CAN WEEDS AND BARK BE BETTER THAN DRUGS?

Quite a distinguished company of cops and prosecutors and politicians and
drug company representatives gathered in Eugene last week to bemoan the
possibility that Oregon voters might decide that pot is all right for people
wasting away from cancer, AIDS and other evil ailments.

They did not challenge the evidence that marijuana smoke stimulates the
appetite in people with wasting syndrome. U.S. Sens. Ron Wyden and Gordon
Smith and a spokesman for a firm that distills one essence of pot into
expensive little Marinol pills argued that people should not be allowed to
smoke or ingest or inject anything not produced by government-regulated
industries.

Lonnie Bristow, former president of the American Medical Association and now
a consultant for Roxane, which makes Marinol, said efforts to allow
medicinal uses of pot are akin to a doctor telling a patient to chew on tree
bark to cure a disease. "We used to do that 100 years ago," Bristow said.

By delectable coincidence, the Journal of the American Medical Association
was just then on the street with a Toronto study showing that bad reactions
to prescription and over-the-counter medicines kill 100,000 Americans a year
and seriously injure 2.1 million. Not counting prescribing errors or drug
abuse, bad medicine is the sixth leading cause of death. Among people taking
legal drugs under medical supervision, 6.7 percent have serious reactions
and 0.32 percent die. Add in the more than 300,000 deaths usually attributed
to the smoking drug that the government does permit, tax and regulate, and
the tally gets pretty grim.

Killer street dope, the threat of which constitutes the leading argument
behind the war on drugs, accounted for fewer than 10,000 deaths in the same
year; that includes 4,000 heroin junkies who overdosed. Amid all the hooraw
about what terrible things medical use of marijuana might do to the fabric
of society was not a single account of any death attributable to smoking pot
to reduce nausea or chewing on willow bark to ease a headache. Stomach
bleeding from frequent doses of aspirin, a concoction expensively derived
from willow bark, is among the more pervasive effects of store-bought,
regulated drugs.