THOSE IN PAIN DESERVE TO USE MEDICAL MARIJUANA

Before even going online to actually look up some current facts, I knew
what Terrence P. Farley, director of the Ocean County Narcotics Strike
Force, was saying about marijuana was a load of horse apples. Farley has
been watching too many government-sponsored "Reefer Madness" movies. Since
there is only one federal and six state studies going on right now, none of
which have been completed, where he got his outrageous information from is
a mystery. It sure couldn't have been from any past studies done by this
government in the '70s and '80s, or any other countries studies, because
they paint another picture entirely. The government has been doing
everything possible not to allow doctors to do testing, including
threatening them with loss of their federal prescription license. The only
federal study being done right now, took five years of pleading before the
government would allow it, and they even put restrictions on that study.

Just looking at the arrest records tells us that all the bad things that
are going to happen to you healthwise that he's claiming is hogwash. Since
1992, more people have been arrested for marijuana use than all the people
living in Alaska, Delaware, District of Columbia, Montana, North Dakota,
South Dakota, Vermont and Wyoming. There were more than 700,000 arrests
last year alone, and, since they aren't arresting even a quarter of the
people smoking it, by now the population should be brain dead or at least
suffering from lung cancer. These huge arrest statistics have been going on
since the '60s, so this natural study tells us people don't go nuts from
smoking pot. Farley tells us in roadside checks of those not impaired by
alcohol, 45 percent tested positive for marijuana, but neglected to mention
one can test positive for up to 30 days after smoking it, so that study
means nothing, and his facts are deceptive to say the least.

Our own government's National Institute on Drug Abuse gives "maybes" and
"could be's" about marijuana causing cancer and destroying brain cells. It
does not state it is a fact.

Bureaucrats take a sentence here and a sentence there from some obscure
study, and add a whole lot of "maybes." I am so tired of people in
positions of authority making up stuff to promote their own causes,
especially when their jobs, like Farley's, depend on drugs remaining illegal.

The bottom line still is whether medical marijuana works. This drug has
been in use as a medicine for a long time now. Its first recorded use was
5,000 BC. Any drug that's been around that long must have some redeeming
qualities and past studies done in other countries like India, where they
even give it to pregnant woman and children, say yes. As for available
synthetic Marinol pills, even if they worked, the government seems to
refuse to give them to people.

Farley says some people just want to smoke it. Cheryl Miller is dying, and
who is anyone else to say she shouldn't be able to ease that pain anyway
she wants to? How selfish!

Even if she were not dying, no one has the right to tell her she couldn't
use medical marijuana. If this mild drug were not illegal, no one would be
doing anything to anyone else but themselves. The law enforcement people
are the ones who arrest the Cheryl Millers and deny them a way to leave
this world in an easier way. In my book, that's nothing to be proud of.

EDWARD H. DECKER Whiting