Pubdate: 14 December 1998 
Source: The Nation (US) 
Section: Selected Editorial
Contact:  
Website: http://www.thenation.com/ 
Copyright: 1998, The Nation Company
Author: Dan Baum
Note: Dan Baum is the author of Smoke and Mirrors: The War on Drugs and the
Politics of Failure, published this year by Little, Brown. Support for this
editorial provided by the Shafer Fund of The Nation Institute.
    
RX: MARIJUANA

Initiatives authorizing the medical use of marijuana passed in five states
in the last election. (Another one would have passed in the District of
Columbia, according to exit polls, but it was consigned to limbo by a
blatantly antidemocratic amendment introduced by Representative Bob Barr
forbidding federal funds to be spent tallying the vote.) On this subject
the words of Dr. Lester Grinspoon, a leading authority on the drug (he is
author of Marijuana: The Forbidden Medicine) and professor of psychiatry at
Harvard Medical School, are apropos: "As the number of people who have used
marijuana medicinally grows, the discussion is turning from whether it is
effective to how it should be made available.

I once thought the main problem was its classification under Schedule I of
the Comprehensive Drug Abuse and Control Act of 1970, which describes it
having a high potential for abuse and no accepted medical use. Moving it to
Schedule II (Representative Barney Frank has introduced a bill to do just
that ) would make clinical research possible and eventually permit
prescriptions. In the present political climate, however, this course seems
unlikely.

Schedule II drugs must undergo rigorous, expensive, and time-consuming
tests before they are approved by the Food and Drug Administration. Who
would pay for the tests? Not the drug companies, because there is no profit
for them in marijuana, which can't be patented.

Only the US government has sufficient resources to explore medical
marijuana, but it opposes loosening present restrictions on clinical research.

A second problem is that as a Schedule II drug, marijuana would still be
classified as having a high potential for abuse, as well as limited medical
use. Pharmacies might be reluctant to carry it, knowing the DEA would be
keeping close tabs on them. The DEA could hound physicians who, by its
standards, prescribed cannabis too freely or for purposes that the
government considered unacceptable. Many thousands of people now obtain it
illegally, often at great risk, to relieve conditions ranging from appetite
loss due to AIDS to pre-menstrual syndrome and chonic pain, and they are
teaching doctors that marijuana has therapeutic uses and that the risks now
associated with obtaining it are needless.

A half million citizens are arrested in this country each year for
possession of marijuana, many of htem for medical purposes.

Regulated availability under the same rules applied to alcohol may be the
only way to make its judicious medical use possible. Fortunately, patients
and doctors have now begun to create the conditions for the enormous change
in our understanding of this drug that will make it possible to implement
new laws and policies."