25 YEARS SEE GROWTH FOR MAMA SUPPORTERS

After 25 years, Sandee Burbank's controversial views on drugs haven't
changed, but she's become more comfortable -- and better at -- backing them up.

Having just come from an interview on Al Wynn's "coffee break," she
remembers being "scared to death" on the same show 21/2 decades
before and unable to respond when Rod Runyon asked, "Where did you
get your information?"

"I had a briefcase full of things," recalls the executive director
and co-founder of Mothers Against Misuse and Abuse (MAMA), "and of
course I couldn't find it. Now, I've learned to say 'I'll get back to you.'"

For the most part, she doesn't have to. Now managing an arsenal of
numbers with ease, she refers people to MAMA's web-site for
documentation and sources, usually the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

It's a testament to how Burbank and her organization, founded in 1982
by seven women at a mountain cabin near Mosier, have grown up.

That maturity includes Burbank's 1997 recognition by the Drug Policy
Foundation with the Robert C. Randall Award for Achievement in the
Field of Citizen Action.

It also includes the 2005 opening of an office and clinic in Portland
that now helps patients register for the Oregon Medical Marijuana
Program and use the drug to effectively to deal with severe pain and
other qualifying conditions.

That state program fits right in with the philosophy of MAMA, which,
while not a strictly pro-cannabis group, asks that all drugs -- legal
and illegal -- be judged on a level playing field.

"We want everybody who cares about their well-being to have the
process available to them to evaluate a drug based on its benefits
and risks," Burbank explains.

The group emphasizes personal responsibility and informed
decision-making over strict faith in de facto federal distinctions
between "safe" and unsafe drugs.

"It's those kind of thought processes that get people in trouble,"
Burbank says, noting that many don't realize that legally available
drugs, including common, over-the-counter medicines can have
dangerous side effects.

By way of illustration, she notes that aspirin and other
non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs kill 17,000 Americans a year,
the same number of fatalities attributed to all illicit drug use.

Meanwhile, tobacco, alcohol and caffeine combined kill 536,000
people, with nearly 14 times as many people addicted to alcohol or
tobacco as to illegal drugs.

Burbank doesn't discount the noxious effects of some illegal drugs,
especially ever-more-poisonous methamphetamine. Still, she says that
meth is "kind of a direct result of prohibition," tracing its rise to
increasing limits on the availability of diet pills, valium and other
pharmaceuticals.

By contrast, "very few, if any negative health effects" have been
reported from controlled marijuana use in Oregon's nearly 10-year-old
medical program.

Burbank is registered with that program -- although she says she was
a cannabis user before it -- as are Jack Thomas and Alice Ivany, who
accompany her to our interview.

All three deal with constant pain. In the case of Burbank and Thomas,
it's a result of auto or sports-related accidents; for Ivany, an
amputee, it's from overuse of her remaining arm.

Ivany says that in 1993 her prescribed pain medications were causing
her extreme nausea, vomiting and stupefaction. She went off them in
favor of Tylenol, but ended up with half-doses because she did not
tolerate it well.

It made things worse, rather than better, she says, as the pain in
her remaining limb grew. Then, in 2001, she became a medical marijuana patient.

"It has improved the quality of my life," says Ivany, noting that she
is not stupefied and that cannabis reduces her inflammation and acts
as an analgesic. "It controls my pain."