HOW TO INHALE

To clarify one point in Philip Dawdy's otherwise excellent piece
"Mental Marijuana" [The Drug Issue, Aug. 18]: Despite federal
government claims, marijuana need not have any respiratory side
effects at all.

Smoking has respiratory side effects, whether you're smoking tobacco,
marijuana, or grass clippings--though marijuana, unlike tobacco, has
never been shown to cause lung cancer. But marijuana need not be
smoked to be used as medicine.

It can be eaten, of course, but patients can obtain the fast action
that makes smoking attractive by using relatively simple devices
called vaporizers. Vaporizers allow the inhalation of the active
components, called cannabinoids, with nearly none of the irritants in
smoke. After much teeth-gnashing, the federal government has finally
allowed one small vaporizer study to go forward, but a second proposed
trial remains in bureaucratic purgatory.

A cynic might think the feds didn't want to encourage development of
safer ways of using medical marijuana.

Bruce Mirken

Director of Communications, Marijuana Policy Project Washington, DC