STUDY GIVES CREDENCE TO MEDICAL 'POT' USE

Twenty-one years ago, New Mexico became the first state to initiate a
pilot program that ultimately concluded what a federal study stated
only this past week: Marijuana can relieve suffering for some ill or
terminally ill patients, and that legalizing it for medicinal use
would not lead to widespread abuse.

U.S. drug policy director Barry McCaffrey hailed this week's National
Academy of Sciences' Institute of Medicine report as "the most
comprehensive analysis of medical marijuana ever done" and supported
its conclusions -- a significant endorsement considering McCaffrey had
commissioned the study to support opposition to medical marijuana
initiatives in California, Alaska, Arizona, Nevada, Oregon and Washington.

This study, and McCaffrey's turnaround, should give Congress the
scientific and political backing it needs to finally eliminate federal
restrictions on states that allow medical marijuana use.

Though it has been without such a program for 13 years, New Mexico
became the first such state in February 1978, with a farsighted,
compassionate law creating a research program; in it patients could
use marijuana to ease eye pressure in glaucoma cases and the nausea
and vomiting associated with chemotherapy in cancer treatment.

The program was named after Lynn Pierson, a 26-year-old University of
New Mexico business student and chemotherapy patient who had
persistently prodded the Legislature for just such a bill, pointing up
the absurdity of having to buy the drug illegally on the street for a
non-recreational medical need. Pierson was the first person approved
for the rigidly controlled program, but died without receiving any
legal marijuana.

By January 1979, the federal government endorsed New Mexico's program
and even supplied the drug -- in government-cultivated cigarette form
and in tablets containing a synthetic equivalent of marijuana's active
ingredient, tetrahydrocannibinol, or THC. A synthetic form of the
drug, marketed under the trade name Marinol, is still used in some
cases today.

This week's federal findings are strikingly similar to New Mexico's
pioneering results. In 1984, after 5 1/2 years of treatments, the
program's director reported that 75 percent of about 200 New Mexico
patients -- ranging in age from 12 to 78 -- received benefit; in some
cases its use extended the lives of patients who might have opted out
of chemotherapy because of its devastating effects. One patient
suffered from vomiting up to three weeks after each chemo session, but
had her first good night's sleep in months after two days of marijuana
use.

This week's report adds AIDS-induced weight loss patients to the list
of those who could benefit. Like UNM's findings, it also says benefits
are sometimes balanced by disorientation and other unpleasant
psychological effects, particularly with older patients.

The new research says users can become dependent on marijuana, but
less so than for cocaine, opiates or nicotine, and that subsequent
abuse of the drug is unlikely. This reinforces UNM's findings that
patients may actually develop an aversion to marijuana because of its
association with nausea and vomiting.

New Mexico's program received high marks from researchers around the
country, and 32 other states followed its lead, but in June 1986, the
$50,000 program fell victim to budget cuts and never was revived. Its
demise was laid to its fragile political standing, shaky in part
because the federal government continued to view marijuana as
contraband, only allowing its use in medical research.

Congress should change this view -- and now has the scientific backing
to endorse a bill by Rep. Barney Frank. D-Mass., to reclassify
marijuana as a Schedule II drug. This change acknowledges a legitimate
medical use, allowing doctors to prescribe it under tightly-controlled
conditions, just as they can prescribe cocaine, morphine and other
drugs with high potential for abuse. Schedule II prescriptions are
subject to both federal and state review.

With congressional endorsement, pharmaceutical companies would be free
to develop safer alternatives to smoking, such as inhalers, patches
and suppositories, and give thousands of patients long-overdue -- and
legal -- relief.