WE'VE MADE A MONSTER OUT OF MARIJUANA

And Now From Our Northern Neighbors, The Allegedly Staid Canadians, A New
Antidote To Our Reefer Madness.

The Canadian government has just increased the number of its people who can
use marijuana as medicine. As of this month, the terminally ill and those
with chronic diseases from cancer to AIDS to MS can turn their back yards
into their medicine cabinets.

With the approval of a doctor, they can either grow it or get it free from
the government, which is paying a company to nurture the plants in an
abandoned copper mine in Flin Flon, Manitoba.

U.S. citizens, who routinely cross the border for cheap prescription drugs,
won't be allowed access to the Manitoba motherlode. But if Canadians can't
export their medical marijuana, it's time for us to import their policy.

The northern light on the subject comes in the wake of a Canadian Supreme
Court ruling that any patient suffering terminal or painful illness should
be allowed access to marijuana when a doctor says it may help. Our own
Supreme Court has moved in exactly the opposite direction.

Our law not only differs from Canada's, it's on a collision course with the
policies in nine states -- Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Hawaii,
Maine, Oregon, Nevada and Washington -- and with patients looking for
relief without looking for trouble.

Marijuana has a medical history that goes back beyond the time when the
strait-laced Queen Victoria took it for menstrual cramps. It was used
widely in the West for pain and sleep, until aspirin and barbiturates came
along. It was demonized in the 1930s with "reefer madness" propaganda and
in the 1960s when Haight-Ashbury was covered in a stoned haze.

Today, thousands of patients from paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould to your
neighbor's grandmother have reported on pot's value in relieving the nausea
of chemotherapy or improving the appetite of an AIDS patient. Many doctors
still wait for scientific proof, the double- blind studies that have become
the gold standard of research. But no such studies existed when penicillin
or even aspirin were accepted.

A recent survey in a British medical journal reported that marijuana was no
better than other available drugs for severe pain and somewhat better for
nausea. But these were marijuana-based medications, not smoked marijuana.
The patients still preferred the marijuana medications by a large margin.

Marijuana, like most drugs, has side effects, although worrying about the
effects, including what medical researchers label "euphoria," or in street
parlance, a "high." But as Leonard Glantz, a Boston University professor of
health law asks, "If someone is terminally ill, and they can eat and be
euphoric, why is that bad?"

Here we get to the heart of the matter: "We're seeing America's war on
drugs being taken to an extreme that begins to make no sense," says Glantz.

Politicians are so afraid of appearing soft on drugs that they can't draw
any distinctions.

Compare this to morphine. We don't allow morphine on the street but we
permit it in the doctor's arsenal for the treatment of pain. Imagine the
uproar if we made morphine illegal. There is no logic in treating marijuana
differently.

Asa Hutchinson, the Bush pick to head the Drug Enforcement Administration,
said prosecuting the medical marijuana dealers wasn't "a priority." But
meanwhile, patients are using drug dealers as doctors. And a treatment for
suffering is a crime.