Copyright © 1997 The Seattle Times Company

Wednesday, Oct. 22, 1997

If pot is legal, will state grow it?

by David Postman Seattle Times Olympia bureau
David Postman's phone message number is 3609439882.
His email address is: dposnew@seatimes.com

OLYMPIA If voters approve an initiative to loosen Washington drug laws,
supporters say they then will push for a stateregulated marijuana growing
and distribution system.

Also, sponsors of Initiative 685 say seriously ill patients whose doctors
recommend marijuana as medicine would be allowed to grow it themselves if
the measure passes Nov. 4.

"If it's legal to possess a dead plant, it should cover a growing plant,"
Jeff Haley, a Bellevue attorney and chairman of the initiative committee,
said yesterday. "If you can possess it, you can grow it."

Opponents of I685 have been critical of a campaign commercial that says
the measure would "free doctors to relieve the suffering of their
patients." Concerned Citizens Against Dangerous Drugs issued a statement
yesterday saying that no distribution system would be created by the
initiative and that it would provide no way "patients suffering from
serious illness could legally and safely obtain the drugs from their
doctors or anybody else."

For a short time nearly 20 years ago, the state provided marijuana to
patients. The experiment was billed as a scientific study but was designed
largely to get around federal restrictions on using marijuana as medicine.

Haley and initiative sponsor Rob Killian, a Tacoma physician, say they want
to see the government back in the marijuana business.

"We are going to go to the Legislature, if the initiative passes, and ask
them to put in place a governmentregulated distribution network to make
sure we get pure product," Killian said. "We have to make sure that some
drug dealer isn't shafting some patient's family with a product that is cut
with something else."

He says he already has a plan, outlined in a recent Washington State
University study, that says a state growing facility could be built for $1
million and run for $393,000 a year.

Measure covers LSD and heroin

Initiative 685 would make it legal for seriously ill patients to use an
illicit drug including marijuana, LSD and heroin if two doctors
recommend it and there is scientific evidence that it works as medicine.

It also would make people in prison for drug possession eligible for
immediate release and send people to treatment instead of prison for the
first two drugpossession offenses. The initiative would require people in
prison for committing violent crimes while on drugs to serve their entire
sentences.

The WSU study Killian cites, released in February and financed by a $70,000
legislative grant, actually recommends against allowing people to smoke
marijuana as medicine.

Written by Mahmoud AbdelMonem, dean of the WSU School of Pharmacy, the
study says smoking marijuana isn't the best way for patients to get THC,
the active ingredient that controls nausea and pain.

AbdelMonem said it's better to use synthetic forms of THC because if a
patient smokes marijuana, it is difficult to regulate the dosage, purity
and strength of the drug.

"We don't know enough to either promote the use of marijuana or speak
against its use in therapy," AbdelMonem said yesterday. "But the use of
cigarettes is not the most appropriate delivery form."

But AbdelMonem's report outlines options for getting marijuana cigarettes
to seriously ill patients, in case legislators disagree with him.

The first recommendation is to get the drug from the federally controlled
marijuana farm at the University of Mississippi and have cigarettes
manufactured at a private plant now doing work for the federal government
in North Carolina.

The state as marijuana grower

But the report concedes that may be difficult because the National
Institute for Drug Abuse, which controls the facilities, has refused to
provide the governmentgrown marijuana to researchers whose work does not
meet the institute's goals.

The report's second choice is Killian's first: raising it in Washington as
a medical crop.

The report's cost estimates for the facility are "grossly excessive,"
according to a peer review of the study done by Rick Doblin, director of
the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies and an advocate
of medicinal use of marijuana.

Doblin's review says the estimates that each patient would smoke 10
marijuana cigarettes a day every day of the year are excessive.

"What was actually needed was a report that evaluated the costs of
developing production facilities that ranged from very small to large,"
Doblin wrote in his critique.

Doblin also criticized the participation in the study of Mahmoud ElSohly
because he is the director of the University of Mississippi growing
facility and holds a patent on THC suppositories.

Haley said that if the initiative passes, people initially will grow their
own marijuana. But if Washington becomes the third state in the past year
to change its drug laws, he says, the federal government soon would drop
its longstanding opposition to medicinal marijuana.

An earlier experiment

It's been a long fight. It was Haley's father, former state Rep. Ted Haley,
RTacoma, who pushed through the state's 1979 experiment in medicinal
marijuana.

Between 1979 and 1981, more than 500 patients were given marijuana
cigarettes by 30 doctors, said Roger Roffman, a University of Washington
professor of social work and a marijuana researcher, who was an adviser on
the project.

Ted Haley, a surgeon now living out of state, was able to win wide
legislative support for a bill to study the medicinal uses of marijuana.
The bill was supported by Brad Owen, then a state legislator and now
lieutenant governor, who is leading the campaign against I685.

Roffman said the bill passed because of Haley's hard work over two
legislative sessions and the personal lobbying of Corleen "Corky" Hapeman,
a cancer patient who told lawmakers that marijuana helped control her
nausea and vomiting.

"The traditional expectation of the Legislature would be this is a young,
counterculture person's idea of how to make marijuana more acceptable to
society," Roffman said. "But who shows up at the doorstep of each
legislator but a very conventional grandmother who, in very eloquent and
personal terms, described what her experience had been."

Haley's bill was called "The Controlled Substances Therapeutic Research
Act," and the study was run like a scientific experiment. The marijuana
came from the federal government, before a late 1980s crackdown on such
studies.

But Roffman said the real goal was to get marijuana to ill patients, not to
study the drug's effects.

"It was a compassionate way of getting around the prohibition of marijuana
being prescribed by doctors under federal law," he said.