IT'S MEDICINAL - BUT IT'S NOT STRICTLY LEGAL

COLORADO SPRINGS, COLORADO // Polly Watson, 34, used to pop 14
prescription pills a day, including powerful painkillers such as
morphine, methadone and Vicodin, to treat her fibromyalgia, a chronic
muscle and tissue disorder that locks its victims in sleeplessness and
widespread agony.

She could not work, rarely left the house and spent much of her time
laid up in bed.

"I was strung out on pills," Mrs Watson said, "and I felt like such a
burden to my family."

Almost three months ago, her doctor suggested she try medicinal
marijuana. Now Mrs Watson comes several times a week to the Patient
Activity and Resource Center, where she and other patients
recuperating from chronic illness inhale marijuana vapour pumped
through a volcano-shaped electric vaporiser, or munch on snacks baked
with cannabis.

At a nearby legal dispensary for medicinal marijuana products, they
can also purchase pills, ointments, tinctures and powders to treat a
wide array of ailments ranging from eczema to depression to migraine
headaches.

Mrs Watson said two months of marijuana use have got her back on her
feet and running her household again. "It gave me my life back," she
said, breaking down into tears.

Although federal US law bans marijuana use, more than a dozen states
including Colorado and California now permit its legal distribution
for the treatment of certain chronic ailments.

Medicinal marijuana bills are making their way through state
legislatures in four other states, and some US residents hope the
president, Barack Obama, will go further by legalising the sale and
taxation of medicinal marijuana nationwide.

Advocates argue cannabis is far less costly as a pain remedy than
pharmaceutical painkillers, and safer than many pills, which can be
addictive.

They say millions of Americans self-medicate anyway by purchasing
marijuana on the street, thus contributing to the yawning global trade
in illegal drugs and costing the federal government billions in lost
tax dollars.

Cloud Fowler, who supervises the patient resource centre in Colorado
Springs, argues that the legal vapour product her centre serves
patients is 97 per cent pure tetrahydrocannabinol carboxylic, or THC,
the active ingredient in cannabis. Illegal users, on the other hand,
tend to smoke marijuana cigarettes, inhaling smoke that is 65 per cent
carcinogenic and only one-quarter THC.

Moreover, she says, many of her patients have been able to reduce the
amount of overall medicine they were taking once they started using
medicinal marijuana.

"That is the way it should be," she said.

But not everyone is keen on the idea of legalisation. The
administration of George W Bush maintained that federal anti-drug
regulations trumped state laws, and in 2005 the Supreme Court upheld
that decision. Federal agents from the Drug Enforcement Administration
raided and closed a number of state-licensed marijuana dispensaries,
most of them in California.

Critics say marijuana is a gateway to stronger drugs, citing a rash of
studies in the 1980s that indicated marijuana users were as much as 60
times more likely to try cocaine. Other studies since have questioned
that finding, and many medical marijuana proponents cite people such
as Polly Watson as an indication that cannabis can help patients with
chronic ailments end their dependency on addictive pain pills.

In Colorado, medicinal marijuana users must obtain a licence from the
state by providing paperwork from their physician - similar to a
prescription for pharmaceutical medicine - that asserts they suffer
from one of the maladies qualifying them for marijuana treatment.

Yet some state officials find the numbers worrisome. Colorado's
medicinal marijuana registry doubled to nearly 5,000 patients last
year, and has grown 800 per cent since 2004. Licensed caregivers now
advertise on the internet and in classified newspaper listings, with
some juggling as many as 200 patients.

"I'm not sure how they can do that, even with the best of intentions,"
Ron Hyman, the state's registrar of vital statistics, was cited as
saying in January in the now defunct Rocky Mountain News.

This month, the US attorney general, Eric Holder, handed medicinal
marijuana advocates a victory when he announced there would be no more
federal raids on dispensaries located in states that have voted to
permit medicinal marijuana use.

"The policy is to go after those people who violate both federal and
state law," he said.

But Washington shows no signs of easing up on marijuana sales. Just a
week after Mr Holder's remarks, Drug Enforcement Administration agents
in San Francisco raided Emmalyn's California Cannabis Clinic,
confiscating marijuana plants, lights and other cultivation equipment,
claiming the centre was operating on a temporary permit in violation
of state and federal law.

Andreas Rivera, who helps run the Cannabis Theraputics dispensary in
Colorado Springs, said he supports strict regulation of the industry.
"We maintain a close relationship with law enforcement here," he said
in the dispensary, where hydroponic marijuana plants grow under
ultraviolet bulbs inside a shop closed to the general public.

"That is the only way we have been able to keep this place running for
four years now."

Mrs Watson, the fibromyalgia patient, said she was also supportive of
strict regulation.

"I am opposed to people smoking drugs," she said. "I have three kids."