MEDICAL MARIJUANA DEBATE A SMOKING ISSUE

How you feel about medical marijuana and the initiative to legalize it on
the Montana ballot depends on where you sit.

Scott Brodie looks at it from his job as sergeant of the Missoula Police
Department's drug unit and his eight years of drug-related law enforcement.
Legalizing the medical use of marijuana will contribute to crime, set a bad
example for youths, open the door to use of other drugs, create more drug
addiction, cost the taxpayers money for more law enforcement - and it's
just plain not necessary, he said.

"I'm just appalled that this thing could be this close to passing," he said
in a recent interview. "I'm passionate about this. I'm just alarmed about
what the poll numbers are showing."

Paul Befumo looks at it as the spokesman of the Medical Marijuana Policy
Project of Montana, based in Missoula. It's just ridiculous to put sick
people in prison - or have them live in fear of that - for using a medicine
that works, with the help of their doctors, he recently told the Missoulian
Editorial Board.

"They don't belong in Deer Lodge," he said. "There's something wrong with
us using police power on this."

"It's a reasonable initiative," he said. "It's got a good purpose. It gives
doctors back a tool they had for the first 150 years of our country."

Brodie, in his role as detective sergeant with the multi-agency
High-Intensity Drug Trafficking Area Task Force, recently wrote a six-page
letter against Initiative 148 for Montana newspaper editorial pages on
behalf of the Missoula Police Protective Association. The police union
represents about 80 law enforcement officers in the rank of lieutenant and
below.

If voters approve it, the initiative would be a law-enforcement nightmare,
he said.

The initiative provides for approved medical marijuana users to carry a
card authorizing that use. Forged cards will proliferate like forged
driver's licenses, he said. Police time will be taken checking the veracity
of cards, increasing the response time and decreasing the time left to
spend on such things as homes that have been burglarized.

The homes of medical marijuana users themselves will be the target of drug
addicts who know they will find marijuana in their homes, Brodie said.

That has not been true in the nine states that have legalized medical
marijuana, said Befumo and Tom Daubert of Helena, a public relations
specialist who is also working to promote the initiative. A study conducted
by the federal General Accounting Office found that in the four states with
the oldest medical marijuana laws - Oregon, Alaska, Hawaii and California -
"medical marijuana laws have had little impact on their law enforcement
activities for a variety of reasons."

Most of the 37 law enforcement agencies interviewed said they routinely had
very few or no encounters with registry cards. The researchers commented on
the small number of patients who had registered and doctors who had
prescribed medical marijuana.

Oregon has had 8,000 medical marijuana users registered at one time, Befumo
said. Considering the population difference, Montana would see many fewer.

"You might be looking at as many as a thousand people," he said. "It might
be a lot less."

In Montana, about 4,000 to 5,000 cases of cancer are diagnosed each year.
Not all but some of those might get relief from nausea, vomiting, pain and
lack of appetite, research says. Recent studies found that the cannabinoids
in marijuana can inhibit the growth of cancer tumors.

Research has established that marijuana has medical value. Its value is
even corroborated in a 1999 report by the National Academy of Sciences
Institute of Medicine, commissioned by the Office of National Drug Control
Policy. Its use is endorsed editorially by the New England Journal of
Medicine and the British medical journal The Lancet Neruology, which called
cannabis "the aspirin of the 21st century."

"Medical marijuana is one of the things that's been shown to work," Befumo
said.

Yet Brodie, speaking for the police union, knows marijuana as a "gateway
drug" that leads to other illegal drugs.

"Somebody doesn't just get up some day and say, 'I'm going to start using
heroin,' " he said. "It starts with tobacco, alcohol and marijuana."

We spend billions on the legal drugs tobacco and alcohol, he said.

"They're legal drugs," he said, "but the vast majority of our social and
law enforcement problems are tied to them."

The secondhand smoke of medical marijuana should be a concern, too, Brodie
said. And he strongly disagrees with parents being allowed to administer it
to their minor children.

"As ludicrous as it sounds," he writes in his letter to newspapers,
"Initiative 148 does not limit a parent from using a doctor's
recommendation to hook up a marijuana bong to the oxygen tent of a sick
infant!"

Just as ludicrous to supporters of the initiative is the notion that
marijuana was attacked for political reasons in the United States in the
1930s after it was used medicinally for thousands of years.

Its medical use is documented as early as 600 B.C. in Persia, among the
writings of the ancient Greeks, in the sixth and seventh centuries in India
and after its introduction in the West in 1839.

"The medicine you use should be between you, your doctor and God," said
Daubert. "Not the federal government."

Supporters of medical marijuana point to the case of eastern Montana farmer
Larry Rathbun, who grew and used marijuana to quell his arthritis and keep
his farm running, Befumo said. He was sentenced to 19 months in the Montana
State Prison at Deer Lodge and came out in a wheelchair, he said.

Missoula's recent medical marijuana case has also been cited in the
initiative debate. Robin Prosser, a Missoula woman who suffers from an
immunosuppressive disorder that's related to lupus, has found that smoking
marijuana is the only thing that gives her relief from pain.

Two years ago, Prosser fasted for more than a month in a public plea for
the legalized use of medical marijuana. Last May, overcome by the strain
and expense of obtaining the drug illegally on her small disability check
and afraid of the pain when she couldn't get it, Prosser tried to kill
herself with an overdose of prescription drugs.

When one of her doctors contacted police for help, and they went to her
apartment, they found marijuana residue and paraphernalia. She was charged
with possession of dangerous drugs and drug paraphernalia.

Prosser could have gone to jail for a year. But Missoula defense attorney
John E. Smith offered to represent Prosser pro bono, and prosecutors
negotiated a deferred prosecution in late August. She will not be
prosecuted if she is "law abiding" for nine months.

Cases like this keep proponents of the initiative going, said Befumo, who
watched his own father starve when he had cancer and no appetite.

Brodie - and Gov. Judy Martz, too, who also opposes the initiative - say
that people like Prosser should take the drug Marinol, which is a synthetic
version of the active ingredient in marijuana. But many patients say it
does not work for them, possibly because it is only one substance in the
plant, and a combination of substances may be what helps people.

Law enforcement officers have compassion for the sick, Brodie said. But
he's suspicious of people who say they have to smoke marijuana to feel better.

"Of course," he said. "An alcoholic feels better when he takes a shot of
whiskey."

"Keeping something illegal is a deterrent," he said, "no matter what you say."