DC'S TROJAN HORSE INITIATIVE

The medical marijuana initiative on the District's Nov. 3 ballot embraces
bad medicine, would encourage drug use among teenagers and is a red herring
for legalizing marijuana. It should be rejected.

This proposal, known as Initiative 59, is more radical than pro-drug laws
passed by referendum in 1996 in California and Arizona. It would allow the
use of pot as medicine for almost any illness upon the oral or written
recommendation of a licensed physician from anywhere. Patients would be
permitted access to "sufficient" quantities of marijuana to sustain their
treatment and to appoint as many as four "best friend[s]" to act as
"caregiver[s]" to obtain pot for them.

While proponents of Initiative 59 say that sick people need marijuana as
medicine, effective and superior medicines are available for each condition
that pot allegedly alleviates. Synthetic THC, the main psychoactive
ingredient of marijuana, has been approved by the FDA as an anti-nausea
treatment for chemotherapy patients and as an appetite stimulant for
patients with AIDS. Unlike crude marijuana, however, synthetic THC is a
stable, well-defined, pure substance available in quantified dosage form.

Other legal drugs can enhance the appetites of AIDS patients and provide
relief for pain and muscle spasms and for glaucoma.

A 1997 poll conducted by the Family Research Council found that 55 percent
of Americans are less likely to support marijuana as medicine when they
learn that legal and superior therapies are available.

Meanwhile, government surveys show that marijuana use among adolescents is
skyrocketing. According to a Family Research Council's poll, most teenagers
believe that medical legalization would encourage drug use.

Since 1981, the District has had a medical pot law. The proposed law would
radically broaden the old statute to permit possession, use, cultivation and
distribution of marijuana and would legalize cannabis buyers' clubs.
Virginia's decades-old statute allows doctors to prescribe marijuana but
does not permit either its legal possession or cultivation. Maryland has no
medical pot law.

Drug use in the District is already high, but adding legal pot stores would
no doubt make our nation's capital a center for illicit drug users from the
mid-Atlantic region -- including teenagers and felons.

D.C. voters should listen to experience. In February 1997, 85 percent of
Arizona voters polled told the Community Anti-Drug Coalitions of America
that their successful drug legalizing proposition should be changed. They
felt deceived by a campaign that used misleading and heart-wrenching
anecdotes of seriously ill people to sell marijuana's alleged therapeutic
benefit.

It's time for leadership. Public health officials who stamped out Joe Camel
must now join hands with District parents to expose Initiative 59 for what
it really is: bad medicine and a Trojan horse for the legalization of
marijuana.

Checked-by: Don Beck