MEDICAL MARIJUANA: THE SMOKE CLEARS

SO FAR, seven American states have voted in favour of it. In Britain,
clinical trials are about to begin, and in Canada they have just been
authorised. Now, the Institute of Medicine, in Washington, DC, has
issued its report on the matter. It concludes, to nobody's great
surprise--though in the most timid possible terms--that marijuana is a
legitimate medical drug. It recommends further research, which is
reasonable. But it cannot quite steel itself to concede that, in the
face of the evidence that it presents, American doctors ought now to
be given the right to prescribe the stuff as freely as they would any
other medicine.

The report, which was commissioned in January 1997 by the White House
Office of National Drug Control Policy, looked at the effects of
smoked marijuana on all the diseases for which some consensus exists
that it might be beneficial. In cases of chemotherapy-induced nausea
and vomiting in cancer patients, and the wasting that accompanies
AIDS, the authors--John Benson of Oregon Health Sciences University
and Stanley Watson of the University of Michigan--agreed that the drug
was effective, and might sometimes be better than existing treatments.
That was also true for its use in treating the muscle spasms that are
associated with multiple sclerosis.

The authors disagreed, however, with the notion that it helped
glaucoma patients. The relief of pressure on the eyeball that
marijuana brings was thought too short-term to be useful.

There was also little comfort for those who had hoped that marijuana
would help with Parkinson's disease and Huntington's chorea.

As to the risks associated with marijuana use, the only one thought to
be outside the bounds of those normally acceptable in a medicine was
the deleterious effect of the smoke itself (it is like tobacco smoke).
So Dr Benson and Dr Watson recommended developing other ways of
delivering marijuana's active ingredients, while accepting that drug
companies might not necessarily think it worth their while doing this.

Moving beyond strictly therapeutic matters, the report also noted that
there was no evidence to suggest marijuana was a "gateway" to
other, more dangerous recreational drugs.

Most hard-drug users had, indeed, tried it before they moved on to
other substances. But they had experimented with legal drugs--ie,
tobacco and alcohol--before that (though usually at illegal ages). If
any drugs are gateways, therefore, it is these.

Try selling that idea to the distillers and cigarette
companies.