NEW STUDY SHOWS MEDICAL VALUE OF MARIJUANA

Ever since California and other states began passing medical
marijuana laws in 1996, the federal government has claimed that -- as
a 2003 White House press release put it -- "research has not
demonstrated that smoked marijuana is safe and effective medicine." A
new study, just published in the journal Neurology, definitively
refutes that claim and underlines the urgent need for the federal
government to change its prohibitionist policies.

The study, conducted by Dr. Donald Abrams of the University of
California at San Francisco, found marijuana to be safe and effective
at treating peripheral neuropathy, which causes great suffering to
HIV/AIDS patients. This type of extreme pain, which is caused by
damage to the nerves, can make patients feel like their feet and
hands are on fire, or being stabbed with a knife. Similar pain is
seen in a number of other illnesses, including multiple sclerosis and
diabetes, and cannot be treated effectively with conventional pain
medications. Standard pain medicines -- even addictive, dangerous
narcotics -- have little effect on this type of pain.

Marijuana doesn't cure neuropathy, but in the UCSF study marijuana
was clearly shown to give relief. In this randomized, double-blind,
placebo-controlled trial (the design that's considered the "gold
standard" of medical research), a majority of patients had a greater
than 30 percent reduction in pain after smoking marijuana. For many,
that level of relief means having a bearable quality of life.

This result is all the more remarkable because researchers like
Abrams are only allowed to test government-supplied marijuana, which
is of notoriously poor quality. There's every reason to believe the
results would be even better if scientists were permitted to study a
better-quality product.

Abrams' study is only the latest in a growing mountain of research
showing that medical marijuana can provide real -- and potentially
even life-saving -- benefits. In a study published last year of
patients being treated for the hepatitis C virus (HCV), those who
used marijuana to curb the nausea and other noxious side effects of
anti-HCV drugs were significantly more likely to complete their
treatment. As a result, the marijuana-using patients were three times
more likely to clear the deadly virus from their bodies -- in other
words, to be cured -- than those not using marijuana.

Clearly, the White House and its drug czar, John Walters, should
abandon their rigid, unscientific rejection of medical marijuana and
start reshaping federal policy to match medical reality.

Unfortunately, this is unlikely; what's more likely is that the Bush
administration will ignore the scientific data during its last two
years in power, just as it has for the past six years.

That puts the ball in Congress's court. There are a number of actions
Congress can take to put federal medical marijuana policy on a path
toward sanity.

The first, and simplest, is to prohibit the Drug Enforcement
Administration from spending money to raid and arrest medical
marijuana patients and caregivers in the 11 states where the medical
use of marijuana is legal under state law. This taxpayer-friendly act
would remove the cloud of fear that now hangs over tens of thousands
of desperately ill Americans and those who care for them.

But that should be just the beginning. Everything about federal
medical marijuana policy should be reconsidered. That includes the
arbitrary rules that needlessly hamper research, as well as the
absurd law that classifies cocaine and methamphetamine as having more
medical value than marijuana, which is grouped with heroin and LSD as
having "no currently accepted medical use."

The guiding principle must be to handle medical marijuana as science,
common sense, and simple human decency dictate. Recent research
leaves no doubt that our government's war on the sick and dying must
end immediately.

Rob Kampia is executive director of the Marijuana Policy Project in
Washington, DC.