MARIJUANA HAS LONG HISTORY OF MEDICAL USE

To the editor:

I write in reply to your editorial on "Pot bill needs
careful review" as an attorney who has worked defending citizens from
detention in the mental health and criminal justice system for more
than 30 years and as the parent of a teenager. Health care, its
ballooning cost, and the growth of the uninsured is a national
scandal that few defend.

Marijuana has a 5,000-year history of medicinal use that has been
recognized by numerous professional health-care organizations,
including the National Institute of Medicine, as having value to at
least seriously ill patients suffering chronic pain. The federal
government obstructed human medical marijuana research for decades,
and its alleged misconduct remains the subject of active litigation.

Given this historical and scientific basis for state action to
relieve patients from the choice of access to effective medicine or
risking arrest, your editor's characterization of Rhode Island's
legislative action as a "fad" is reprehensible. Furthermore, citing
the Essex County DA as a "law enforcement professional" to lend some
credence to his "gateway" theology (no science supports his belief)
concerning marijuana use is simply incompetent journalism:
Health-care professionals and addiction researchers have discredited
this "theory," including, again, no less an authority than the
National Institute of Medicine. The conflict between state and
federal law is not a reason to maintain Massachusetts patients' fear
of both state and federal interference with their health care. The
state attorney generals in the states sheltering doctor-approved
patients from local law enforcement unanimously support the freedom
of their state patient certification programs to function in the face
of contrary federal law. Furthermore, the licensure of medicinal
cultivation is a step toward controlling distribution, not expanding
access to nonpatients. If the government had facilitated rather than
frustrated medical marijuana research, distribution by pharmacists
might make more sense, but the undisputed fact of marijuana's impact
is the absence of a toxic dose, unlike virtually all patent
medicines for serious pain relief.

As for your editor's need for "conclusive evidence" that nothing else
works, we already license the distribution of multiple medical
substances for the same symptom, which medications have a potential
for far greater harm (and death) than the symptom the substance is
intended to relieve.

Finally, as for whether a legalization groundswell exists, it all
depends on how you measure the grass roots.

If you ask parents and other voters how our current drug policy of
punitive prohibition is working, if you ask whether their children
or their neighborhoods are safer or healthier than when legislatures
began promoting punishment over treatment 30 years ago, I suspect the
answer will be clear and virtually unanimous: Prohibition has
failed, and it's time to move on to more-effective policies that
support treatment on demand and reserve detention for people who
have harmed others or present an imminent risk of doing so.

Michael D. Cutler