POT DEBATE NEEDS A DOSE OF HARD SCIENCE

Are traveling doctors who specialize in the lucrative niche of writing
marijuana recommendations -- licenses to smoke coveted both by
genuinely afflicted patients and casual users who just want to avoid
trouble with the police -- running afoul of the canons of medical
ethics? Maybe, but that's between them, their consciences and the
Medical Board of California.

And even if the answer's yes, the law's not going to do much about it
- -- not as the rules stand in California. As long as physicians follow
the most basic guidelines of medical practice, no jury's going to
convict them of wrongdoing. And it's not as if the patients are
complaining of malpractice.

But it's hard not to see a stretching of the state's groundbreaking
1996 Compassionate Use Act beyond all recognition when patients arrive
not thanks to a referral from their family doctor, but after hearing a
30-second ad on the local rock station.

Of course, how are these doctors so different from the hospitals that
emblazon their names on highway billboards? The pharmaceutical
companies that tout the latest high-priced prescription meds between
scenes of "House, M.D."? Medicine is a noble healing profession, but
it's also a business.

Deeper down, the heart of the quandary is that marijuana is still, in
the minds of most Californians, a recreational drug. Yes, it has some
bona fide medicinal uses, but in practice the conditions for which it
is recommended have become so vague and diverse as to tax its
credibility as "medicine."

Nearly all Californians these days would agree that if a cancer
patient suffering from severe pain, treatment-related nausea and
weight loss found relief from using marijuana, that poor soul should
have all the bud he or she needs to endure the terrible disease.

Nearly all Californians would also agree that marijuana is probably
the wrong treatment for a teenager whose braces hurt her mouth --
though Redding Police Chief Peter Hansen says at least one Redding
girl has managed to obtain a medical-marijuana recommendation based on
just that complaint.

In between those two extremes is a vast gray area where a gray market
thrives. Here, common sense and intuition are not reliable guides.
What patients, doctors and society at large need is a more rigorous
scientific understanding of cannabis, its active ingredients, its
effective doses, the ailments for which it is genuinely effective.

Without that knowledge, without more clear definitions of the medical
promise and limits of marijuana, arguments over medical cannabis are
about ideology, not science.

Unfortunately, federal regulations list marijuana as a Schedule I
drug, which means that, officially, it has no accepted medical use --
never mind that more than a dozen states say otherwise. Because of
those rules, even conducting research is enormously difficult. The
American Medical Association last fall called for easing of those
federal strictures -- not as endorsement of marijuana but simply to
allow more study. And that is the best prescription for a way out of
the current mess.

In some cases, marijuana might well be good medicine. In many others,
it's surely not. But it's all guesswork without more hard facts -- and
the federal government should at least get out of the way of
researchers who'd like to gather them.