STUDIES SHOW...

Re: your Sept. 17 editorial suggesting that the U-T's editorial writers
"spark up." Right on, but those folks should probably have sitters nearby
when they do consume the forbidden fruit-to talk them through the potential
guilt and realizations they will have of how many lives they encouraged the
ruining of with their ignorant editorials.

The Union-Tribune has a long shameful history of supporting zero-tolerance
laws. I can tell you thousands of people from every walk of life have
mailed them letters outlining proper-drug-policy analysis for years,
including myself. I fear their form of intolerance far more than a person
who smokes a joint. People who smoke a joint will generally not favor
caging you with violent felons for committing an act far safer than
drinking a martini or smoking a cigarette.

Perhaps that is what should be studied: Are people better off being caged
with violent felons versus consuming marijuana under advice of their
physician. Marijuana has been used medically for thousands of years, was
used as such in the United States until 1937 and was not removed from the
pharmacopoeia until 1944. Patients in our country sued the federal
government in the late 1970s and won the right to medical access to
marijuana. To this day, seven surviving members of the Investigational New
Drug Compassionate Use Program receive a fat tin of 300 joints mailed to
their local pharmacy from the federal government each and every month.

None are so blind as those who refuse to see. I suppose it would be
pointless to mention there is no such absolute scientific data supporting
the use of aspirin, which kills 1,500 people per year. There is plenty of
evidence supporting the medical efficacy of marijuana. Here is one example:

Oral vs. Inhaled Cannabinoids for Nausea/Vomiting from Cancer Chemotherapy.
New Mexico State Department of Health (www.druglibrary.org/olsen/MEDICAL/
pierson.html:

"Results acquired under the State of New Mexico's Controlled Substances
Therapeutic Research Act indicate that oral THC and inhaled marijuana are
both effective anti-emetics and anti-nauseants. This conclusion is based on
data gathered at the time of the initial dose. The efficacy of the inhaled
form is superior to the oral form, but this difference is statistically
significant for vomiting only."

Tell them to put that in their pipe and smoke it, because the day they
smoke marijuana is the day I start drinking martinis and dancing to disco
music.

Matthew Hulett,

Brick, N.J.