MEDICINAL HOPES FOR MARIJUANA IGNITE CONTROVERSY FOR WIDESPREAD USE

TORONTO (CP) - If there was one drug that relieved the nausea caused
by chemotherapy and AIDS-induced wasting as well as the symptoms of
glaucoma, arthritis, Tourette's syndrome, Crohn's disease, multiple
sclerosis, migraines, irritable bowel syndrome, PMS, asthma,
fibromyalgia, epilepsy, and some skin ailments, wouldn't you expect to
find it in every medicine cabinet?

Experts like Dr. Lester Grinspoon argue that there is such a medicine.
But instead of being lauded, it's illegal. The drug is marijuana.

Critics, like U.S. anti-drug czar Barry McCaffrey, are quick to
dispute claims that marijuana has a useful place in modern medicine.
They see cannabis as a "gateway" drug that leads to the use of
serious, addictive substances like cocaine and suggest it may
contribute to health problems such as infertility and cancer.

"There's not a shred of scientific evidence that marijuana is a useful
medicine," McCaffrey has said.

Dr. Mark Ware, an epidemiologist at McGill University Health Centre,
disagrees.

"This plant has been a good friend to the human race for a long time
and we've done it a great disservice over the last 70 and shut it out
of our systems," Ware argues.

While marijuana has been "the demon weed" and the cause of "reefer
madness" for most of our lifetimes, it wasn't always so.

People have used marijuana as medicine for thousands of years. In
fact, its first recorded medicinal use was in China in 2727 BC.

Cannabis was commonly used in the 19th century for treating symptoms
of what's now called PMS. Queen Victoria used it for premenstrual
symptoms and menstrual cramps.

"When pure and administered carefully it is one of the most valuable
medicines we possess," her doctor, J. R. Reynolds, wrote in 1890 in
The Lancet, the esteemed British medical journal.

So who's right? Over the next few years, Canadian researchers hope to
answer a lot of questions surrounding medicinal marijuana.

Health Canada is in the process of approving studies aimed at finding
out whether the anecdotal evidence people like Grinspoon - a doctor
and professor at Harvard medical school - have been collecting for
years has a basis in science.

But Eric Angst doesn't need government-approved studies to convince
him marijuana has a role in health care.

Angst, 56, suffers from fibromyalgia, a muscle disorder which causes
chronic fatigue and pain, as well as rheumatoid and osteoarthritis. He
can no longer take the painkillers and anti-inflammatory drugs (such
as ibuprofen) that are routine treatment for these conditions.

"My stomach, intestine, liver and kidneys all have damage from these
medications," explains Angst, who says his stomach starts to bleed
even if he takes an Aspirin.

So Angst smokes dope.

"Without cannabis, I am a cripple in my bed," the Saskatoon resident
says2E

"My wife has to help me out of bed, to help me to the can. Sometimes
she even has to clean up after me because my muscles will not allow me
to move that far.

"(After smoking marijuana) my muscles relax. The pain
decreases.

"I'm never out of pain. It's not a cure. But it does give me a quality
of life far beyond what pharmaceutical medications ever did and far
beyond what I can have without it."

Angst is among a number of people who have gone to court to force
Canadian authorities to decriminalize marijuana for medicinal uses.

Terry Parker, an epileptic from Toronto, won yet another battle in the
war last week when the Ontario Court of Appeal upheld a lower court
ruling that the federal ban on marijuana possession was
unconstitutional because it did not consider that some people use the
drug as a medicine.

Parker, 44, says marijuana virtually eliminates the up to 80 seizures
he used to suffer weekly.

Grinspoon has heard thousands of stories like Parker's and Angst's in
the more than 30 years since he started researching cannabis.

Now 72 and a professor emeritus, he set out in 1967 to write a paper
about the dangers of marijuana. He quickly became a convert - although
he did not try the drug personally until after Marihuana Reconsidered
was published in 1971 by Harvard University Press. (Marihuana is an
alternate spelling of the drug2E)

In the years since, Grinspoon has become a sort of marijuana guru.
With co- author James Bakalar, he published Marihuana - the Forbidden
Medicine. His Web sites (www.rxmarihuana.com and ww.marijuana-uses.com)
contain dozens of accounts from people who say that marijuana has
significantly relieved their suffering.

"I think it is not outrageous to consider that one of these days, when
our societies come to their senses about this, it will eventually be
considered a kind of a wonder medicine," he says in an interview from
Boston.

"It's going to be a wonder drug in terms of helping people to lower
the level of suffering that has to do with these diseases."

Proponents are quick to note that so far, there is no evidence that
marijuana has curative powers, although Ware notes that researchers in
Spain reported earlier this year that they were able to shrink brain
tumours in mice by injecting the masses with cannabis.

They see marijuana as a drug that improves quality of life in certain
cases, with few side-effects and virtually no risk of overdose.

"Mind you, that doesn't mean to say that I think cannabis is
completely harmless," Grinspoon cautions.

"There's no such thing as a harmless substance. But relative to the
harm of other medicines or indeed other recreational drugs, this drug
is in a class all by itself."

Those who swear by it use the drug to alleviate the symptoms of
diseases or the side-effects of medical treatments, such as the
vomiting that is often caused by chemotherapy. People with AIDS and
cancer often smoke the drug because it stimulates appetite and helps
to combat the dangerous weight reduction associated with both diseases.

Many in the palliative care field think marijuana may play a key role
in making dying patients more comfortable in their final days.

"Our guess is that it will not be a magic bullet but it may in fact .
. . improve the quality of life towards the end of life," says Allan
Best, a health services researcher at Vancouver General Hospital.

The use of cannabis might have a two-fold benefit, he suggests. In
addition to alleviating pain and nausea, it may reduce the need for
some other pain killers and analgesics that "typically have very
uncomfortable side-effects associated with them."

According to anecdotal evidence, it ameliorates conditions that
feature spasticity and tremors. People with multiple sclerosis and
Tourette's report that it helps them.

Although smoking is considered an irritant for asthma, some asthmatics
report that marijuana helps their condition. Why? Grinspoon says the
cannabinoids - the chemicals that make up cannabis - in marijuana
dilate the bronchial tubes that constrict during an asthma attack.

Cannabis has been reported to lower the eye pressure of glaucoma and
help stave off the crippling pain of an attack of Crohn's disease.
People who suffer bipolar disorder - often called manic depressives -
say it moderates their giddy highs and lifts their crushing lows.

'I learn of a new indication almost daily," says Ware, who calls the
range of the drug's potential use "absolutely stunning.

"I'm continually amazed at what the potential uses for cannabis
are."

How does one drug help with so many - and such different -
ailments?

No one is really sure.

Cannabis has been illegal for the last 70 years or so, which has
seriously limited research into its workings and potential
applications. There have been no double-blind studies, where some
subjects are given marijuana and others a placebo to test whether the
benefit is real or imagined.

What is known is humans have receptors that bind to cannabinoids,
which in turn have an impact on the central nervous system. In
addition, it has been discovered that we manufacture our own
cannabinoid, which the body uses in pain control, much like the
endorphins that are stimulated by exercise.

Our natural cannabinoid is called anandamine, based the Sanskrit word
ananda, which means bliss.

Proponents of medicinal marijuana believe the coming wave of new
research may completely change thinking about the drug, predicting
that it will follow the path from pariah to important tool that
morphine took several decades ago2E

"Prof. Patrick Wall, who's one of the world's greatest pain
researchers in London, told me that with cannabis, we are basically
where we were with morphine 20 to 30 years ago," Ware says.

"We're going through the same kinds of processes. You know: Are people
going to get addicted to it? What are the problems? What are the
risks? If we make it a medicine are we going to suddenly see a massive
increase in the number of people using it recreationally? Are we going
to get a nation of morphine addicts?

"It didn't happen. Morphine came, became registered, became a good
drug."