SEEKING A CURE TO DRUG CULTURE
OUR MISGUIDED APPROACH TO DRUGS by John Miara
Copyright (c) 1997, Denver Publishing Company

When Arizona and California voters passed referenda
permitting marijuana for medical use, the response from
federal and state officials was startlingly harsh. Voters
were duped by a national legalization conspiracy, these
officials charged, ignoring the fact that government
heavyhitters also had spent much time and money presenting
their case. Indeed, the government's sledgehammer response
to the votes in California and Arizona was so out of
balance that it jolted the public to attention. And when
people began to look more closely, they discovered that the
marijuana dispute was just the camel's nose peeking under
the tent. The public now wants to drag the rest of the
beast inside to take a good look at it.

Fortunately, the present controversy differs from the
usual confrontations between drugissue traditionalists and
their opponents mainly because it has drawn in ordinary
citizens who until now have been content to sit on the
sidelines.

Now that John and Jane Q. Public are watching, both
sides in the debate have been forced to defend their
positions, and neither has done a particularly good job.

For example, the debate over whether or not to prescribe
marijuana to relieve the pain of terminally ill patients is
no debate at all. No one in their heart of hearts opposes
this. There is no rational reason to deny anything to
people who are dying, whether it's a morphine cocktail or a
toke of marijuana.

A similarly misguided debate involves marijuana's
medicinal benefits. If, after rigorous scientific tests
are performed, marijuana is found to have a medicinal
benefit, then it should be included in doctors'
pharmacological arsenal. If tests show it is harmful, then
certainly doctors will not prescribe it. Virtually everyone
now agrees on this, including America's ''drug czar,'' Gen.
Barry McCaffrey.

So if the debate is not about dispensing marijuana to
the terminally ill or studying its medicinal potential,
what is it about? Why did government officials threaten to
prosecute doctors who prescribe marijuana for their
patients. The public perceived this not only as a challenge
to the will of California and Arizona voters, but as an
insult to the integrity of medical professionals who devote
their lives to curing illness and alleviating pain.

In an editorial entitled ''Federal Foolishness and
Marijuana,'' which appeared in the January issue of the New
England Journal of Medicine, the journal's editor, Dr.
Jerome Kassirer, took government hardliners to task. He
wrote, ''I believe that a federal policy that prohibits
physicians from alleviating suffering by prescribing
marijuana for seriously ill patients is misguided,
heavyhanded and inhumane.''

The real significance of the column is that a
prestigious, mainstream scientific journal questioned
federal officials' inflexible response to a complex issue.
In other words, the government's unyielding defense of a
shaky drug war orthodoxy, not the policy itself, has
emerged as the real issue in the current controversy.

Reaction to this ''pharmacological McCarthyism,'' as one
analyst described it, is manifesting itself in two ways: a
general concern over whether drug war officials may be too
close to the trees to see the forest, and a call for a
closer examination of antidrug policies that are not
producing the desired results.

Although this reaction might make federal officials
squirm, the process has its positive side. New voices with
unimpeachable antidrug credentials such as Mayor John
Logie of conservative Grand Rapids, Mich. are now
insisting on a discussion of oncetaboo subjects. Logie is
establishing a panel to take a fresh look at such issues as
needle exchange and sentencing policy.

What Logie and many increasingly assertive citizens are
saying is that it's time to have a noholdsbarred debate
about the nation's antidrug strategy. The only rules
should be an assumption that everyone knows drug addiction
is a miserable fate, and the fewer addicts around the
better off we'll all be. That settled, the task is to
figure out how to reduce the number of addicts to the
lowest possible level, even if getting there requires
tipping the current system upside down. GRAPHIC:
Illustration