STIRRING THE POT

5 States Consider Marijuana Initiatives

“It’s better to make doctors and scientists decide what medicine to use
through the process of the FDA, than to have John Doe standing in a voting
booth decide.” - Leigh Leventhal, PDFA

The debate about marijuana as a gateway drug has shifted from classrooms to
ballot booths.

In school, smoking pot was condemned as the first step toward serious drug
addiction. Now, critics say ballot initiatives that would legalize medical
marijuana are a gateway between alternative therapy and the corruption of
national drug policy.

“What I would like to do is make the argument …,” said drug czar Barry
McCaffrey at a Washington press conference Tuesday, “that these initiatives
are simply not in accordance with good science, ignore the safety of the
American people and send a bad message.”

With allied law enforcers and health officials by his side, McCaffrey urged
voters to reject initiatives in Alaska, Nevada, Oregon, Washington state
and California that would make marijuana legal, to varying degrees, for
medicinal purposes.

Proponents say marijuana, specifically in smoked form, has a range of
valuable uses. Among the ailments pot is said to relieve are arthritis,
premenstrual syndrome, nausea from chemotherapy, and the extreme weight
loss associated with AIDS.

Are Voters Qualified?

But there’s no science to back up those claims, say drug policy officials,
and further, there’s no precedent for letting citizens decide for
themselves which drugs should be approved for public use.

“What we are saying is that we question whether this is the best way to
make a law,” says Leigh Leventhal, a spokeswoman for the Partnership for a
Drug Free America. “Medical marijuana is a medical issue and we feel that
this is really best left to the medical community to decide.

“It’s better to make doctors and scientists decide what medicine to use
through the process of the FDA [Federal Drug Administration], than to have
John Doe standing in a voting booth decide,” she says. “The way we make
medicine in this country is tried and true, and they have to go through
those rigors.”

But proponents of medical marijuana say they are resorting to ballot
initiatives only because the government, unwilling to conduct new studies
or honor old ones, has left them no other choice.

“There are two tracks going on this right now,” says Allen St. Pierre, the
executive director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana
Laws [NORML]. “One is the NIH [National Institutes of Health] study, and
all it’s doing is placating us by going back and reviewing all of the ’60s
’70s and ’80s studies.”

“The other is the Donald Abrams study, a $1 million study to look at AIDS
patients that would have cost $50,000 in 1991.”

The initial question in the Abrams study, St. Pierre says, was to see if
marijuana helped patients gain weight.

“But after six years as a bureaucratic study, now it asks ‘Does marijuana
impact the immune systems of AIDS patients?’ So one is a non-study, and one
is a study with big, fat asterisks,” St. Pierre says.

To Inhale or Not to Inhale

McCaffrey and other critics denounce marijuana proponents’ assertions that
it’s relatively safe. They point to NIH research showing that side effects
of marijuana use include lung damage, rapid heart beat, loss of
coordination, and impaired short-term memory. And the verdict, the
researchers say, is still out on its damage to long-term memory.

Foes of marijuana smoking also say a variety of already approved drugs with
well-known side effects—including the orally administered form of
marijuana’s active ingredient, THC—that can serve patients better.

Dr. Lester Grinspoon, associate professor of psychiatry at the Harvard
Medical School and author of several pro-marijuana books, counters that the
drug is safe. He says evidence, even if it is anecdotal, proves it.

“This drug is among the least toxic substances we know of,” says Grinspoon.
“When I as a physician write a prescription, I do a risk-benefit analysis.
Is the disorder that you’re suffering enough that I know I should give you
a medicine with side effects?

Nearly all medicines, even common ones like ibuprofen and aspirin, have
side effects that cause thousands of deaths annually, Grinspoon says.

“And yet these are considered over-the-counter drugs. Now you tell me about
[marijuana], which has never killed anybody, and yet you can go to jail if
you get caught with it.”

Mixed Messages

But McCaffrey warns legalizing even controlled amounts of marijuana for
specific usage sends a bad message to the American public, especially to
children.

“People ask me what the most dangerous drug in America is, and I would
argue unequivocally, it’s poly-drug abuse, alcohol and marijuana combined
by American adolescents,” he says. “Because we know that young people
between the ages of 9 and 18 that are involved in a lot of pot smoking and
alcohol consumption have enormously increased statistical risks of ending
up as compulsive drug users as adults.”

To combat this, the government has spent millions of dollars on campaigns
that tell kids to “Just Say No;” that a brain on drugs resembles a fried
egg, or a destroyed kitchen.

Now, in five states, the question is: If a pocket of states sanctions
marijuana’s medicinal use, will it undermine the nation’s efforts to combat
illicit drug use? Polls show voters in four of those states seem poised to
say yes. The final answer will come on Election Day.

Checked-by: Richard Lake