GROUP WANTS RIGHT FOR AIDS PATIENT TO USE MARIJUANA TO FIGHT DISEASE'S
SYMPTOMS

Thomas Place, 55, of Rialto, wants more research conducted on the
ingestion of marijuana to assist AIDS patients and has helped create
an AIDS patient medical marijuana group to further the cause.

"I just want to help other people," Place said, after showing off his
concoction of marijuana tincture, a concoction that he says has helped
him overcome renal failure. "I've seen people in different clinics
struggling."

Place's group, the Inland Empire HIV/AIDS Medical Marijuana Patient
Support Group, meets at 7:30 p.m. Mondays in Riverside.

The support group, which is also open to caregivers and family
members, has had open discussions on using marijuana for treating
AIDS-related symptoms for about a month.

Meetings are for dispensing information such as using marijuana,
methods of injection, legal ramifications and sources for obtaining
it.

Members, who maintain they are not drug addicts, said AIDS medicines
often bring with them side effects that marijuana does not have.

Place said he and group facilitator Lanny Swerdlow would not be
allowed to promote using marijuana if the meetings were help in a
public-owned facility, which is why the meetings take place at the
THCF Medical Clinic & Patient Center.

"The information we're providing them, the AIDS organizations will not
provide them," said Swerdlow, also a director of the Marijuana
Anti-Prohibition Project, an Inland Empire medical marijuana patient
support group and law reform organization.

Rancho Cucamonga Mayor Don Kurth, a physician who is an professor at
Loma Linda University Behavioral Medicine Center, is skeptical.

"Speaking as a physician I think there are probably more desirable
ways to find relief from symptoms," Kurth said Friday. "But many of
the marijuana advocates are very passionate about the symptom relief
they get from marijuana in its raw form. So they're often unwilling to
try the more medicinally accepted preparations, if you will."

Kurth said that when talking about alleviating symptoms, it's an
objective statement.

"If someone says it makes them feel better, it makes them feel
better," he said. "It's not something that's easily
quantifiable."

Kurth added many but not all physicians are uncomfortable prescribing
marijuana and would rather prescribe other medications more specific
toward an individual symptom.

Members of the medical marijuana group, like San Bernardino resident
Henry Ceslewski, 48, said he enjoyed the "non-traditional ways" of the
meetings.

"It's affirmation I have helped healed myself," Ceslewski said, who
has stage 3 AIDS.

He is also an amputee, has chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and
is bi-polar.

"It's got me better under control without being reliant on
medications," he said of using marijuana, which he still smokes every
day besides injesting it.

Cynthia Moya, 52, of Moreno Valley, was diagnosed in 1994 with HIV.
She received a tainted blood transfusion following a seizure in a mall
after hitting her head on a glass display.

Her condition later went to full-blown AIDS, and she is also battling
ovarian and cervical cancer.

Moya maintains that she has felt better since starting to consume
"marijuana treats" with hemp seed oil in the butter besides injesting
the cannabis.

Paul Chabot, co-founder of the Inland Valley Drug Free Coalition, said
he was skeptical of the group and its purpose.

"It's nothing more than a ploy by a pro-drug group. They're standing
back and rallying for their cause."

Chabot said there were many great medications, which have improved
over decades, that could be used for people with AIDS and other ailments.

Calvina Fay, executive director of the Drug Free America Foundation,
said "essentially marijuana is marijuana. There are different ways to
deliver it. But no matter how it's delivered, and this is of
particular concern for those with AIDS, there is a good deal of
research to support its suppression of the immune system."

Place, discounting critics, said his group has an eye toward the
future with hopes it could create community gardens with fruits and
vegetables injected with his "liquid marijuana" as well as other
projects like salad dressings.