MARIJUANA IS NO CURE

To The Editor:

As a parent who lost his son to drug use, I now work tirelessly to
prevent the same tragedy from ever occurring again, I am dismayed to
see the New Jersey Legislature even considering the medicinal use of
marijuana, based upon dangerously deceptive claims about the medicinal
potential of the crude marijuana plant.

Marijuana has not satisfied the demanding requirements of the national
drug regulatory agency, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). No
crude marijuana liquid or otherwise, smoked or vaporized or eaten in
brownies, can meet these criteria.

Why would patients and their physicians want to use crude plant
material when a proper medical product is already available to
physicians as a prescription medicine? Why would patients and their
physicians want to use crude plant material, potentially contaminated
with bird droppings, rodent carcasses, pesticides, heavy metals and
fungi when a proper prescription medicine is making its way through
the international regulatory process? The answer is they won't.

The activists seeking to legalize marijuana smoking under the fiction
that it is a medicine have realized that.

That is precisely what the US government has been saying all along:
only a product that has been properly researched and manufactured
should be made available as medicine. Marijuana advocates are not
trying to promote medicine for seriously ill patients. In facts, they
are willing to put seriously ill patients at risk so they can deceive
the public into accepting crude marijuana. Their shameless claims and
use of the sick and dying offends those who truly care about sick
patients and who have lost so much to drug use.

Steven Steiner

Tiaga Center, N.Y.