VOTERS WEREN'T HAZY ON ISSUE OF MEDICAL POT

I ran into Gean Weeks and Jeff Jones during a break Monday at
the"Perspectives on the Medical Use of Marijuana"symposium at USI. And it
would be hard to imagine two guys who outwardly seem more different.

Gean, 50, is a big guy in striped overalls, a former fundamentalist
preacher and gas station manager who sports a white beard, a gold ring in
his left ear, a tattoo of an Iguana crawling out of his other ear and a
lifesize tattoo of the mythical sorcerer Merlin's face emblazoned on the
back of his shaved head. That's right,on the back of his head.

Oh, and Gean smokes marijuana every single day.

Jeff, on the other hand, could easily pass for the chairman of the local
Young Republicans club. Dressed in a dark suit and a conservative tie,
with no discernible body art, he's a cleancut 23yearold who experimented
with pot in his younger days but never smokes it anymore.

But despite those apparent differences, Gean and Jeff share two firm beliefs:

First, they fervently believe that the medical benefits of marijuana have
already been amply demonstrated.

Second, they think the political question of wheather marijuana should be
permitted for medical use in California was settledor should have
settledwhen the voters approved Proposition 215 by a 56 percent majority
last year. (In Orange County it was 52 percent.) And they're angry that
many state and federal officials don't seem to see it that way.

"They're still treating (medical marijuana) as treason in the war on
drugs," says Gene, a member of the Orange County Cannabis Coop who says he
smokes marijuana daily to ease the pain of degenerative disks.

"They're just playing politics with people's suffering," Jeff, director of
an Oakland medical marijuana club, says of state and federal
officialsparticularly state Attorney General Dan Lungren who want to
close down clubs that provide marijuana to people with AIDS, cancer and
other diseases and ailments." And this (the UCI symposium) is just a
stalling tactic.

The threeday symposium whose topics include such brainbusters as "Neural
Mechanisms of Cannabinoid Analgesia" and "Neuropharmacology of Cannabinoids
and Their Receptors" is part of an $896,000 federally funded study to
scientifically determine the benefits and risks of medical marijuana use.
The study, ordered by federal drug czar Barry McCaffrey, is billed as a
nonpolitical look at the issue, not a rigged attempt to undermine support
for legal medical marijuana use.

And maybe it will be nonpolitical. But as far as California is concerned,
it still seems a little like spending almost a million dollars of taxpayer
money to study the barn door after the horse has already run out.

Now, I don't really know if marijuana is any more goodforwhatailsyou
than, say, a stiff three fingers of bourbon. And I certainly wouldn't want
anyone who has just smoked a joint to drive or operate any machinery more
dangerous than a TV remote control.

But Gean and Jeff are right on this: As a legal issue in California, the
medical marijuana question should have been closed Nov. 5, 1996.

Like millions of other Californians, some of whom use marijuana and some of
whom don't, Gene and Jeff heard the voice of the voters.

And they wonder why the government can't.