DOCTORS WON'T BACK MARIJUANA AS MEDICINE

Despite an impassioned plea by a former president of the organization, the
Washington State Medical Association voted yesterday not to endorse a
ballot initiative that would legalize marijuana use by terminally ill and
chronically debilitated patients.

The association, which represents 8,000 physicians around the state, did go
on record to urge completion of studies of marijuana's effectiveness as a
medicine.

The association's annual meeting, which began Thursday in Bellevue,
adjourned yesterday.

The resolution supporting the initiative was sponsored by Dr. William
Robertson, who said this year's Initiative 692 is "far more limited" than
last year's initiative, which the association voted not to support.

The initiative has "stringent requirements" that would limit its use to a
small number of terminally ill and debilitated patients. Some patients
believe it helps them, said Robertson, a medical director of the Washington
Poison Center.

Some cancer and AIDS patients say smoking marijuana is the only thing that
helps quell their nausea, vomiting or lack of appetite. Although the active
ingredient in marijuana is available in pill form, some patients say they
vomit up the pill, that it takes too long to work or makes them high for
too long, or that the dose is not easily regulated.

Dr. Sandra Counts, who specializes in addictions and in chronic pain, urged
the group to send a message to Congress "to not treat a drug as a moral
thing."

"I don't see any difference, personally, between marijuana, Valium or
Percocet," she said. Plenty of patients abuse the last two, she said, and
yet those drugs are not made unavailable to everyone.

Dr. Peter Marsh, the organization's outgoing president, argued that no
scientific data shows marijuana is an effective treatment.

"We have no problem with saying we're in favor of any drug that shows
pharmacologic effectiveness," he told the group's study committee Friday.
"If there is good data and good evidence to support that smoked marijuana
does something that's not available with any other medication, we'd have no
problem endorsing this at all."

But, he added, "in actual fact, there is no data, to our knowledge at
least, that supports that - that there is an effective use of smoked
marijuana that cannot be achieved any other way."

Checked-by: Pat Dolan