MARIJUANA RX?

Oct. 25 - The first gifts arrived during Darla Whitney's darkest hour
- - when the chemotherapy left her so sick, she was praying to God for a
fatal heart attack.

The tiny packages came from friends at work, handed to her husband,
Scott, as he headed home to his cancer-stricken wife. They were
wrapped in pretty paper. They had "Get well Darla" notes.

They were stuffed with marijuana.

"I never solicited it. I never asked for it. But I smoked it. And in
maybe 15 minutes, I started feeling OK," says Whitney, 43 and the very
picture of a suburban mom, with a house in Highlands Ranch and son who
was a national debating champ.

"It let me eat. It took my mind off my ordeal. It relaxed me enough to
let my chemotherapy do its job."

A cancer-fighting ritual was born. On Thursday afternoons, two hours
after a chemo drip left her throat sore, her ears ringing and her
stomach queasy, Whitney would sit in her home, light a joint and
inhale some of that gift-wrapped grass.

Over the summer, her frail body slowly rallied. But in beating breast
cancer she says she was forced to break the law.

"If we can help ourselves by taking marijuana to feel good and to quit
throwing up, then why not?" Whitney says. "Then we might get cured."

She has since lent her voice to a fast-growing movement, one that
wants to legalize marijuana for medical use in Colorado.

Led by another cancer survivor, Martin Chilcutt, and fueled by
California cash, a group called Coloradans for Medical Rights pushed
pot onto the Nov. 3 ballot with Amendment 19.

Ultimately, Secretary of State Vikki Buckley ruled that backers hadn't
collected enough valid signatures. As this story went to press last
week, the measure remained on the ballot but any votes it garners
won't count.

Yet the fight for medical marijuana will roll on, Chilcutt vows. Ill
people will continue to smoke it. An underground network of Colorado
growers will continue to supply it to patients. And some doctors will
continue to quietly suggest it - legal or not.

"We need to stop making criminals out of sick people," says Chilcutt,
a soft-spoken Korean War veteran who smoked marijuana while undergoing
treatments for prostate cancer four years ago. "There are patients who
are using it in their fights to stay alive, to survive.

"I will start over next year, and we will have it back on the ballot .
. . (Our opponents) have lost their war on drugs and they've begun a
war on patients. They think sick people are vulnerable. Well, I'm
strong and some of the patients are strong and we're going to win."

Marijuana's key ingredient, THC, already is prescribed in pill form
under the brand name Marinol. Some local doctors say the drug helps
block nausea and pump up sagging appetites as effectively as smokable
pot. But a number of patients who have tried Marinol complain that is
leaves them feeling "drugged" or "anxious."

Like few other hot-button issues, medical marijuana has jumped the
tracks of partisan politics, turning doctor against doctor and cop
against cop.

The American Academy of Family Physicians is for it. The American
Medical Association is against it. Denver City Councilman Ed Thomas, a
22-year police veteran, supports the use of marijuana for patients in
chronic pain. Arapahoe County Sheriff Pat Sullivan raised $18,000 to
defeat Amendment 19.

Some conservative Christians say it's a fine idea. That aligns them -
on this issue - with many gay activists. There's often no rhyme or
reason as to who backs medical marijuana, though Chilcutt says many
advocates have seen someone close ravaged by a terminal disease.

"I have lost four really close friends to cancer in the last five
years," says Chilcutt, who set up his spartan campaign headquarters in
a Capitol Hill mansion.

There, barren, white walls surround four desks, one copy machine, one
computer and a knee-high filing cabinet. Classical music plays in the
background as Chilcutt, a retired psychology professor, explains why
marijuana is good medicine.

First, he says, it helps people being treated for cancer or AIDS beat
back the nausea often triggered by their medicine. It also helps
people with AIDS put on weight by sparking their appetite. And it
eases the interocular pressure of glaucoma.

For people with epilepsy, it can help prevent seizures. For folks with
multiple sclerosis, it can quiet the spasticity in their muscles,
Chilcutt claims. Many of those assertions are based on testimonials
from real people in Amendment 19's own camp. Yet the same benefits
also were praised in a 1996 report by the American Public Health
Association, which has urged Congress to make marijuana a legal, ready
remedy.

"Marijuana has been used medicinally for centuries, and . . . cannabis
products were widely prescribed by physicians in the United States
until 1937," says the American Journal of Public Health. In that year
the Marijuana Tax Act outlawed the plant despite disagreement from the
American Medical Association.

Standing hard against the pro-pot pack are a cadre of local police
groups, the Colorado District Attorneys Council and the state board of
education, which charge that medical marijuana supporters are blowing
smoke.

"Nowhere in the modern history of medicine have we taken a weed and
burned it and inhaled it and called it a medicine," says Arapahoe
County Sheriff Sullivan. He heads an anti-Amendment 19 group called
CALM (Citizens Against Legalizing Marijuana), which sums up Chilcutt's
initiative as a "very bad idea."

"It sends the wrong message to our young people that marijuana is
helpful," Sullivan says.

Pot smoking among high school seniors is on the rise, according to the
National Institute on Drug Abuse. More than 50 percent of seniors say
they have tried it, compared with 33 percent in 1992.

Some experts have blamed, in part, the debate over medical marijuana,
complaining that the dialogue over its potential benefits may have
eroded the carefully crafted "Just Say No" campaign of the 1980s.

Even worse, marijuana "is not a harmless drug" because it contains
carcinogens, decreases memory and hurts the immune system, contends a
CALM brochure. And most important, Sullivan says, the stuff is illegal.

Marijuana is classified by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration as
a Schedule I controlled substance beside heroin and LSD. By placing it
in that group, the government deemed pot without therapeutic value and
unsafe for medical use.

One of Sullivan's political allies is the Colorado Medical Society,
which argues that any medical practice must be backed by solid,
reproducible research and not by the prevailing political winds.

Dr. Christopher Unrein, who practices geriatrics in Aurora and speaks
for the Colorado Medical Association, points out two crucial problems
with doctors who knowingly allow their patients to use pot. One,
physicians can never know how potent the marijuana might be. Two, they
can't give the patient any supervision or monitor the effects because
it is illegal.

"There's no one responsible to make sure it's the right thing and that
it's working," Unrein says.

But the real issue behind medical marijuana is politics, pure and
simple, argue Unrein and Sullivan. They claim that what Chilcutt and
his supporters secretly want is for pot to be permissible for anyone
in Colorado, that they are simply using medicine as a back door to
full legalization.

"It's a fantastic Fifth Avenue marketing tool - pull on the
heartstrings of the sick and dying," Sullivan says.

"If legalizing marijuana is the issue," Unrein adds, "don't cloak it
in medical purposes."

Just look at the wealthy people who paid for Amendment 19, say its
opponents.

According to campaign documents on file at the secretary of state's
office, Coloradans for Medical Rights received 99 percent of its
funding - $156,200 - from a group called Americans for Medical Rights,
based in Santa Monica, Calif.

Chilcutt identified the big money men in AMR as billionaire financier
George Soros, auto insurance magnate Peter Lewis and John Sperling,
president of the Apollo Group, a holding company that controls
for-profit universities and job-training centers.

Before the Colorado initiative, that trio pumped $1.2 million into a
similar California measure - Proposition 215. It passed in 1996 and
allowed Californians to grow and smoke pot for "any illness for which
marijuana provides relief," including chronic pain and arthritis. A
doctor's oral recommendation is required.

Over the past 20 years, 36 states have passed some form of legislation
recognizing marijuana's alleged medical value. And AMR's cash
continues to pay for ongoing state-level campaigns.

While Soros has said he does not support decriminalizing narcotics,
former Health, Education and Welfare Secretary Joseph Califano has
dubbed him the "Daddy Warbucks of drug legalization." Ethan Nadelmann,
who heads Soros' drug-policy institute, has been quoted as saying he
hopes to "legalize the personal possession of drugs by adult Americans."

Sperling, meanwhile, told Reader's Digest that he thinks physicians
should be able to prescribe heroin, LSD and all drugs.

But Chilcutt contends that his chief funders are concerned only with
bringing chronically sick people some compassion and relief through
pot.

"Some (of those financial backers) had cancer and illnesses in their
family and saw people use it first-hand," Chilcutt says.

Legalizing drugs "isn't part of my battle," Chilcutt adds. His
"narrowly worded" measure stopped cold at opening up marijuana for
medical purposes.

Had it been approved by Colorado voters, people with "debilitating
medical conditions" like cancer, glaucoma and AIDS could have asked
their doctors to authorize pot in their treatment.

Qualifying patients would have been allowed to possess up to 2 ounces
of marijuana or to cultivate six plants. They would have had to find
and buy the pot themselves. And they would have received a
confidential identification card from the state health department that
they could flash to police officers to avoid arrest.

"I've read it and signed a petition in favor of it, and I think it's
actually quite conservative," says Dr. Charles Steinberg, head of the
Beacon Clinic, Boulder's only HIV treatment center.

"It sets a lot of limits. It (was) not going to open marijuana sales
clubs in Downtown Denver like (similar measures) did in San Francisco
. . . Forgive me, but it seems to be a no-brainer."

A minority of Steinberg's AIDS patients have revealed to himthatthey
are using marijuana to put on weight or quell the queasiness that
often comes with the anti-HIV drugs known as protease cocktails.

"They're not getting necessarily stoned," Steinberg says. "The dose of
marijuana they require is pretty small, so they've learned how to do
that so they're not out of it."

With an array of similar success stories floating around, the National
Nurses Society on Addictions recently decided to endorse medical
marijuana. The 23-year-old group says it's time pot became a Schedule
II drug so physicians can prescribe it.

"If we have an opportunity to give a couple of hours of relief to
people with cancer, with AIDS, with MS or chronic pain, what's not to
like about that?" says Ed Thomas, perhaps medical marijuana's most
surprising supporter. Now a city councilman, Thomas spent 15 years as
a Denver street cop, busting people for pot possession and trying to
do his part to rid the city of drugs.

"It's a tough stance for a former policeman to take, but I think it's
just a fair, honest, open way to deal with somebody's pain," Thomas
says. "How about just a little decent compassion? . . . So when we
have some self-

righteous law-enforcement personnel who say, "By God, it's the law,'
go let them stand in front of the bed of a dying family member and let
them have the same position then."

Ror Poliac, 42, Arapahoe County

Twice now, Arapahoe County sheriff's deputies have stopped Ror Poliac
and found marijuana in his car.

Twice they have handed him back his pot and let him
go.

A way with words? Just plain lucky? No, Poliac carries a note from his
doctor for just such occasions.

Poliac, who has chronic, progressive multiple sclerosis, is a living
example of how a medical marijuana system might work in Colorado.

His physician, he says, recognizes how pot quiets the spasticity in
his leg muscles, boosts his appetite and helps him sleep through the
buzz of the 30 prescription pills he has to take daily. The doctor's
handwritten note indicates Poliac has his permission to smoke the marijuana.

But because marijuana remains illegal in Colorado, the officers still
could have busted Poliac for possession. For that reason, he doesn't
flaunt his unofficial pot prescription.

In fact, when he calls friends about buying marijuana, they use code
words over the phone lines - phrases like "I'm going to the green
house" or "Do you have any cans of green paint?" "It seems ludicrous
to have to go to that extent for my medication," says Poliac, 42.

For about 10 years, the MS has slowly stolen Poliac's ability to walk
on beaches, to dance and to hike. He now uses a wheelchair. As his
paralysis worsened, he found that a nightly dose of marijuana gave him
the energy he needed to fight the illness.

"Ten puffs and I'm fine," Poliac says. "They're always saying we shouldn't
cut down all the rain forests because maybe some tree has the cure for
cancer or AIDS . . . Well, this could be my plant in the Amazon. Who
knows?"

Jim Sargent, 43, Denver

Jim Sargent keeps two pints of liquid morphine on hand to quiet the
constant pain in his right side. It's enough to numb his entire
neighborhood.

He also keeps a tiny stash of marijuana near his bed. It's barely
enough to help him sleep.

Guess which drug could get Sargent arrested?

For more than three years, Sargent, 43, has been undergoing cancer
treatment. It was diagnosed as non-Hodgkins lymphoma, but the disease
spread to his liver.

A robust engineer who once managed an office for a Fortune 500
company, Sargent was thrown into a cycle of chemotherapy and steroids.
His wife quit her job to care for him.

Today, Sargent is past the chemo, and chances are he'll live a long
time. That doesn't mean getting through the day is easy. Red-hot pain
flares from his side, from the place doctors performed a biopsy in his
liver last year.

"It's like somebody took a claw hammer to me."

The prescriptionmorphine, he says, just isn't enough - even at 350
milligrams a day. It's the pot that gives Sargent the rest he needs.

"The biggest fight is to stay mentally stable enough to want to get up
the next day to do it again," Sargent says. "If there's something out
there that gives me that edge . . . nobody has the right to take that
away."

Before bed each night, Sargent puffs the marijuana from a pipe then
packs himself in pillows and tries not to move.

While his morphine supply can be refilled with a call to the doctor,
his illegal pile of pot is dwindling, and "the people I get it from"
just moved out of state, Sargent says. "Which means," Sargent adds,
"I'll have to increase my (prescription) drug doses, which I'm not
into doing. Morphine really affects me, it affects the way you think.

"I'm stretching (the marijuana) out. There's enough to last another
week and then I will be completely out. That has me a little concerned."

Darla Whitney, 43, Highlands Ranch

One of the loudest arguments against medical marijuana is that it
sends the wrong message to young people.

But Tim Whitney is one young guy who was glad to hear that his mom was
smoking pot - not because it gave him license to toke up, too, but
because it gave her a fighting chance.

"If it keeps you alive," Tim told her earlier this year, "do anything
it takes."

Darla Whitney, 43, was into her first rounds of chemotherapy last
February when friends began sending her unsolicited "little gifts" -
packages of marijuana.

The legal drug that she was taking to fight breast cancer left her
weak and queasy. A few puffs, she says, restored her appetite and
renewed her spunk. Whitney's doctor approved and then she got that
endorsement from her college-age son, a guy who doesn't drink or smoke.

"I had no fears whatsoever that he would think, 'Oh, Mom is smoking
marijuana so that means I can.'"

She finished chemotherapy in July. An exam 10 days ago found her to be
in good health with little chance of a recurrence. And while Whitney
isn't smoking marijuana now, she backed Amendment 19 which sought to
legalize medical marijuana.

"It needs to be available to anybody," says Whitney, a Highlands Ranch
resident. "Some of the women I had chemotherapy with were a lot older
and may not have had an opportunity like I did.

"They don't know who to ask. But they need to be able to get some
without feeling guilty to help them through this."

Checked-by: Patrick Henry