WHERE'S BUSH'S COMPASSION FOR MEDICAL MARIJUANA USERS?

Along with 18 members of the Legislature, I have joined a national
coalition of hundreds of
state legislators, physicians, religious leaders, medical organizations --
and such notables
as Walter Cronkite, Hugh Downs and Milton Friedman -- to ask President Bush
to allow
seriously ill patients to have legal access to medical marijuana under
federal law.

This coalition published its request to the president in the form of a
full-page ad in The New
York Times on March 6.

Bush, who campaigned as a "compassionate conservative," said during the
2000 campaign
that states should be able to decide the medical marijuana issue "as they
so choose."

But his administration has pursued a different course, allowing the Drug
Enforcement
Administration to raid medical marijuana providers in California, where
voters approved
medical use of marijuana in 1996. Such a policy is inhumane and unnecessary.

In 1978, the federal government created a program through which patients
with serious
medical conditions could receive a government-grown supply of marijuana.
The Compassionate Investigational New Drug (IND) program was set up as a
research program, so that each
patient's physician could study the effects of marijuana on a particular
medical condition.
For the seven patients who are still in the program, marijuana remains an
effective drug.
Glaucoma patients have successfully prevented their vision from
deteriorating further, and
those with crippling neurological conditions have found pain relief that is
enabling them to
lead functional lives.

In the early 1990s, however, a flood of applications from AIDS patients
threatened to expand
the Compassionate IND program into a much larger program that would have
undercut the
first Bush administration's insistence that there is no acceptable use for
marijuana.

As a result, in 1991 the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
closed the
Compassionate IND program to all new applicants, even though the patients
who were
already in the program were clearly benefiting.

Three years ago, at the request of the White House drug czar's office, the
National Academy
of Sciences' Institute of Medicine (IOM) examined all available research on
the medical uses
of marijuana. As IOM principal investigator Dr. John Benson explained, the
institute found that
"there are some limited circumstances in which we recommend smoking
marijuana for medical
uses."

In its landmark report, the IOM suggested that a program similar to the
Compassionate IND
program might be the best way to remove the threat of arrest for patients
suffering chronic
conditions such as severe pain or AIDS wasting syndrome, while at the same
time gathering
additional data on marijuana's therapeutic uses.

What we are asking of the president isn't radical. It represents the
consensus of leading
scientists and health organizations, such as the American Public Health
Association and
the American Preventive Health Association. Our effort has brought together
people from
all shades of the political spectrum, from Alan Dershowitz and former
Surgeon General Dr.
Joycelyn Elders to such noted conservatives as Lyn Nofziger, a trusted
adviser to former
Presidents Reagan and Nixon.

It also has the overwhelming support of the public. In every state,
including Washington,
where voters have had the opportunity, they have chosen to allow seriously
ill people to
use medical marijuana without fear of arrest. Poll after poll has shown
strong levels of
public approval.

Other nations are already moving in this direction. The Canadian government
already
has given 1,000 patients legal permission to use medical marijuana, and has
hired a
private firm to grow marijuana for these patients.

All we ask of the president is simple compassion and common sense.

The administration should implement the Institute of Medicine's
recommendations,
which would provide desperately needed relief to seriously ill people while
giving policy-
makers the data we need to formulate a longer-term policy.

Marijuana's use for medical purposes is already recognized under Washington
state law,
following voter approval of Initiative 692 in 1998. It is time that
patients received similar
protection under federal law.