SCIENTIFIC REPORT SAYS MARIJUANA MAY BE MEDICALLY USEFUL

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The active ingredients in marijuana can help fight
pain and nausea and thus deserves to be tested in scientific trials, a
federal advisory panel said in a report sure to reignite the debate
over whether marijuana is a helpful or harmful drug.

The Institute of Medicine also said there was no conclusive evidence
that marijuana use leads to harder drugs.

In the past few years, voters in Alaska, Arizona, California,
Colorado, Nevada, Oregon and Washington have approved measures in
support of the medical marijuana, even through critics believe such
measures send the wrong message to youth.

Congress has taken a hard line on the issue, with the House last fall
adopting by 310-93 vote a resolution that said marijuana is a
dangerous and addictive drug and should not be legalized for medical
use.

Asked to examine the issue by the White House drug policy office, the
institute,which is an affiliate of the National Academy of Sciences,
said that because the chemicals in marijuana ease anxiety, stimulate
the appetite, ease pain and reduce nausea and vomiting, they can be
helpful for people with AIDS.

The panel warned, through, that smoking marijuana can cause
respiratory disease and called for the development of standardized
forms of the drug, called cannabinoids, that can be taken, for
example, by inhaler.

"Marijuana has potential as medicine, but it is undermined by the fact
that patients must inhale harmful smoke," Stanley Watson of the Mental
Health Research Institute at the University of Michigan, one of the
study's principal investigators said.

Even so, the panel said, there may be cases where patients could in
the meantime get relief from smoked marihuana, especially since it
might take years to develop an inhaler.

The White House Office of National Drug Control Policy said it would
carefully study the recommendations.

"We note in the report's conclusion that the future of cannabinoid
drugs lies not in smoking marijuana, but in chemically defined drugs"
delivered by other means, the office headed by retired General Barry
McCaffrey said in a statement.

One patient called the findings long overdue.

"It's taken a long time, but I feel like now, people will stand up and
listen," Irvin Rosenfeld, a Boca Raton, Fla., stockbroker who has
smoked marijuana supplied by the federal government for 27 years
because of a rare medical condition said.

"When you have a devastating disease, all you care about is getting
the right medicine ... and not having to worry about being made a
criminal," Rosenfeld said. He suffers from tumors that press into the
muscles at the end of long bones. The marijuana relaxes those muscles,
keeping them from being torn by the tumors and allowing him to move
with less pain.

Rosenfeld is one of just eight people in the country receiving
marijuana from the government because of unusual diseases.

The panel urged clinical trials to determine the usefulness of
marijuana in treating muscle spasms.

While it has also been promoted as a treatment for glaucoma, the panel
said smoking marijuana only temporarily reduces some of the eye
pressure associated with that disease.

Daniel Zingale of AIDS Action said he is "pleased that the study
validates the benefits of medical marijuana."

Chuck Thomas of the Marijuana Policy Project said the report "shoots
down" claims that marijuana has no medical benefits.

Opponents of allowing medical use of marijuana long have claimed that
it is a "gateway" drug, giving people a start on the road to more
dangerous drugs such as heroin and cocaine.

The report concludes there is "no conclusive evidence that the drug
effects of marijuana are casually linked to subsequent abuse of other
illicit drugs."

In fact, the report concludes, most drug users did not begin with
marijuana but rather started by using tobacco and alcohol while they
were underage.

The New England Journal of Medicine has editorialized in favor of
medical marijuana and the American Medical Association has urged the
National Institutes of Health to support more research on the subject.

An expert panel formed by NIH found in 1997 that existing research
showed some patients could be helped by the drug, principally to
relieve nausea after cancer chemotherapy or to increase AIDS patients'
appetites. The drug also has helped some patients control glaucoma,
that panel found.