STOP THE WAR ON MEDICAL MARIJUANA

TUCSON Today, in Tucson, Phoenix and dozens of other cities and towns
across the U.S., something remarkable will happen: Thousands of people
battling cancer, AIDS and other terrible illnesses will deliver "cease and
desist" orders to the federal Drug Enforcement Administration to stop it
from blocking their access to a needed medication.

Their request is so simple, so obviously correct that it is heartbreaking
that people, many very seriously ill, are forced to deliver their message
in this way, perhaps risking arrest.

But as individuals who have found that medical marijuana relieves their
symptoms when conventional medicines fail, they feel they had no choice:
The federal government continues to fight an irrational war against medical
marijuana, and the sick and struggling are its principal victims.

Make no mistake: The government's demonization of marijuana is irrational.
When I first published a study in Science on marijuana's physical and
psychological effects back in 1968, I was certain that medical use of the
plant would be legal within five years. This is, after all, a medicinal
plant for which no fatal dose has ever been established and which has been
used in folk medicine for millennia.

Like all medicines, marijuana has its drawbacks, particularly when smoked.
It is not a panacea. I support research into safer delivery systems such as
low-temperature vaporizers or inhalers, which offer the fast action of
inhaled medicine without the irritants found in smoke.

Still, I have seen in my own studies that marijuana is less toxic than most
pharmaceutical drugs in current use, and is certainly helpful for some
patients, including those with wasting syndromes, chronic muscle spasticity
and intractable nausea.

Unfortunately, the only legal substitute available now - a prescription
pill containing a synthetic THC, marijuana's main psychoactive component -
is not good enough for many patients. I hear regularly from patients that
the pill does not work as well as the natural herb, and causes much greater
intoxication.

I am not alone in this view. The Institute of Medicine, in a report
commissioned by the White House "drug czar," concluded in 1999 that there
is convincing evidence of marijuana's value in relieving nausea, weight
loss and other symptoms caused by AIDS, cancer and multiple sclerosis, as
well as by the harsher drugs often used to treat these conditions.

The institute concluded that, for some patients, the potential benefits
clearly outweigh the risks, and that ways should be found to make marijuana
available to them.

As a physician, I am frustrated that I cannot prescribe marijuana for
patients who might benefit from it. At the very least I would like to be
able to refer them to a safe, reliable, quality-controlled source.

But both the Clinton and Bush administrations have pursued a policy that
the New England Journal of Medicine has called "misguided, heavy- handed
and inhumane."

They have declined to act on the Institute of Medicine's recommendation,
and have conducted a series of raids on medical marijuana cooperatives
operating legally under California law - depriving patients of precisely
the safe, secure source of medicine they need. Sick people are forced to
turn to street sources, or simply suffer.

So it comes to this: Desperately ill people, their friends, families and
loved ones, standing outside DEA offices, pleading with their government
not to deprive them of medicine that relieves their suffering.

It should never have been necessary, and one can only hope that the
administration and Congress will listen.