US Column: Marijuana for AIDS, up to a point

The big story on the drug front (nicely brought together by USA Today)
is that more states continue to schedule votes or plebiscites that
would permit the dispensation of marijuana for patients suffering from
ailments that, in the opinion of their doctors, are uniquely
ameliorated by marijuana. Five Western states allow medical
marijuana. Alaska joined their company last week, and Maine has
scheduled a ballot on the subject.

The subordinate story features Joanna McKee. Mrs. McKee, herself
crippled, has founded, in her home in Maine, what she calls the Green
Cross Patients Co-Op. Its modest purpose is to make marijuana available
to those who (as far as she can figure out) are authorized under state
law to have it. In the account of Patrick McMahon:

"Joanna McKee bustles around her den, handing out pharmacy bottles of
marijuana buds and leaves to visitors. They come and go, usually
taking away 7 to 10 grams - about a third of an ounce, enough to last
a week. Occasionally McKee will hand out small marijuana plants for
home cultivation."

But Mother Green does more merely than try to wiggle her compassionate
way through the dilemma: Should she flout the federal law or the
state law? The federal law says you can't give away or sell
marijuana; the state law says (under certain circumstances) you can.

She is presumably waiting to be arrested, in the fashion of Peter
McWilliams of Los Angeles. He is the conspicuous figure - author,
poet - who was jailed, then released on bond, most recently examined
by a federal judge, who ruled that McWilliams could not use marijuana
while out on bail pending a trial for distributing the weed and
helping to finance the growing of it.

McWilliams takes the position that he has been condemned to death,
given that his cancer and AIDS accelerate in the absence of the relief
he gets from cannabis.

The connection with MNother Green hits you in the face. The reporter
doing the story for USA Today summarized: "About 75 percent of the
Green Cross' patients are HIV-positive." That is an arresting datum.

A very important rule in life governs, or should govern , the
expostulations of critics. It is that you Mustn't accost the
misfortunate (a word that should exist) by saying I-told-you-so. But
this approach is necessarily tempered by circumstances.

We learn this from our attitude toward drunken drivers. There aren't
widespread calls for sympathy for people who drive while intoxicated -
DWI's can get rough treatment, and do; and their offense, in some
jurisdictions, gets very public notice: like a bumpersticker-type
notice on the rear window of their cars advising other motorists that
the person driving that car was once judged to have driven while
intoxicated.

But why isn't there commensurate pressure on those who engage in
practices that risk, or bring on, AIDS? There is nothing the Green
Cross patients who have AIDS can do, save search for means of
alleviating their pain and prolonging their lives. But their plight
could reasonably be hoped to generate pressure that would caution
dirty-needle users to avoid that risk, and homosexuals to avoid
dangerous practices.

And the other 25 percent of the marijuana users who go under doctors'

orders to Mother Green could be told to guard against a greater
affliction than whatever it is they now have that the doctor seeks to
assuage.

It was commentator Charles Krauthammer, if memory serves, who some
time ago confronted the search for a cure for AIDS with the
observation that we already know the cure for AIDS - namely abstention
from certain practices (not an alternative available to a fetus whose
mother suffers from AIDS). That sounds a little catechistic, rather
on the order of saying to an alcoholic: Simple, don't drink. The
special hideous drama of AIDS is that nature does not permit
retroactive abstinence; so that sufferers are left dependent on the
drug cocktails and, in the case of the Green Cross people, the relief
that marijuana is said to give.

Those who reject any analogy with drunken driving on the grounds that
drunken drivers run into innocent people must reflect that many people
who contract AIDS are putting their partner at risk and that that
partner, in many cases, is a woman and a wife. It is in no civilized
quarter advocated that treatment should be denied to AIDS sufferers.
Such treatment is being denied in Africa, for the one reason that
medical resources do not begin to equal the need for them. But
marijuana suppliers should do what can be done to focus attention on
what caused the suffering that they seek to alleviate.