BLOW SOME OF THAT SMOKE DOWN HERE

BOSTON - And now from our northern neighbours, the allegedly staid
Canadians, a new antidote to our reefer madness.

The Canadian government has just increased the number of its people
who can use marijuana as medicine. As of this month, the terminally
ill and those with chronic diseases from cancer to AIDS to MS can
turn their back yards into their medicine cabinets.

With the approval of a doctor, they can either grow it or get it free
from the government, which is paying a company to nurture the plants
in an abandoned copper mine in Flin Flon, Manitoba.

Where does that leave us? U.S. citizens, who routinely cross the
border for cheap prescription drugs, won't be allowed access to the
Manitoba motherload. But if Canadians can't export their medical
marijuana, it's time for us to import their policy.

The northern light on the subject comes in the wake of an Ontario
Court of Appeal ruling that patients suffering terminal or painful
illness should be allowed access to marijuana when a doctor says it
may help. Our own Supreme Court has moved in exactly the opposite
direction. In May, our Supremes ruled on narrow grounds that federal
drug law allows no exception for medical marijuana.

So the Canadians have implicitly recognized that marijuana has uses
as well as abuses. But our government supports the idea that
marijuana has no medicinal value worth the social risks.

Our law not only differs from Canada's -- it's on a collision course
with the policies in nine states -- Alaska, Arizona, California,
Colorado, Hawaii, Maine, Oregon, Nevada and Washington. More to the
point, it's on a collision course with patients who are looking for
relief without looking for trouble.

Is anyone hallucinating?

Marijuana has a medical history that goes way back beyond the time
when the straitlaced Queen Victoria took it for menstrual cramps. It
was used widely in the West for pain and sleep, until Aspirin and
barbiturates came along. It was demonized in the 1930s with "reefer
madness'' propaganda and in the 1960s when Haight-Ashbury was covered
in a stoned haze.

Today, thousands of patients from paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould to
your neighbor's grandmother have reported on pot's value in relieving
the nausea of chemotherapy or improving the appetite of an AIDS
patient. Many doctors still wait for scientific proof, the
double-blind studies that have become the gold standard of research.
But no such studies existed when penicillin or even Aspirin were
accepted.

The few studies available show mixed results. A recent survey in a
British medical journal reported that marijuana was no better than
other available drugs for severe pain and somewhat better for nausea.
But these were marijuana-based medications, not smoked marijuana. The
patients still preferred the marijuana medications by a large margin.

Marijuana, like most drugs, has side effects, although worrying about
the effects of smoking on the lungs of a terminally ill patient seems
a bit absurd. One of the other side effects is what medical
researchers label "euphoria,'' or in street parlance, a "high.'' But
as Leonard Glantz, a Boston University professor of health law asks,
"If someone is terminally ill, and they can eat and be euphoric, why
is that bad?''

Here we get to the heart of the matter: The drug war in which
marijuana has played a starring role with 700,000 arrests in 1998.
There is a fear that if grandma can smoke it legally for her health,
granddaughter will smoke it to get high.

"We're seeing America's war on drugs being taken to an extreme that
begins to make no sense,'' says Glantz. Politicians are so afraid of
appearing soft on drugs they can't draw any distinctions.

Compare this to morphine. We don't allow morphine on the street but
we permit it in the doctor's arsenal for the treatment of pain.
Imagine the uproar if we made morphine illegal. There is no logic in
treating marijuana differently.

The Canadian system has its own critics: doctors who worry about
being gatekeepers and marijuana activists who think there are still
too many hurdles. But we are in a marijuana muddle.

The feds aren't likely to crack down on the terminally ill, nor are
law enforcers eager to rip joints out of the hands of AIDS patients.
Asa Hutchinson, the Bush pick to head the Drug Enforcement
Administration, said prosecuting the medical marijuana dealers wasn't
"a priority.'' But meanwhile, patients are using drug dealers as
doctors. And a treatment for suffering is a crime.

Is that a whiff of sanity from across the border? Or just a contact high?