CANADA LIGHTENS UP ON MARIJUANA

BOSTON -- 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 marijuana 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.

Where does that leave us? U.S. citizens, who routinely cross the border
for cheap prescription drugs, won't be allowed access to the Manitoba
mother lode. 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.
In May, our Supremes ruled on narrow grounds that federal drug law
allows no exception for medical marijuana.

So the Canadians have implicitly recognized that marijuana has uses as
well as abuses. But our government supports the idea that marijuana has
no medicinal value worth the social risks.

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. More to the point, it's on
a collision course with patients who are looking for relief without
looking for trouble.

Is anyone hallucinating?

Marijuana has a medical history that goes way back beyond the time when
the straight-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.

The few studies available show mixed results. 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 of smoking on the lungs of a terminally ill patient seems a
bit absurd. One of the other side effects is 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: the drug war in which marijuana
has played a starring role with 700,000 arrests in 1998. There is a fear
that if grandma can smoke it legally for her health, granddaughter will
smoke it to get high.

"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 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.

The Canadian system has its own critics: doctors who worry about being
gatekeepers and marijuana activists who think there are still too many
hurdles. But we are in a marijuana muddle.

The feds aren't likely to crack down on the terminally ill, nor are law
enforcers eager to rip joints out of the hands of AIDS patients. 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.

Is that a whiff of sanity from cross the border? Or just a contact high?