EDITORIAL: MEDICINAL MARIJUANA

The Issue: Marijuana not without medical benefits.

Our View: Scientific report makes clear the dangers of marijuana.

Marijuana has its advocates, people who want it to be legalized generally.
Some clearly think that permitting the drug’s medical use would advance this
cause, and they have said as much. They may be rejoicing, then, over a
scientific panel’s recent report saying the active ingredients in marijuana
can whet the appetite, reduce pain and counteract nausea.

This report, however, is scarcely a paean to pot.

It is true, as the advocates are sure to stress, that the report does not
conclude that patients treated with marijuana will graduate from limited
puffs in a hospital to buying wholesale quantities in the streets or maybe
mainlining heroin. Nor does the report do what the nation’s drug czar, Barry
McCaffrey, presumably hoped it would do when he commissioned it. It does not
say marijuana is without any medical benefits at all.

What the report does stress, though, is that marijuana smoke is toxic, worse
than the smoke from cigarettes — a deadly threat to the lungs. Meanwhile, it
says, the benefits of smoking marijuana are modest and can be obtained by
most patients through other treatments. The most likely candidates for
marijuana treatment, according to the report, are those who need fear no
long-term consequences, such as the terminally ill.

Even then, the treatments would not be justified, unless they were studied
to gain still more information about the drug, the authors of the report
believe. Any medical use of marijuana beyond these recommendations, the
report says, should await the development of such risk-free delivery
mechanisms as inhalers.

If Congress modified federal law in accord with the report’s advice — and
that’s deemed unlikely — the legal doors would scarcely be flung wide open
for the medical use of marijuana.

In the seven states that have already approved prescribed use for health
reasons, doctors would still have to worry about federal prosecution if they
did not heed the tight guidelines.

Much less does the report lend credence to those who insist the only reason
marijuana is not generally legalized is an irrational misapprehension of its
effects. As this report makes clear, marijuana is dangerous.