Pubdate: Thur 6 May 1999 Source: Jordan Independent (MN) Contact: 109 Rice St. S., Jordan, MN 55352 Website: http://www.jordannews.com/ Author: Paul M. Bischke LEGAL MARIJUANA DEBATE CONTINUES To the editor: In mid-March, several seriously ill Minnesotans bared their souls before a legislative committee, often in tears, to explain the unique benefits they derived from using marijuana medicinally and the anguish they suffered due to the severe criminalization of their medicine. Immediately thereafter, Aaron P. Fredrickson of the Minnesota Family Council responded in cold indifference to their medical and legal plight with a canned reefer-madness statement fraught with distortions akin to those in his April 22, 1999 guest editorial. Fredrickson is pharmacologically wrong and religiously wrongheaded. The recent Institute of Medicine report commissioned by the federal government confirms those patients' experience: marijuana is medicinally beneficial. Smoking delivers the medicinal compounds rapidly and, where nausea is concerned, in a uniquely useful way (cancer patients with severe vomiting may simply regurgitate pills) and the amount of smoke involved is generally medically inconsequential. Contrary to Fredrickson's innuendo about marijuana as a criminogenic substance, marijuana actually inhibits aggression (see the February 1994 Dept. of Justice comprehensive study 'Psychoactive Substances and Violence' by Dr. Jeffrey Roth). It is true, however, that the same persons willing to skirt drug laws may act in other risky ways, as well. There is a similar correlation between cigarette smoking and criminality (see 'America's Longest War' by Duke and Gross, Jeremy Tarcher Press, 1993), but neither correlation demonstrates causation. One might expect intolerant right-wing extremists to prevaricate to gain political control, but such conduct ill befits an organization whose stated purpose is "the preservation of traditional Judaeo-Christian values," as the Minnesota Family Council claims. First, traditional Judaeo-Christian values clearly forbid the withholding of useful medicines from the sick. Second, the Judaeo-Christian tradition insists that the whole of the created order is good, including the cannabis sativa plant (commonly called hemp or marijuana) that Mr. Fredrickson so despises. Like the rest of creation, it can be put to pro-social, anti-social, or morally neutral uses. Medicine is clearly pro-social. Third, lying to our kids by denying marijuana's pro-social uses in order to dissuade them from anti-social uses cannot be justified in Christian morality. In relation to pleasure drugs, the traditional Christian standard is the virtue of temperance (it is certain forms of Islam that advocate enforced abstinence). Moderate and responsible use of pleasure drugs is acceptable in Christian morality. In some cases, temperance demands abstinence (for kids, drivers, and expectant mothers), but in general Christianity judges temperate use as good. If there are pleasure drugs for which temperance is truly impossible (and this may be so), we must ascertain this in the just climate of truthfulness and respond with prudence informed by compassion. So far, America has not done this. In light of the Christian virtue of prudence, the Drug War that Mr. Fredrickson so heartily endorses cannot be morally justified exactly because abstinence enforcement creates more social evils than it prevents (for example, crime, disease, urban decay, unjust punishments, corruption, legal inequity, and the withholding of useful medicines). Bringing pleasure drugs under civil regulation is not an 'outrageous agenda,' as Fredrickson purports, but rather a necessary process to restore social order under the wise counsel of the Four Cardinal Virtues of the Christian tradition. The Minnesota Family Council would do well to abandon its strident and ill-reasoned intolerance and adopt St. Augustine's advice for responding to intemperance: "such things are cured not by bitterness, severity and harshness, but by teaching rather than prohibition, by gentle admonitions rather than threats." Paul M. Bischke, Drug Policy Reform Group of Minnesota St. Paul - --- MAP posted-by: Don Beck