AN INSULTING EDITORIAL ON MEDICAL MARIJUANA

Re: "Smoke screen" (Editorial, Dec. 1):

Your editorial on medical marijuana use is an insult to voters in the nine
states, including California, that have passed laws in favor of it. To say
that we are all the unwitting pawns of those who want to make all drug use
legal and that the Supreme Court should strike down Proposition 215 is
saying that the people are too stupid to govern themselves.

The fact that you abhor the same argument when the courts support a liberal
point of view doesn't escape this reader.

What is most offensive, though, is your attempt to trivialize and
marginalize those for whom pot brings relief from nausea and pain and
severe appetite loss by putting the word "medicinal" in quotation marks
throughout the editorial. Just because you think their relief is purely
imaginary doesn't make it so. To use punctuation in such a way makes you
look sarcastic and mean. Perhaps you could do a little research by talking
to actual sufferers before belittling them. Then you might be able to keep
your "reputation" for "fairness," or at least "accuracy."

While the Food and Drug Administration is approving drugs left and right
that later turn out to be killers, and dangerous substances like Prozac are
prescribed for millions of children, you cling to our federal drug laws as
if Moses brought them down from the mountain. I trust doctors to decide
what is and isn't medicine, not newspapers or politicians.

As an AIDS sufferer who has lost nearly 20 percent of my body weight this
year because of my illness, I haven't yet availed myself of the use of
marijuana. But I am furious to think that my doctor could prescribe it,
only to find that I can't get its relief because you are afraid it will
lead to heroin use in the public schools, or something equally absurd.

After you have repeatedly vomited from the six or seventh protease
inhibitor you've tried, the way you blindly cling to an ultra-conservative
status quo might change. At any rate, don't belittle the voters of
California with quotation marks. It's offensive.

Eric Poulsen, San Diego