A PITCH FOR POT'S POWER TO EASE PAIN

After smoking a little marijuana, Erin Hildebrandt feels good again.
Overwhelming pain goes away for a while.

"It's one or two puffs, then I put it away," she said.

Vomiting, abdominal cramps, muscle spasms, chills, bloody diarrhea and
fever are symptoms of Crohn's disease, an inflammatory bowel condition
Hildebrandt has.

"It completely drains me," said Hildebrandt, 32, of Smithsburg.

With her husband, Bill, and their five children waiting in the hall,
Hildebrandt testified in Annapolis last week before the state Senate
Judicial Proceedings Committee, urging passage of a bill allowing marijuana
for medical use.

The bill failed last year, but it may have a better chance this year.

Hildebrandt said she considers marijuana a medicine, which is why she
overcame her hesitancy and spoke up.

"I just can't stand back and watch more and more people thrown in jail for
this and see their lives turned upside down," she said.

It is illegal in Maryland to smoke marijuana for pleasure or to relieve
pain. But advocates say it's a safe drug and less harmful than alcohol or
tobacco, of which society allows the use.

Opponents argue that medicinal use is only an excuse to legalize an illicit
drug.

MedChi - The Maryland State Medical Society, which represents more than
6,000 physicians and their patients, has asked two state Senate committees
to reject the bill.

"While physicians are supportive of any therapy to relieve pain in their
patients," the group's position paper said, "MedChi is not aware of any
scientific or peer reviewed literature indicating that marijuana has the
benefit contemplated by the legislation without having detrimental impact
as well. ...

"While the active ingredient in marijuana (THC) can be effective in
relieving pain, this ingredient can be obtained in oral form in a legal
manner by prescription without involving the adverse agents that are also
present in the marijuana cigarette."

'Outright confusion'

MedChi Executive Director Michael Preston said the General Assembly could
create "outright confusion" by allowing medicinal marijuana use when the
federal government prohibits it.

That was the conflict in California, where Brian Epis was sentenced to 10
years in prison for growing marijuana plants that would have been used by
sick people. The state allowed what he did, but the federal government
prosecuted him.

Erin and Bill Hildebrandt became active in the cause about a year ago,
attending marijuana rallies and bringing their children. The couple
protested Epis' plight at a rally in Washington last year. Bill Hildebrandt
was ticketed and fined $50 for ignoring three warnings from police, his
wife said.

Fearing the fallout, Erin Hildebrandt will not say if she smokes marijuana now.

"I'd rather not hand them a warrant," she said.

This is what she imagines could happen: "I'm picturing that I would get my
medicine, then armed men in masks would burst in. My babies would be
screaming about me being taken away to God knows where for God knows how
long ... just because I said I have used it."

Also about a year ago, the Hildebrandts started a Web site,
ParentsEndingProhibition.org. There, Erin muses on the discomfort of seeing
police officers blanketing the nation's roads and on the injustice of the
prohibition of marijuana.

"I'm a parent," she wrote. "My first duty is to my children and keeping
them safe and healthy.

"More than half of high school students today have experimented with drugs
at some time," she wrote. "This means that at least three of my five
children are at risk of being turned into criminals and losing their basic
human rights and freedoms because of the 'war on drugs.'"

Initially afraid

Hildebrandt said she probably tried marijuana the first time just after she
graduated from high school.

"I was still afraid of it," she said. "I had bought into all the
propaganda, just like everybody else."

But she rebelled, tried marijuana and decided it isn't dangerous.

It became an "on again, off again" interest when she attended Lansing
Community College in Michigan. Students would get together to smoke pot and
discuss philosophy, and she would join in.

She turned to marijuana for pain relief around 1996, when a friend told her
it might ease the migraine headaches she's had most of her life. It did,
she said.

In 1999, when the Hildebrandts moved from Michigan to Smithsburg, Erin
found that marijuana also could soothe the symptoms of her Crohn's disease.
Until then, she said, prescription drugs either didn't work or caused other
problems.

Hildebrandt said she gave up using marijuana recreationally about eight
years ago, when she became pregnant for the first time.

Asked when she last smoked marijuana, Hildebrandt wouldn't be specific.

"It's been a while," she answered twice, explaining that she doesn't need
it now.

She said her Crohn's disease is "under control" and she hasn't taken
prescription drugs for it in about seven years. She hasn't been to the
hospital for her migraine headaches in three years after previously going
up to three times a week.

Hildebrandt said she teaches her children - Daniel, 8; Thomas, 6;
Jessamine, 5; Billy, 3; and Juliet, 1 - to try a cold compress, a massage
or lying down in a dark room before asking for a pain reliever for a headache.

For adults, she said, marijuana can also ease pain.

"It's a medicine ... that can be used or abused ...," she said. "I'm behind
ending the mass hysteria behind marijuana. It's not the bogeyman of illicit
drugs."