BEYOND THE MYTH, THERE'S RELIEF FOR THE PAIN

Someday, marijuana will probably be legal, and people will look back
and laugh at those times when a benign backyard weed caused heavily
armed men in black jumpsuits to leap from police vans and arrest
local pot farmers and burn their crops.

But not yet. Marijuana is still illegal, still shrouded in
well-tended myth and still reason enough to get a person sent to the slammer.

So there is a wonderful opportunity this week for state government in
Rhode Island to come down on the side of compassion and common sense.

The medical marijuana bill would mean that very sick people could
relieve their pain and suffering without fear of getting busted. It
would mean the naturally grown substance that some doctors recommend
for their patients could be used without the need to lock the doors
and pull the shades.

Rhode Island would become the 11th state in the country to pass
legislation that gives people approved for its use the right to keep
a limited amount of marijuana on hand for those times when the pain
threatens to shut them down.

Lawmakers have heard from people who have found relief from the pain
of life-controlling illnesses in the puff of the weed. It works where
other, officially approved things do not. It gets people through the day.

And it is illegal because it has always been illegal. The Reefer
Madness cartoons have been laughed out of the room, but marijuana
continues to claim a ridiculously large amount of money and time and
resources. There are probably people high in the ranks in the war on
drugs who sit around with a double Scotch or a couple of Budweisers
and discuss how to cut down on the grass.

Cynical friends -- and I have a few -- suggest that marijuana can't
be legalized because it is too easy to grow in the backyard and
therefore too difficult for big business to turn into big business.

But as long as marijuana remains on the same list as substances that
really can mess people up, it will continue to force people to make a
painful and dangerous choice: go without and live with the pain or
buy or grow marijuana and risk arrest.

There was a fine commentary in The Sunday Journal on June 5 by Polly
Reynolds, a writer and mother of two from East Providence. She has
multiple sclerosis. She smokes marijuana to relieve the pain. And all
anyone really has to know about marijuana is what she tells us:

"The federal government's stubborn, hypocritical refusal to permit
good citizens to use an herb with medicinal properties that makes
them feel better is stupid, dictatorial and empirically mean. It is
uncivil, inhumane and disempowering.

"The decision for me as my disease worsens has been either to smoke
marijuana and keep functioning or to crawl under my bedcovers as a
non-functioning, if socially acceptable, parent."

It's that simple. It really is. For those who need it -- those who
would be officially certified by the state under the proposed law --
marijuana is the ticket to a fuller, richer, less painful life. It
allows people with multiple sclerosis, AIDS, PTSD and a whole bunch
of other spirit-sapping ailments to get up and get out and do things.

It is hard to imagine how anyone can say no. Federal law does not
allow legal exemptions for those who use medical marijuana. But Rhode
Island has the chance to be better than that. It can look past the
smoke and see that marijuana can relieve the suffering of a
considerable number of its citizens. It can make it possible to
relieve the pain and the anxiety.

It would be kind, compassionate, even enlightened.