MANY PATIENTS CALL GOVERNMENT MARIJUANA WEAK

Medicinal Cigarettes Loaded With Stems, Seeds, Researchers Say

They call it Mississippi ditch weed, and the quality is so poor to
Sacramento resident Elvy Musikka that she spends a whole day picking apart
the medical marijuana cigarettes the U.S. government sends her to remove
the stems and seeds.

Many even consider street-level marijuana, which can sometimes come laced
with PCP, to be of higher quality than the government-grown marijuana that
is supplied by the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

The institute has been growing the pot through the University of
Mississippi for medicinal studies since the 1970s and has been hearing the
complaints from the very beginning.

The poor-quality pot is partly to blame for the lack of participants in a
current San Mateo County program that is the first publicly funded study to
look at the effects of medical marijuana on HIV patients who smoke the drug
at home.

Only 10 people are taking part in the study, which was designed for 60, and
Dale Gieringer, coordinator for California NORML, the National Organization
for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, said the seeds and stems issue is part of
the reason.

"It was really obvious when you looked at (the cigarettes) and saw the
problem," Gieringer said. "There was a potency test several years ago with
samples of medical marijuana. The government pot tested at the bottom of
the samples."

According to the study performed in 1999 by Ethan Russo, a Montana
neurologist and editor of the Journal of Cannabis Therapeutics, the
government's marijuana cigarettes were loaded with seeds and stems and
tested at 2 to 3 percent potency, compared with 5 or 6 percent for typical
street-quality marijuana and 7 to 8 percent for the pot that is supplied by
most medical marijuana operations.

"That has been a chronic problem from the time the farm was created," said
Allen St. Pierre, executive director of the NORML Foundation.

But Steve Gust, the special assistant to the director at the National
Institute on Drug Abuse, said the government's marijuana tests at almost
the same level of potency as the average marijuana that is seized by the
federal Drug Enforcement Administration, which is about 4 to 5 percent.

"Like any mass processing, it's not a perfect process," he said. "But the
marijuana that we provide and produce is almost entirely free of stems and
seeds."

The institute ships the majority of its marijuana cigarettes to a dozen
research programs throughout the nation that service several hundred
people. The agency also directly ships cigarettes to seven patients who are
part of an old investigative program that was created in the 1970s for
research.

Musikka, a Sacramento woman who has had glaucoma since 1975, is one of the
seven study participants who receive the shipments from the institute. She
said that since her participation in the study began in 1988, the quality
of the marijuana has gone from awful to tolerable but that she still can't
smoke the cigarettes without cleaning them up first.

"They always have to be rerolled," said Musikka, who is blind in one eye.
"I don't like their papers, and all the seeds and stems have to come out.
It takes me all day to just clean everything and get it so that I can
reroll it."