MEDICINAL MARIJUANA PROS AND CONS WEIGHED AT HEARING

TRENTON -- Before he was a famous TV personality, Montel Williams had a
career in the Navy and started an anti-drug program for children.

So Williams choked up Thursday while testifying before the Senate
Health, Human Services and Senior Citizens Committee about how only
marijuana -- not prescribed painkillers -- have helped ease the pain
multiple sclerosis has dealt him since 1999.

"I'm not only the poster child for MS around the world; I'm the poster
child for pot," Williams said. "What angers me so much is that all
people consider me a dopehead when all I want to do is wake up in the
morning and go to work without pain."

Williams is using his celebrity and personal story to sway state
lawmakers to make it legal for certain chronically ill patients to
have the drug, if their doctors prescribe it. Opponents say that
there's no proof that smoking pot helps and that making it legal at
the state level would usurp the federal drug-approval process. Some
have also said it's an attempt by some to legalize recreational marijuana.

Senate health committee Chairman Joseph Vitale, D-Middlesex, said that
he is close to supporting the idea but that the topic is still so
controversial that he won't post it for a vote.

"I don't know if if there's enough people who support it," Vitale
said.

Sen. Nicholas Scutari, D-Union, a onetime prosecutor who is pushing
the legislation, said he wants it approved quickly but understands it
could be a slow education process to garner enough support. He scoffed
at those who say it's an attempt to legalize drugs.

"We certainly aren't talking about a population for whom marijuana
possibly becomes a gateway drug," Scutari said. "We are talking about
very sick people who are in desperate need of relief. These people are
not criminals, and it does not behoove us as a society to treat them
as such."

Scott Burns, deputy director of the Office of National Drug Control
Policy, said approving medicine is the job of the federal Food and
Drug Administration -- not impassioned advocates and state lawmakers.

"No one in this country would want anyone to suffer -- that's why we
leave that to physicians," Burns said. "The argument always is, "It
makes me feel better.' . . . Crack cocaine makes you feel better, so
we cannot declare what is medicine solely on the argument that "It
makes me feel better.' "

Dr. John Morgan, a professor of pharmacology at the City University of
New York Medical School, dismissed opponents as spreading myths.

"I have no scientific doubt that smoking marijuana is effective in
relieving symptoms in these diseases," Morgan said.

Anti-drug advocacy groups that want to quash the bill say smoking
marijuana is dangerous and unproven.

"I know what it's like to be desperate and afraid you're going to
die," said Don Evans, a cancer survivor who heads the Drug Free
Schools Coalition. "I deeply resent cancer patients being told
marijuana can help you without the scientific evidence backing it up.
If I had smoked marijuana, I would be dead today, and my children
would be without their father."

Don and Gerry McGrath of Washington Township, whose son Sean died in
2002 of cholangiocarcinoma, or bile duct cancer, said his last 19
months were eased by marijuana; it helped him regain his appetite and
strength when nothing else worked.

"Can someone explain why the one medicine that was most effective,
least toxic and had the lowest cost for my son was illegal for him to
use, while less effective, highly toxic and very expensive drugs were
prefectly acceptable?" Gerry McGrath said.