GOOD TO GROW

Washington -- RELIEF for medical marijuana patients was snatched away this
week. In Gonzales v. Raich, the Supreme Court ruled that such patients will
be subject to federal prosecution even if their own state's laws permit use
of marijuana. Now, short of Congress legalizing medical marijuana, the only
way that its users can avoid stiff financial penalties or jail is if it is
turned into a prescription medicine approved by the Food and Drug
Administration. Justice Stephen G. Breyer said as much during oral
arguments last November with his comment that "medicine by regulation is
better than medicine by referendum."

Fair enough. The problem is that the very agencies integral to facilitating
the research and development of medical marijuana have actually been
impeding progress.

The first obstacle is ideological. The Drug Enforcement Administration has
fought marijuana's use as a medicine, maintaining that it has no
therapeutic value. (It hasn't helped that activists have tried to use
medical marijuana as a wedge to liberalize drug laws.)

But scientific consensus says otherwise. Surveying a range of findings, a
federally commissioned Institute of Medicine report issued in 1999 noted
the active ingredients in marijuana, cannabinoids, can relieve
chemotherapy-induced nausea, stimulate appetite and suppress pain in
patients who have failed to get relief from conventional treatments. Other
countries have embraced such findings. Last April, for example, regulators
in Canada approved a marijuana extract delivered in an oral spray for
relief of symptoms of nerve pain associated with multiple sclerosis.

A more imposing obstacle to developing medicine in the United States is
that there is only one legal source of research marijuana: a farm in
Mississippi run by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, part of the
National Institutes of Health. As gatekeeper of the supply, the drug abuse
institute must review and approve all proposed marijuana research projects,
a hurdle for researchers that is both onerous and redundant: they already
must undergo at least three other oversight evaluations (from the Food and
Drug Administration, the D.E.A. and their own institutions) before they can
enroll their first subject.

One scientific team has been trying for two years to get a mere 10 grams of
marijuana from the drug abuse institute for its effort to develop a device
that heats marijuana but doesn't burn it, thereby providing nontoxic and
immediate relief to patients.

Since the drug abuse institute's mission does not include the development
of marijuana into a commercial prescription medicine, any expanded studies
with the marijuana plant must be privately financed. But, in a Catch-22,
private resources are out of reach as long as only federal marijuana -
which is notoriously weak and poorly manicured - can be used.

After all, a pharmaceutical development team must have a stable source of
raw material with adequate purity. Researchers need to be able to control
the ratio of active to inert compounds in the plant by manipulating growing
conditions. Unless a pharmaceutical company could be sure of producing a
drug or device for commercial sale, it won't invest millions of dollars in
clinical trials.

One solution is to get the National Institute on Drug Abuse out of the
marijuana supply business. Let researchers get marijuana directly from the
government-approved Mississippi farm or from overseas sources like the
Dutch Office of Medicinal Cannabis. Better yet, permit a privately financed
D.E.A.-approved farm, like the kind that Lyle Craker, a medicinal plants
expert at the University of Massachusetts, has been hoping to create for
the last three years. In addition to producing higher-potency, cleaner
marijuana, such a farm could offer strains with varying levels of
cannabinoids that may contribute to marijuana's therapeutic effects.

Developing cannabis into an approved and effective prescription medication
can be a goal within reach. But it will take a federal government that is
truly open to the research that it claims to value.