MARIJUANA AS MITZVAH

Local Temple Supports Drug's Therapeutic Use

Susan Gaskill had many of the things that her friends had: a husband, a
son, activities at her temple. She also had something that they didn't
have: AIDS.

She couldn't eat. Her weight dropped to 85 pounds, and her only nourishment
came from a feeding tube inserted into her shoulder.

And then she tried pot. "When Proposition 215 was passed, she was able to
go down to the club in San Jose and get her card and get marijuana. It
enabled her to eat so that she could gain weight, take the medicine that
she needed to take, and she got two more years of life before she passed
away in May of 1999," her friend Jane Marcus said.

The rub? She was using the drug illegally. While California and several
other states legally allow the use of marijuana for medical reasons,
federal law -- which overrides the states' authority -- says otherwise.

To Gaskill's friends, this prohibition was a call to action. Even before
Gaskill died, Beth Am Women, a group at Congregation Beth Am, the Los Altos
Hills temple where she worshipped, had begun organizing to protest the
federal decree.

"We had a panel at the synagogue in June 1998 and had a rabbi from Stanford
speak and the chairman of the California Medical Association's task force
on medical marijuana, a religious studies professor, and an assistant
attorney general," Marcus said.

The outgrowth of that discussion group was a proposal to the umbrella
organization of Beth Am's women's group, called Women of Reform Judaism.
Beth Am Women presented a resolution -- first to a regional group, then to
the larger group -- recommending that they endorse the use of marijuana for
medical reasons.

"It was unanimous; wherever we presented the resolution, there was enormous
support for it," Marcus said.

The impact of this resolution's adoption is that now, Women of Reform
Judaism has a platform on which to address the topic. It gives them clear
directions on how the organization would respond if asked a question about
the issue.

"For example, there was an ad taken out in support of medical marijuana in,
I think, The New York Times. When the Women of Reform Judaism were
approached as to whether they would be signatories to this ad, all they had
to do was look at our resolution and, so yes, they became signatories,"
Marcus said.

In 2001 the national group presented Beth Am Women with an award for
special achievement on this project.

Indeed, public support for allowing the medicinal use of marijuana appears
to be on the upswing. According to "State by State Medical Marijuana Laws,"
published in 2001, "Eight states have laws that protect patients who
possess and grow their own medical marijuana with their doctor's approval."

In addition, three California cities directly challenged Federal law by
deputizing local medicinal pot farmers. The discussion was opened earlier
this year, when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San
Francisco upheld the rights of seriously ill patients by allowing them to
accept recommendations from their doctors for marijuana.

Canada is also expected to decriminalize marijuana possession.

HR 2592, a bill that would have reclassified marijuana so that doctors
could prescribe it, died in Congress, denying medicinal pot users the full
blanket of legal support that their advocates want. So, more than four
years after that first feat of activism, Beth Am Women are still at work.

They produced an informational video with accompanying teaching and study
guides that they distribute to temples on a regional basis.

The group also sponsored another panel discussion in late October, attended
by roughly 25 people from Beth Am and from the community at large.