs. When he failed to respond to
conventional medical treatment, he was advised to ``go home and
rest.'' Instead, Paufler began smoking marijuana, which led to his
return to health. He regained his lost weight and he could walk again.
He boasted, ``I can even go out and show the kids how to kick a soccer
ball.''
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`We should be conducting more research into the possibility of
cannabis as having a variety of medical purposes'
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Glaucoma, an eye disease commonly found among older people, can also
be controlled by marijuana therapy, according to evidence presented at
Parker's trial. The disease is caused by a buildup of fluid in the
eyeballs, leading to heavy pressure which results in blurred vision
and blindness. Many glaucoma patients claim that they have preserved
their eyesight because marijuana lowers the intraocular pressure.
As the result of his lengthy campaign to make marijuana available as a
medicine, Parker has become an authority on the subject. His apartment
is piled high with scientific reports, research papers, books and
legal documents on the topic. In the material he has amassed, many
highly respected individuals and institutions demand that we embark on
a program which thoroughly investigates the medicinal properties of
cannabis.
Dr. Berry (Perry) Kendall, head of the Addiction Research Foundation
said in a published interview: ``We should be conducting more research
into the possibility of cannabis as having a variety of medical
purposes.'' The authoritative U.S. Academy of Sciences echoes the same
sentiment: ``The investigation of cannabis should be given a high
priority.'' The highly regarded New England Journal Of Medicine shares
the same view.
Parker asks, impatiently, ``Since so many qualified people support the
idea, why are we dragging our feet on marijuana research?''
On Dec. 10, if Sheppard grants Parker the right to use marijuana, he
will regard it as a major victory for himself and thousands of other
patients struggling with epilepsy, glaucoma, multiple sclerosis,
cancer and AIDS. He feels he's entitled to have access to a drug which
controls his seizures without being arrested by the police for drug
possession.
``I've been fighting for this right for 20 years,'' he says wearily.
``In the name of humanity, how much longer will I have to wait?''