HEALTH: SCIENTISTS WILL GATHER IN IRVINE TO INVESTIGATE THE PLANT'S MEDICAL
VALUE STIRRING A NATIONAL DEBATE.

Marijuana causes brain damage.Or it doesn't.

Marijuana is highly addictive.Or it's not addictive at all.

Marijuana snaps chromosomes like twigs and weakens the immune system or
marijuana is a wonder drug that blocks pain and reduces inflammation.

So is it Cheech and Chong medicine? Or a natural healing herb used for more
than 2,000 years?

Sorting through the vast and contradictory scientific evidence on marijuana
can be maddening but that's precisely what investigators from the
Institute of Medicine in Washington, D.C., will spend the next year doing,
in their quest for the truth.

This governmentfunded inquiry ordered by federal drug czar Barry
McCaffrey and almost unthinkable two years ago is a direct result of
medical marijuana initiatives that succeeded in California and Arizona last
year, observers say. It brings investigators from the Institute of Medicine
to Irvine today to hear public testimony on the highly controversial issue.

Busloads of activitsts from as far as San Francisco are expected to
converge on the Beckman Center in Irvine. Public comment will be heard.

"We may see some fireworks," said John A. Benson Jr., the study's
coprincipal investigator as well as dean and professor emeritus at Oregon
Health Sciences University School of Medicine in Portland.

The sessions continue Monday and Tuesday, when scientists from America's
most distinguished universities delve into marijuana's effects on the body.
There will be only two more sessions like it: one in New Orleans, the other
in Washington, D.C.

"Our job is to assess the risks and benefits of marijuana for human
health," said Janet E. Joy, study director. "We're not addressing the
political issues at all which is not to say we don't understand they
exist. We are staying very focused on the science. It's exciting."

Some say it's redundantthat what's needed is not a review of old studies,
but new studies. To many others, it's not just exciting it's almost
miraculous.

"Medical marijuana studies supported by the federal government? Who would
have thunk it? I wouldn't have thunk it," said Dave Fratello, spokesman for
Americans for Medical Rights, the main force behind California's
Proposition 215.

Prop.215, which passed in November 1996 with 56 percent of the vote, allows
doctors to recommend marijuana to people with cancer, anorexia, AIDS,
chronic pain and most other ailments without fear of punishment; it also
allows patients and their caregivers to grow their own.

A similar initiative passed in Arizona at the same time, giving doctors
even more latitude to prescribe drugs the federal government now declares
illegal.

That put the states on a collision course with the federal government. Drug
czar McCaffrey said voters were asleep at the ballot box, and threatened to
bust doctors who dared prescribe pot to patients.

For doctors, that was the last straw.

"Physicians finally became enraged," said Donald Abrams, a noted AIDS
researcher at UC San Francisco. "They said, 'You can't tell us what we can
tell people and can't tell people.' He really opened a Pandora's box."

Politics has kept scientists from doing conclusive studies on the medicinal
effectiveness of marijuana for decades, researchers say. But after the
election, the California Medical Association was imploring the government
to approve controlled studies of marijuana's efficacy. The New England
Journal of Medicine endorsed marijuana's use as medicine and branded
threats of government sanctions "misguided, heavyhanded and inhumane."

And things began to change.

For more than four years, Abrams had been banging his head against the wall
trying to get federal approval for a study of HIVinfected patients who
smoke marijuana. The practice is widespread the folk wisdom being that
pot increases appetite and eliminates nausea, thus fighting the "wasting
syndrome" that causes severe weight loss but there was no hard science
behind it.

Abrams wanted to investigate how pot's active ingredients interact with the
new drugs that suppress the virus. He wanted to see if there was an impact
on the viral load, the immune system, hormone levels. Did appetite, caloric
intake and lean body mass really increase?

Bad science, the federal government told him again and again. It refused to
allow Abrams to import researchgrade marijuana from a Dutch grower. It
refused to provide Abrams with researchgrade marijuana from its own crop
in Mississippi. In frustration, Abrams redesigned and resubmitted the study
only to have it rejected again.

But the dike broke this summer. Finally, the federal government approved
Abrams' study and gave the goahead to the Institute of Medicine's review
as well.

Abrams' is a $ 1 million, twoyear project titled "Short Term Effects of
Cannabanoids in HIV Patients." It's the only new study of marijuana's
effects on human patients currently in progress in the United States. He'll
speak in Irvine at 10:30 a.m. Tuesday.

The Institute of Medicine's study will cost $896,000, and its report will
be delivered in about a year to McCaffrey.

"But there needs to be more research," Abrams said.

And many think there will be. "Abrams' study is the first of more to come,"
said Fratello of Americans for Medical Rights. "We rattled the cages of the
federal science agencies and are pushing the government on this issue.
That's something everyone in California can be proud of."

But nothing's perfect. Even though Abrams has agreed to speak at the
Institute of Medicine's sessions here, he considers its review "superfluous."

"They did this in 1980," he said. "To me, it doesn't appear to be necessary
to do it again. There hasn't been much more science done in the intervening
years."

At first, Fratello shared Abrams' skepticism. But he's softening.

"It looks like it's shaping up to be something much better than originally
promised," Fratello said. "The original order was just to review the
existing studies and that's a book report. That's not the kind of
information patients and doctors need. But they're taking it farther
they're making much more of an effort to hear people out. And that process
alone is going to be valuable."

Orange County's own crusader for medical marijuana Senior Legislature
member Anna Boyce of Mission Viejo will be speaking to the Institute of
Medicine's investigators today. She'll tell them how marijuana helped ease
her late husband's nausea when he was undergoing chemotherapy, and how it
made his last days on Earth less agonizing.

"I trust them to be fair," Boyce said. "This is wonderful step forward."

Investigators also promise to visit Cannabis Buyers Clubs, the
notsounderground network of pot clearinghouses that have cropped up in
California to Dispense marijuana to patients.

The Institute of Medicine is a private, nonprofit organization that advises
the government on health issues.

"Our recommendations might say whether the available evidence indicates
marijuana is or is not a good medicine for glaucoma, whether alternative
therapies are equal, better or not as good," said study director Joy. "We
would enumerate the risks and benefits, and the efficacy of different
delivery systems. Most people smoke it, but you can eat it. And what about
inhalers? Patches? Suppositories?'

COprincipal investigator Benson said the report will probably recommend
more studies, and how they might be done. "We go in, I hope, with no
particular positions or biases," Benson said. "We aren't there to try to
rewrite laws or reschedule marijuana or challenge the Arizona and
California laws. Our job is to see what the evidence is. It's an important
social and medical issue that ought to be settle."