THE CHANCELLOR'S WIFE

E. Gordon Gee, 62, has been the chancellor of Vanderbilt University
in Nashville, Tennessee, since 2000. Vandy lured Gee away from the
top job at Brown, which had lured him away a few years earlier from
Ohio State. Gee is an awesome fundraiser who spends lavishly on his
own needs and wants. In an attempt to constrain his spending, some
trustees recently exposed his wife's medical marijuana use.

According to a page-one Wall St. Journal profile Sep. 26, "Vanderbilt
paid more than $6 million, never approved by the full board, to
renovate and enlarge Braeburn, the Greek-revival university-owned
mansion where Mr. Gee and his wife, Constance, live. The university
pays for the Gees' frequent parties and personal chef there. The
annual tab exceeds $700,000. Some trustees' concern was aroused when
they learned that Mrs. Gee was using marijuana at the mansion. The
chancellor told some trustees she was using it for an inner-ear ailment."

Constance Gee, 52, uses marijuana to treat Meniere's disease, an
inner-ear problem that causes vertigo, nausea, and hearing loss. She
discussed her situation frankly with writers who did a follow-up
piece for the Tennesseean Sept. 27. Implicitly questioning whether
Gee's use was really medical, they reported that Timothy Hullar of
Washington University School of Medicine ("one of two major centers
of study on Meniere's") said "he's never heard of anyone using
medical marijuana to treat symptoms of Meniere's." They quoted Hullar
saying "I can't imagine going to the extreme of marijuana."

California doctors routinely approve the use of cannabis by Meniere's
patients who say that it helps ease their symptoms. "Meniere's causes
dizziness, dizziness causes nausea, cannabis relieves nausea," says
David Bearman, MD. "I wouldn't be surprised if the symptoms caused
Mrs. Gee to be a little depressed and of course cannabis helps that, too."

Robert Sullivan, MD, corroborates: "I've issued many recommendations
for Meneire's, as well as tinnitus [ringing in the ears]. It works
well enough to make a significant improvement in patients' lives,
i.e., symptoms not gone but much abated so they can function and
carry on their daily activities, instead of sitting and suffering. It
also aids sleep."

R. Stephen Ellis, MD, of San Francsico, has given some thought to how
cannabis might help in the treatment of Meniere's. "Three possible
mechanisms come to mind," he says. "Number one, the anti-anxiety
effect of cannabis would be very useful to a Meniere's patient. These
people are anxious as can be when they hit the ER. When they get an
attack it's as if they are wired -that's why Ativan is one of the
treatments, to bring them down. Two would be the anti-nausea effect.
Duh! You're barfing and there's a drug that offers relief in 10
seconds. The third is slowing down the vertigo itself -the sensation
of spinning caused by the inner ear problem. My patients say cannabis
is as good as Antivert, which is the classic treatment, or Benadryl,
which is used in certain situations. I recall reading that the
auditory nerve does have CB1 receptors. I don't know about the
cochlear structure itself."

[Small world department: Dr. Ellis's grandfather graduated from the
old Vanderbilt Medical-Dental School. His grandparents' nine-acre
estate in Nashville is now owned by Crystal Gayle.]

Constance Gee once aspired to be a painter but instead became a
professor of "arts education." She is an independent thinker. Back in
Ohio, where the Gees married in 1995, Mrs. Gee opposed a
publicly-funded arena that Mr. Gee was campaigning for. In 2004,
after Bush's re-election, she lowered the flag outside the mansion to
half staff. Her husband quickly raised it. When Condoleezza Rice was
invited to campus last year, she signed a letter of protest.

According to the Wall St. Journal, Chancellor Gee was physically
trembling as trustees confronted him in his office with charges that
his wife was smoking marijuana at the mansion. The man is in a double
bind. He has seen first hand that cannabis really helps his wife cope
with the symptoms of Meniere's Disease. But he can't uphold her
rights -let alone encourage the faculty at the medical school to
pursue research in the field of cannabinoid therapeutics-because you
don't get to be a great fundraiser without the drug companies'
backing. Gee agreed to run his expenditures by an oversight
committee. Mrs. Gee has accepted a reprimand of some kind from the university.

Tennessee has no medical marijuana law, but Constance Gee is
protected by the American two-tier system of justice: the rich can
get away with what the poor do time for. If it were otherwise,
Prohibition would end immediately. But why should the elite get rid
of the drug laws when the drug laws barely apply to them (and never
in their full draconian viciousness)?

The danger in making an issue of unequal justice is that, in the name
of fairness, law enforcement will crack down on Mrs. Gee and others
of her class instead of lightening up on those "less privileged."
It's the old Shelly Mandel principle -demand uniform justice and
they'll impose uniform harshness. (In the early 1970s a young
clerical worker named Shelly Mandel sued to make Yom Kippur a paid
holiday for Jewish state, county and municipal employees in
California. Her lawyers argued that Catholics got paid when they took
off Good Friday, and Jewish employees deserved equal treatment.
Superior Court Judge Robert Bostick said he agreed with their premise
and ruled that henceforth Good Friday would not be a paid holiday.)

Righties Turn a New Leaf

John Tierney is a New York Times columnist who thinks that the war on
drugs is not in the best interests of the U.S. ruling class. The
defense of coca by Bolivian president Evo Morales at the United
Nations last week inspired Tierney to publish a forceful op-ed Sept.
23 calling for an end to U.S. interdiction efforts. Tierney describes
Morales as "ranting" (and he gratuitously disses Hugo Chavez, Noam
Chomsky, and Cuba) before making his cogent points.

The U.S. government, Tierney writes, has:

"sacrificed soldiers' lives and spent billions of dollars trying to
stop peasants from growing coca in the Andes and opium in Afghanistan
and other countries. But the crops have kept flourishing, and in
America the street price of cocaine and heroin has plummeted in the
past two decades...

"[Morales] denounced 'the colonization of the Andean peoples' by
imperialists intent on criminalizing coca. 'It has been demonstrated
that the coca leaf does no harm to human health,' he said, a
statement that's much closer to the truth than Washington's take on
these leaves. The white powder sold on the streets of America is
dangerous because it's such a concentrated form of cocaine, but just
about any substance can be perilous at a high enough dose.

"South Americans routinely drink coca tea and chew coca leaves. The
tiny amount of cocaine in the leaves is a mild stimulant and appetite
suppressant that isn't more frightening than coffee or colas - in
fact, it might be less addictive than caffeine, and on balance it
might even be good for you. When the World Health Organization asked
scientists to investigate coca in the 1990's, they said it didn't
seem to cause health problems and might yield health benefits.

"But American officials fought against the publication of the report
and against the loosening of restrictions on coca products, just as
they've resisted proposals to let Afghan farmers sell opium to
pharmaceutical companies instead of to narco-traffickers allied with
the Taliban. The American policy is to keep attacking the crops, even
if that impoverishes peasants - or, more typically, turns them into criminals."

Tierney acknowledges that Morales "is right to complain about
American imperialists criminalizing a substance that has been used
for centuries in the Andes. If gringos are abusing a product made
from coca leaves, that's a problem for America to deal with at home.
The most cost-effective way is through drug treatment programs, not
through futile efforts to cut off the supply.

"America makes plenty of things that are bad for foreigners' health -
fatty Big Macs, sugary Cokes, deadly Marlboros - but we'd never let
foreigners tell us what to make and not make. The Saudis can fight
alcoholism by forbidding the sale of Jack Daniels, but we'd think
they were crazy if they ordered us to eradicate fields of barley in
Tennessee. They'd be even crazier if they tried to wipe out every
field of barley in the world, but that's what our drug policy has come to."

Tierney ends as he began, insulting Morales:

"We think we can solve our cocaine problem by getting rid of coca
leaves, but all we're doing is empowering demagogues like Evo
Morales. Our drug warriors put him in power. Now he gets to perform
show and tell for the world."

U.S. drug warriors did not put Evo Morales in power, the people of
Bolivia did--mainly his fellow Indians.

The day before Tierney decried prohibition in the Times, Mary
Anastasia O'Grady, another capitalist cheerleader, did so in the Wall
St. Journal. She, too, takes shots at Hugo Chavez, she calls him "the
kook from Caracas." (It's embarassing to type her words.) O'Grady
writes that Morales "dreams of an indigenous collectivist Bolivian
economy." How can this nightmare be prevented? "One thing the U.S.
could do to weaken Evo is end insistence on coca eradication, which
while failing to reduce drug use has alienated peasants."

What goes unsaid as rightwing strategists question the wisdom of drug
eradication is that they no longer need it as their rationale for
military penetration of foreign countries -they have "terrorism."