DOPE NOT ANSWER FOR SPIRITUAL VOID

My last column expressed my doubt that marijuana had any useful properties,
and my name topped an e-mail hit list.

If in fact anything helpful can be extracted from this plant and
administered with the understanding that it's a palliative means to a
healing end, then we can go that far. No further.

The "Reefer Madness" Opinion page (Mar.2) overwhelmingly supported
recreational use, citing judges, commissions and the odd science periodical
to waft a halo of authority for their contention; judges, not
immunoligists, not chemists or geneaticists or pharmacologists; not
individual researchers subject to peer reviews, but thick legal works that
diffuse personal accountability. The empirically established health
hazards of marijuana use have again been ignored.

Dr. Gabriel Nahas pioneered experiments to determine the medical effects of
consistent marijuana use. In the early 1970s there was already a push for
decriminalization, but not much was known about what the drug did. Nahas,
a pharmacologist, grew uneasy with this situation and decided to begin
researching.

He would also chronicle the Columbia University lab work of Dr. Akira
Morishima, geneticist, and Dr. Nicole SuciuFocia, ummunologist, who showed
that white blood cells in pot smokers suffer genetic damage and reduced
replication. Marijuana was thus established aas an imlmunosuppress- ant.

With the use of radioactively "tagged" THC, Nobel Laureate Dr.Julius
Axelrod showed how the body stores it away. This was ground-breaking stuff,
and by the end of the 1970's,Nahas had published about it:
Marijuana,Deceptive Weed, is a technical work. Keep off The Grass is for
the lay public; a lively, engaging read,l available at the public library.

But even Nahas was at odds with people in the medical community who
inexplicably insisted, against all evidence to the contrary, that smoking
marijuana had no harmful effects. And they've drawn their battle line in
the political arena.

My own perspectivre is well articulatedl by Joseph Califano (Time Dec.
9/96): "With all three of my children, I made two points. First,l each was
a creature of God, blessed with brains and talent. With such generous
divine gifts goes a moral obligation to develop those talents and use them
to help the less-fortunate. That's why it's morally wrong to use drugs"

The drug trade is a physical Band-Aid for a spiritual void. It will be
killed by lack of demand, but that starts when we first know ourselves as
spiritually needy, and God as a spiritual source who is able to fill that
need. From reliance on God follows the rejection of narcotics, not because
of an unsturdy law, but because we find their use unthinkable.

Tom Yeoman