JUST AN EXCUSE FOR PEDDLING POT

He asked me if I could get him some marijuana. Me? Marijuana? I was a child
of the 1940s. We didn't know anything about marijuana. All we did was suck
up chocolate shakes at the Pik-a-Rib and listen to Glenn Miller play
Moonlight Serenade on the radio. The Three Ps (passion, protest and pot)
didn't come into play until the 1960s.

But my friend was dying from liver cancer. He had heard marijuana might
give him some relief from his chemotherapy discomfort. We had been friends
for many years. He gave me my first job in radio, and so I told him I would
see what I could do.

A guy in the newsroom, our "Peck's Bad Boy" at the time, said he would get
me some of the good stuff for $20 and deliver it the next day to us at the
Golden Ox restaurant where my friend and I had lunch every week or so.

The Ox was a hangout for upper echelon city officials, of which my friend
was one. On that particular day, many of them were also lunching at the Ox
and joined us at our table.

I had assumed my newsroom pal would discreetly slip me an envelope of the
stuff and leave. No. What he did was dump the marijuana out on the table
and instruct us on how to comb out the seeds and how to roll the joint in
cigarette paper.

I looked around the table, and these high city officials were looking
around the room at everything but the pot. Their faces were ashen. They
flat out didn't know what to do. Neither did I, so I just sat there,
feeling the eyes of everyone in the room.

Finally, the city brass got up and left after excusing themselves, leaving
my friend and me with a pile of pot in the middle of the table and everyone
else in the room staring at us.

The next time we met I asked him whether the marijuana had given him some
relief from his pain. "No," he said, "It didn't help me at all. I am for
anything that works, but marijuana didn't work for me."

All this came up because of a ballot initiative that would legalize the
sale of marijuana for medical use. I asked my doctor about it, and she said
there is no precise way of measuring it. "And besides," she said, "the same
stuff is now available in prescription medication."

I think the ballot proposal is just a backdoor way of peddling pot. If
folks want marijuana for recreational use, let's vote on that, not just
disguising it as medically approved.

Physicians are wary of prescribing marijuana because smoking it may put
patients at a greater risk of lung cancer than smoking tobacco. A study at
the University of California indicates that smoking just three joints is as
dangerous as smoking a whole pack of unfiltered cigarettes.

The tetrahydrocannibnol (THC) in marijuana that makes smokers high also
promotes the growth of tumors and reduces the body's ability to fight off
infection through its immune suppressors. There is a lot more tar in
marijuana smoke than there is in tobacco smoke.

If that isn't enough to scare the daylights out of you, a person's risk of
a heart attack is five times greater in the first hour after smoking just
one marijuana cigarette.

Gene Amole's column appears Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday.
( gamole@aol.com)