NEW POT RESEARCH LEAVES CLINIC

A medicinal marijuana study, the first of its kind in the United States
funded by local authorities, is designed to determine whether the drug will
be diverted to recreational users. Participants in the San Mateo County
experiment will not be watched while they smoke.

San Mateo County officials are recruiting HIV patients for a two-year
medicinal marijuana study considered groundbreaking in that it aims to
determine whether cannabis will be used medicinally or wind up on the streets.

Participants will be monitored through self-reports, home visits,
medication logs and the return of marijuana cigarette butts during weekly
clinic visits.

The study, launched at a Tuesday press conference, is the first of its kind
in the United States funded by local, not state or federal, authorities and
aims to determine whether medicinal marijuana use can be studied outside of
a clinical setting.

But in undertaking the experiment, the county has to trust patients to
adhere to the rules. Unlike other publicly funded cannabis studies under
way, participants will not be watched while they smoke.

If marijuana is to come into widespread use as medication, "we're not going
to use it in a locked ward,'' said Dr. Dennis Israelski, who will oversee
the study. "We're going to use it out in the community.''

In the coming weeks, applicants will be screened based on specific
criteria. They have to pledge not to sell or swap the drug. They must know
how to smoke a marijuana joint. And they must log when and where they
inhale, reporting back to San Mateo County General Hospital each week
before they get more.

It is there that the data will be tracked, with the goal of one day helping
to answer whether pot can be safely administered outside of hospitals.

Patients will collect a kit each week for six weeks, receiving as many as
35 rolled marijuana cigarettes a week and three plastic containers: one for
marijuana grown on government farms in Mississippi, one for partially
smoked joints, and one for finished butts, marked for identification purposes.

And they must have a safe place to smoke.

Because smoking and transporting marijuana is still a crime as far as the
federal government is concerned, the study's 60 participants will have
legal protection as well. Local sheriff's deputies and police officers will
know that if they stop a person carrying a "medical marijuana research
study'' card with the official county seal, that person is free to smoke in
peace at home.

"If a person is smoking a joint and they have 15 more in their house,
they're not going to be arrested,'' San Mateo County Sheriff Don Horsley said.

The county is hoping its study of HIV patients who suffer from a painful
and largely untreatable condition in their nerves known as neuropathy will
contribute more science to what is so far a legal and ethical dispute.

The study came from three years' collaboration between an ex-cop turned
county supervisor, Mike Nevin, and Israelski, an internationally renowned
AIDS specialist who oversees the county's infectious disease treatment.
Nevin wants compassionate care for his constituents; Israelski wants to
know if what he hears about marijuana anecdotally from patients -- who
suffer from often-untreatable nausea, wasting and chronic pain -- can be
scientifically proved.

Both want to know if sending the drug out into the community for medicinal
purposes will work. And so do other professionals who are studying
medicinal marijuana in the more traditional settings of clinics and hospital.

Other studies funded by the federal government are under way in California,
the first of eight states to legalize marijuana for medicinal use. But San
Mateo County's $500,000 contribution places it in a unique spot as the
first county in the nation to fund cannabis research, according to a
spokeswoman with the federal government's National Institute on Drug Abuse
and local officials.

In addition to the San Mateo County project, four federally funded studies
are under way at the Center for Medical Cannabis Research in La Jolla. They
are a collaborative effort between the University of California campuses in
San Francisco and San Diego.

Studying marijuana use is hard to do in clinical settings, said Dr. Donald
Abrams, the University of California-San Francisco professor of medicine
who is overseeing the San Francisco research. San Mateo County is "taking
us a step closer to seeing how this is used in the real world,'' Abrams said.