FEDERAL OFFICIAL CRITICIZES MEDICAL MARIJUANA ISSUE

A medical marijuana ballot issue in South Dakota is being supported by
people who want to legalize drugs, a top federal drug official said
Friday.

John Walters, director of National Drug Control Policy in Washington,
said people who have been trying to legalize marijuana are exploiting
the suffering of genuinely sick people to further their political ends.

South Dakota would join 11 other states that allow some medical
patients to smoke marijuana to ease their pain and other medical
problems if voters approve Initiated Measure 4 on Tuesday.

Diseases and conditions that would be covered include: cancer,
glaucoma, HIV, AIDS, severe or chronic pain, severe nausea, seizures,
severe or persistent muscle spasms and multiple sclerosis. The state
Department of Health also could approve other medical conditions.

Valerie Hannah of Deerfield, who smokes marijuana to help ease chronic
pain, said Walters' comments are without merit and amount to
last-minute scare tactics.

"I'm one of those people who have been trying to get this drug
legalized for those sick people," said Hannah, who served in the
Persian Gulf War in the early 1990s and was exposed to chemical
weapons that are basically causing her nerves to dissolve.

She called marijuana "an innocuous and harmless weed" and that drug
officials' statements about the ballot issue have "just gotten really
silly."

In a release, Walters said the Food and Drug Administration, the
American Medical Association, the National Cancer Institute, the
American Cancer Society and the National Multiple Sclerosis Society do
not support the smoked form of marijuana as medicine.

Walters said there are more teenagers in treatment for marijuana
dependence than for all other illegal drugs combined. The Office of
National Drug Control Policy release did not provide figures on
teenage treatment.

"Marijuana is a much more harmful drug than many Americans realize,"
he said.

But Hannah said in the 11 states that have legalized the substance,
marijuana use among teens has gone down 15 percent to 45 percent,
depending on the state. She said that in Rhode Island, where the
Legislature approved medical marijuana, only one incident of abuse was
reported among 136 people who registered for the substance in a year.

That person was prosecuted, just as what would happen in South Dakota
if anything went wrong, she said.