MEDICINAL POT A HEATED DEBATE

July 16, 2000 - Ror Poliac could be the last man prosecuted in Colorado for
growing the marijuana he smokes to relieve pain.

The 43-year-old Poliac, who has multiple sclerosis, liked to smoke a little
at night, to help him sleep.

"I have spasticity in my legs. There are times when I can't even bend my
legs, and it's hard to get into bed," he said.

That illegal habit could cost him two to six years in jail, but Poliac
doesn't think that's going to happen. He just can't imagine a jury looking
at him, in his wheelchair, with his colostomy bag, and deciding he should
be in jail.

This November, Colorado voters will get a chance to decide whether people
like Poliac, who smoke marijuana for what they say are medical reasons,
should indeed be prosecuted. Voters will be asked to decide whether to
change the state's constitution to allow medical use of marijuana.

Proponents say the change makes sense, that marijuana is less dangerous,
less addictive than other drugs, like morphine, that doctors prescribe legally.

But opponents say there is a big difference - that people like Poliac still
couldn't get a prescription, precisely filled out by a pharmacist. Instead,
they'd still have to grow their own or buy off the street uncertain doses
of an unproven, potentially dangerous drug.

Making a statement

In Poliac's case, the Arapahoe County district attorney's office offered to
bump the charges down to a misdemeanor - if Poliac agreed to stop using
marijuana for the length of his probation.

But Poliac said he can't do that. Besides, he and his attorney, Warren
Edson, want a trial. They want to make a statement about Colorado's
marijuana laws. And until the trial was delayed this month, they were
hoping to make that statement in time to sway voters.

Proponents tried to get the medical marijuana measure passed in 1998, but
thenSecretary of State Vikki Buckley said they had not gathered the
required 54,242 signatures. As the legal wrangling dragged on, the question
remained on the ballot, but the results were not tallied.

Even without the outcome of Poliac's trial to digest, voters will hear
plenty of messages this fall, some factual, many just designed to tug at
their heartstrings or play on their fears.

Like the pitched battles over abortion or gay rights, the war over medical
marijuana is often waged on an emotional front.

On one side is the baggage of marijuana - the popular drug of the
counterculture, a symbol of rule-breaking, of listless hippies and VW vans.

Pitted against that are the images of hairless chemotherapy patients,
skeletal AIDS patients, and people like Poliac.

Cancer patients say marijuana relieves the roiling nausea brought on by
chemotherapy. MS patients say it relieves their pain. And AIDS patients
claim it gives them back an appetite.

There is already a legal, pill form of marijuana that patients can get with
a prescription.

So why do initiative proponents insist that only smoked marijuana will do?

"We want to give Colorado patients an additional treatment option," said
Luther Symons of Ridder Braden public relations agency, which is heading
the campaign this time around. "I don't want to see people become criminals
trying to treat an illness."

Chemotherapy patients say they have trouble keeping the Marinol pills down.
And Poliac, who takes 10 to 15 pills a day, said he doesn't want to swallow
another one.

The issue has drawn the attention of nearly all the nation's medical
heavyweights. The Colorado Medical Society, the American Cancer Society and
the American Medical Association are opposed. This month, conservative
scion William F. Buckley Jr. sounded a pro-medical marijuana note lamenting
the death of a friend.

Literature distributed by Coloradans Against Legalizing Marijuana, or CALM,
hits the family-values hot button, describing the initiative as "bad for
families," and the organization's spokesman, Dr. Joel Karlin, a past
president of the Colorado Medical Society, calls it "the wrong message to
send to our children." To which Chuck Thomas, of the Washington-based
Marijuana Policy Project, fires back with his own charged rhetoric:

"Someone with late-stage AIDS who weighs 85 pounds and is covered with
Karposi's (purple skin lesions) is not something to make marijuana
glamorous to use."

Regardless of what a state's voters say about medical marijuana, federal
law still trumps state law. And federal law says marijuana is illegal, period.

In 1998, the U.S. Justice Department reminded California of that when it
won a court order shutting down most of the state's cannabis clubs.

Those who oppose Colorado's initiative raise the specter of medical
marijuana unleashing a wave of efforts to legalize drugs from non-medical
marijuana to heroin.

"This has been a campaign which has marched from state to state financed by
wealthy out-of-state individuals whose purpose has been to legalize drugs,"
Karlin said.

In Colorado, as in other states, much of the money backing the initiative
comes from a California-based group called Americans for Medical Rights.
That group has been linked to financier George Soros, an outspoken critic
of the so-called war on drugs.

Far from being a grassroots populist movement, initiatives are big-money
endeavors that "really circumvent the democratic process," Karlin said. And
the resulting constitutional amendment is far more difficult to amend or
get rid of if it doesn't work out, he said.

"I have yet to have a person give to me a good, valid reason why this
should become law," Karlin said.

If the initiative is passed in Colorado, patients will have to grow their
own marijuana, or buy it from dealers.

With this delivery system, "the potency of marijuana varies greatly from
one batch to another, so you don't really know what you're getting," or how
much to use, Karlin said.

And the initiative would let marijuana skip the usual, exacting process
through which the Food and Drug Administration tests, and then tests some
more, prescription and over-the-counter drugs, he said.

Proponents, meanwhile, ask why doctors can legally prescribe for their
patients drugs far more potentially addictive and toxic than marijuana -
morphine, cocaine derivatives - without anyone warning about possible
addiction or those drugs' influence on children.

And backers of medical marijuana say hundreds of years of therapeutic
cannabis use have left a library of unofficial research.

In the United States, marijuana was not classified as a narcotic, off
limits to everyone including doctors, until 1937.

Then, in the '70s, the federal government legalized some medical marijuana
use, sort of.

The government created the "compassionate use" program, which allowed some
glaucoma, cancer and other chronically ill patients to apply to receive
marijuana grown by farmers at the University of Mississippi.

Then in 1992, faced with a flood of AIDS applicants, the Bush
administration decided those already enrolled could continue getting their
marijuana, but nobody else could sign up. The Clinton administration has
continued that policy.

There are eight patients in the United States who get government-grown
marijuana to use for medical conditions.

The current move to legalize medical marijuana grew out of the discovery by
AIDS patients that the same dope-smoking known for inducing insatiable
munchies gave them back some of their lost appetite. Marijuana became a
weapon to fight what doctors had begun calling wasting syndrome that left
them hollow-eyed and emaciated.

Researchers are working on a patch, like the one used to help the
nicotine-addicted quit smoking, and a method of inhaling marijuana that
would eliminate the toxicity of smoking it.

Colorado voters won't have the luxury of waiting for either device to be
perfected. So CALM and Coloradans for Medical Choice are busy gearing up
for a vigorous campaign.

Proponents have history on their side. No state's voters have nixed a
medical marijuana initiative. And a March 1999 nationwide Gallup poll found
that when asked whether they would vote for or against a measure to make
marijuana legal when used to "reduce pain or suffering," 73 percent said
they would vote in favor, 25 percent would vote against, and 2 percent had
no opinion.

In 1998, Denver pollster Floyd Ciruli found just slightly less lopsided
support among Coloradans.

That's one reason, Poliac said, that he's not too worried about going to jail.

"I just can't see my fellow Colorado people wanting to give me trouble
about this," he said.