AVOIDING THE OBSTACLES: STUDYING AIDS PATIENTS WHO USE THEIR OWN MARIJUANA

One researcher chose not to leap the many hurdles to using the
government's supply of marijuana to test the plant's medical benefits.

She decided to study people already smoking cannabis for medicinal
purposes, who had procured the drug from their own sources.

Kathleen Boyle, a social psychologist at the Drug Abuse Research
Center at the University of California at Los Angeles, is nearing
completion of a study of 125 AIDS patients who smoke marijuana legally
under California's Proposition 215, which exempts people from arrest
for use and cultivation of the plant if their doctors recommend it.
Many of the patients get their marijuana from the Los Angeles Cannabis
Resource Center, a nonprofit organization that provides marijuana and
support services to patients.

Ms. Boyle has conducted in-depth interviews, and follow-ups one year later,
with the patients. "The marijuana helps people not just to stay on their
regimen [of medicine], but to keep up with their lives," she says.

Though her study is not a placebo-controlled, clinical trial, the sine
qua non of medical research, she notes that it has more real-world
significance than one in which patients spend a month alone in a
hospital lab, as in Donald I. Abrams's clinical trial at the
University of California at San Francisco. "I think we need all kinds
of studies to be done," she says.

Because Ms. Boyle did not apply to use the federal supply of marijuana in her
trial, she experienced much less difficulty in getting her study financed and
under way. Her study is supported by the University of California's
Universitywide AIDS Research Program, which she says approved her
project quickly, taking about four months to review it.

The review board on her campus did raise questions. "U.C.L.A. was
concerned because [marijuana] is still considered a contraband
substance, so they wanted to make sure that the research subjects
would not be threatened at all," she says. "My background is research
with street drugs: crack cocaine or heroin. Marijuana didn't seem very
threatening to me."

Ms. Boyle knows of no other studies like hers. People to whom she talks
about it often "giggle and don't take it seriously when you tell them that
[patients] don't want to get stoned," she says. "The people who voted for
Proposition 215 and whoare in favor of it sometimes don't help medical
marijuana as a cause, because they trivialize it. They make it into a
holdover from the 60's. It is a serious medicine and should be thought
of as a medicine. Nobody snickers if you tell them you're taking a
Tylenol with codeine."