MARIJUANA LAWS IGNORE SCIENCE

Editor, Times-Dispatch:

In his column on pain, A. Barton Hinkle argues that terminal cancer
patients should be allowed to use medical marijuana if it helps relieve
their symptoms. Unfortunately, a review of marijuana legislation would open
up a Pandora's box most politicians would just as soon avoid. America's
marijuana laws are based on culture and xenophobia, not science.

The first marijuana laws were enacted in response to Mexican migration
during the early 1900s, despite opposition from the American Medical
Association. White Americans did not even begin to smoke marijuana until a
soon-to-be entrenched government bureaucracy began funding reefer-madness
propaganda. Dire warnings that marijuana inspires homicidal rages have been
counterproductive at best. An estimated 38 percent of Americans have now
smoked pot. The reefer-madness myths have long been discredited, forcing
the drug-war gravy train to spend millions of tax dollars on politicized
research, trying to find harm in a relatively harmless plant. Meanwhile,
research that might demonstrate the medical efficacy of marijuana is
consistently blocked.

The direct experience of millions of Americans contradicts the
sensationalistic myths used to justify marijuana prohibition. Illegal drug
use is the only public health issue wherein key stakeholders are not only
ignored but actively persecuted and incarcerated. In terms of medical
marijuana, those stakeholders happen to be cancer and AIDS patients.

Robert Sharpe. Washington, D.C.