FDA'S REEFER MADNESS

Dismissing Medicinal Marijuana, With Prejudice

On March 30, 1999, David Letterman ran off the "top 10 jobs in the new
millennium," which included "NBA token white guy," "NHL token black
guy" and "Human toy for Bill Gates" -- and, at No. 9, "medical
marijuana product quality tester." That last may have to wait until
the next millennium. The Food and Drug Administration, utilizing
science more familiar with 17th century bloodletting than 21st century
medicine, used a one-page opinion last week to dismiss any validity
for medicinal marijuana use.

The FDA contradicted a 1999 book-length report by the Institute of
Medicine -- a branch of the federally chartered National Academy of
Sciences -- that found research lacking and marijuana's addictive
potential lower than nicotine's. The FDA contradicted the electorates
of 11 states, where medicinal marijuana use has been legalized.

And it contradicted the countless findings of patients suffering from
cancer, glaucoma, AIDS and other common but ravaging ailments, who
rely on marijuana for some relief from "nausea and vomiting and AIDS
wasting" (in the words of the Institute of Medicine report).

The FDA's one-page shrug is not about science.

It's about the denial of science to protect old war-on-drugs
superstitions, among them the notion that medicinal marijuana would
open the way for marijuana's widespread use recreationally; that
recreational marijuana is addictive, and a gateway to harder drugs; or
that marijuana is more dangerous than alcohol or cigarettes. None of
those superstitions hold up to fact.

Here are a few. No one has ever died of a marijuana overdose.

A couple of studies have found that extremely heavy marijuana use
decreases blood flow and briefly increases the chance of a heart
attack.

But extreme shocks to the system using all sorts of legal foods and
drinks alter the body's balance: More than 20,000 people a year die
from alcohol-related reasons.

The current estimate is that an average person would have to smoke 900
joints in a row -- no interruptions allowed -- to die by pot poisoning.

Addiction? As mind-altering substances go, it's among the safest,
causing addiction in just 9 percent of users. Alcohol's rate is almost
twice that, and a third of tobacco users become addicted.

Health effects?

A University of California-San Francisco study published three years
ago found that pot smokers increased their numbers of cells that help
fight disease.

We won't go so far as saying that pot is good for you -- not because
it is or it isn't, but because there isn't enough research to make the
judgment. That also means that there's not enough science to judge pot
bad for you, although what science does exist points consistently in
the other direction, and almost exclusively so when pot is compared
with other legal drugs.

It would be tempting, therefore, to say that whoever produced that FDA
report on medicinal marijuana must have been smoking something.

But that might impugn marijuana's credibility. It would be helpful if
the FDA would smoke something -- if it encouraged comprehensive
federal research of marijuana, rather than blunt such research with
circular reasoning that begins and ends with its foregone, and
archaic, conclusions.

Meanwhile, and thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling giving
federal agents the power to arrest medicinal marijuana users even in
states that legalized the stuff, this particularly cruel and narrow
form of prohibition continues to wreck its way through the lives of
patients who could do with a little more compassion. Buoyed by the
falsely moral administration of President Bush, the Food and Drug
Administration is aiding only the bloodletters.