FEDERAL PANEL RECOMMENDS SCIENTIFIC TRIALS OF MEDICAL MARIJUANA

WASHINGTON - The active ingredients in marijuana can help fight pain
and nausea and thus deserve to be tested in scientific trials, a
federal advisory panel said today in a report sure to reignite the
debate over whether marijuana is a helpful or a 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 state have approved measures
in support of medical marijuana, even though critics say such measures
send the wrong message to children.

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

Asked by the White House drug-policy office to examine the issue, 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 who are undergoing chemotherapy and people with
AIDS.

But the panel warned that smoking marijuana can cause respiratory
disease and called for the development of standardized forms of the
drugs, 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," said Stanley Watson of the
Mental Health Research Institute at the University of Michigan, one of
the study's principal investigators.

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

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

One patient called the findings long overdue.

"It's taken a long time, but I feel like now, people will stand up and
listen," said 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.

"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," said Rosenfeld.

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

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.

But the report concludes that most drug users began with tobacco and
alcohol while they were under age, and it said there is "no conclusive
evidence that the drug effects of marijuana are causally linked to
subsequent abuse of other illicit drugs."