REEFER MADNESS

Congress Should Recognize The Medicinal Use Of Marijuana.

A relatively new development in the practice of American medicine is to
focus not only on the quality of a patient's life but also on the
quality of a patient's death.

Health care facilities now acknowledge pain as a patients' rights issue.

Measuring and recording pain as a vital sign has been the norm in most
American hospitals since January, when the Joint Commission on
Accreditation of Health Care Organizations adopted a rule directing
hospitals to regularly assess, monitor and manage pain in all patients
or risk losing their accreditation.

Pain management may be changing the culture of health care, but it has
made little impact on the men and women sitting in the cushy
congressional chairs in Washington.

As heartbreaking as this week's Supreme Court decision was for people
whose suffering can be managed through marijuana use, the justices ruled
the only way they could under existing federal law. The narrowly drawn
and unanimous decision in the case involving an Oakland, Calif.,
marijuana cooperative could go no other way as long as federal lawmakers
cling doggedly to the belief that marijuana should be a Schedule 1 drug
under the Controlled Substance Act, which means it has no accepted
medical use in treatment in the United States.

Opponents of allowing doctors to prescribe marijuana as a pain reliever
for terminally ill patients can no longer fall back on the argument that
no scientific evidence exists to prove marijuana is useful. Two years
ago, the Institute of Medicine at the National Academy of Sciences
identified medicinal value in compounds found in marijuana, reporting
that the cannabinoids are suited for treatment of certain conditions,
such a chemotherapy-induced nausea and the physical deterioration that
AIDS patients experience.

Marijuana isn't any different from morphine or other narcotics that have
medicinal applications. Yet Congress can't seemed to grasp the
comparison.

As we have said before, we are not advocating the removal of criminal
penalties for marijuana possession when it is being used as a
recreational drug. And we want law enforcement to vigorously go after
dealers who are selling it to our children. But the issue in question is
the controlled use of marijuana as prescribed by doctors to patients
suffering unbearable pain, incapacitating nausea and vomiting, or a
severe loss of appetite brought on by disease.

It's time that Congress abandon its "reefer madness" mind-set and
realize that the medicinal use of marijuana provides relief from
suffering. It merits recognition as a prescription drug.