HARD ON DRUGS, SOFT ON SUFFERING

SOME DAY, Washington will catch up with the 72 percent of Americans
over 45 who, according to a 2004 poll by the AARP, believe adults
should be able to use medical marijuana if a physician recommends it.
First, however, voters are going to have to make some noise.

Or as Justice John Paul Stevens wrote in this week's Supreme Court
ruling that upheld the federal government's authority to prosecute
medical-marijuana users, despite California's and 10 other states'
medical-marijuana laws, "the voices of voters allied with these
respondents may one day be heard in the halls of Congress."

Too bad, the drug-war hawks have Washington spooked. Lawmakers don't
want to appear soft on drugs, so they are afraid to call an end to
prosecuting people in pain.

That's why marijuana is a "Schedule I" drug in the federal lexicon,
which puts the drug in the same legal classification as heroin. Less
dangerous drugs -- like cocaine and morphine -- fall under Schedule II
and are available for medical use. But not marijuana.

That's because there is no recognized medical use for marijuana
according to the American Medical Association, the drug warriors respond.

Fair enough. But the California Medical Association supports medical
marijuana. Chief executive Jack Lewin, a physician, explained that his
group believes the government should listen to doctors who recommend
the drug. What's more, in passing Proposition 215 in 1996, state
voters have spoken, and from what Lewin has seen, "it's not doing a
whole lot of harm."

Many California doctors recommend the drug because they've seen
salutary results with marijuana not found with its legal pill-form
equivalent, Marinol. For some reason, Marinol doesn't take with many
patients, who find relief by smoking, drinking or eating marijuana.
Marijuana, they say, relieves their nausea, mitigates the ravages of
some diseases and increases appetites depressed by
chemotherapy.

Doctors have risked their careers recommending an illegal drug. They
don't need a study when they can look at the faces of afflicted people
who finally have found something that works for them. And many users
note that medical marijuana relieves their nausea without drugging
them into oblivion.

Sure, some medical-marijuana boosters may be looking for an excuse to
smoke pot. Two years ago, I went to a Santa Cruz event where a young
man told me he took medical marijuana for an injured knee. Yeah, right.

At the same event, however, I saw a 93-year-old Dorothy Gibbs who
suffered from post-polio syndrome. She found that marijuana eased her
severe nausea. As a member of the Wo/Men's Alliance for Medical
marijuana, Gibbs joined a different lawsuit against federal
prosecutions, after the Drug Enforcement Administration raided WAMM
and seized 167 marijuana plants.

Gibbs is now dead, WAMM founder Valerie Corral told me on the phone
yesterday. In the six months after the raid, 13 WAMM members died --
almost 10 percent of WAMM's members. This is a group of seriously ill
people -- and the kid with the bad knee was not one of them.

Corral, an epileptic, believes she suffers fewer seizures because of
medical marijuana. She used to take more powerful pharmaceutical drugs
that "made me feel as if I was underwater. " With marijuana, she said,
she is more functional.

Back to Congress. Ten states have legalized medical marijuana.
Republicans who believe in states' rights should support these states,
but in 2004, only 19 Republicans voted for a measure by Rep. Dana
Rohrabacher, R-Huntington Beach (Orange County), that would have
blocked federal enforcement for users of medical marijuana in states
that have legalized its use. It failed 268 to 148.

Rep. Bill Thomas, R-Bakersfield, voted for such a measure in 2003, but
backed off in 2004. Locally, Rep. Richard Pombo, R-Tracy, voted "no"
last year.

"We've got 70 percent of the Democrats," said Bill Piper, of the
anti-drug-war Drug Policy Alliance. Most, but not all. Rep. Dennis
Cardoza, D-Modesto, is one of two California House Democrats, as Piper
put it, "voting against their own state."

I got no answer from the staff of Pombo or Cardoza as to how either of
them plan to vote on this year's Hinchey-Rohrabacher bill. Which
means, perhaps, they could be swayed by input from
constituents.

The White House drug czar John Walters has been a strong opponent of
medical marijuana. As he sees it, potheads are using sick people to
push marijuana.

I am sure he is right. And I don't care. This year I watched a friend
die who lived longer, I believe, because she could drink a tea that
revived her appetite, mitigated her need for other pain control and
probably bought her a few extra weeks with her children. Marinol
didn't help her. Marijuana did.

So I'll quote what Dr. Marcus Conant once said to me. Conant is the
doctor who identified the first cases of Kaposi's sarcoma among San
Francisco AIDS patients. He also successfully sued to stop the federal
government from acting against doctors who recommend medical marijuana.

Conant explained: "To deny sick people relief because of abuse is not
humane."