PATIENTS NEED MEDICAL MARIJUANA

WHILE the issue of medical marijuana is clearly subject to debate, your
March 9 editorial opposing its approval began from an inaccurate premise.
You quote Dr. John McDonnell of the Hawaii Medical Association explaining
how doctors who "prescribe" marijuana would risk losing their licenses, and
that the six states which have passed laws to permit medical use -- Alaska,
Arizona, California, Maine, Oregon and Washington -- have found that
doctors "will not prescribe marijuana."

This is a half-truth. With the exception of Arizona (where the law is
indeed not working), those states' laws use the term "recommend" or
"written documentation" for the paperwork, which the physician would supply
to a qualifying patient.

As in the Hawaii legislation, the term "prescribe" was avoided because
federal law does ban prescribing marijuana. States may pass drug laws that
differ from federal laws, and this is exactly what the West Coast states
and Maine have done.

When the federal government threatened physicians in California with loss
of their licenses after the passage of Proposition 215 in 1996, the 9th
U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals found that a doctor's right to recommend
cannabis to a patient was protected by the First Amendment.

While McDonnell and the Star-Bulletin speculate about what might happen if
our Legislature were to pass a bill, there are programs up and running in
several jurisdictions and it makes sense to examine their experience.
Oregon's program began in December 1998. Oregon has a registry system
housed with the Department of Health (as do Hawaii's proposed bills).

A March 10 report from Kelly Paige, director of the Medical Marijuana
Program there, says nearly 500 patients use the program and nearly 300
physicians participate -- from private and public settings including HMOs
like Kaiser. This is a far cry from Dr. McDonnell's dire prediction that
doctors will not become involved.

Naturally, any physician who doesn't want to recommend marijuana to his or
her patients need not do so, and is protected by Hawaii's proposed
measures. Patients would not have to "buy marijuana from street dealers"
under the pending bills, as McDonnell asserts. The Hawaii bills would
permit patients to cultivate their own limited supply. Again, this is
working well in Oregon, Alaska, Washington and elsewhere.

Your editorial speaks of how other drugs have been "thoroughly studied,"
but this is especially true of marijuana, which has received intense
scrutiny over the last 60 years. It is disingenuous to repeat the mantra
"more research is needed" when there are at least 70 modern peer-reviewed
studies of marijuana as medicine.

Finally, you conclude that "legalization for medical purposes would lead to
wider illegal use by people who don't need it to relieve pain." This
conjecture is contradicted by a survey conducted by the National Institute
on Drug Abuse (NIDA) in California and Arizona after those two states
passed their first initiatives.

Despite doing an extra large sampling designed to test this very theory,
NIDA found that the usage rate of marijuana among adolescents in those
states was actually lower than the national average.

THE bottom line is that patients in Hawaii are now using medical marijuana
to obtain relief from the effects of cancer chemotherapy, AIDS Wasting
Syndrome, multiple sclerosis and other serious conditions. Many others
would like to try marijuana to relieve their symptoms but fear arrest or
job loss.

Everywhere that medical marijuana has been put to a vote, it has passed. A
poll conducted last month by Oahu-based QMark found that 77 percent of
Hawaii voters support it, too. We should not be distracted by vague
predictions about what might happen, but instead look at the experiences of
our sister states.

We should encourage our legislators to follow the will of the people on
this compassionate issue and approve medical use of marijuana this session.