NEW YORK TIMES AD URGES BUSH: STOP THE WAR ON MEDICAL MARIJUANA

In an unprecedented full-page ad in the March 6 New York Times, a national
coalition of doctors, nurses, medical organizations, celebrities, and more
than 300 state legislators asked President Bush to allow patients with
serious illnesses to apply for government permission to use marijuana to
relieve their symptoms.

Signatories include elected officials from 42 states and the District of
Columbia, esteemed television journalists Walter Cronkite and Hugh Downs,
former U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Joycelyn Elders, best- selling health author
Dr. Andrew Weil, longtime Republican activist Lyn Nofziger (who was aide to
Presidents Reagan and Nixon), the American Public Health Association, the
National Association of People With AIDS, and the Nurses Associations of
California, Hawaii, Minnesota, Mississippi, New Mexico, New York, Virginia,
and Wisconsin. The letter is also signed by such celebrities as Politically
Incorrect host Bill Maher, actress Susan Sarandon, and comedian Richard
Pryor, who suffers from multiple sclerosis. The letter, ad, and complete
list of signatories (including a state-by-state list of elected officials)
are available at http://www.CompassionateAccess.org .

The ad features an open letter to President Bush. "Countless seriously ill
people are already using marijuana because they and their doctors believe
that it is the best medicine for them," the letter states. "These patients
should not be treated like criminals." Under current federal law, people who
possess even small amounts of marijuana can be sentenced to a year in
federal prison, with no exception for medical use.

In signing the letter, Hugh Downs, longtime host of the ABC News program
20/20, noted that he has long questioned laws barring medical use of
marijuana. As far back as 1994, he explained in a radio commentary that
marijuana "has established therapeutic use in a variety of medical
conditions. But, since it is caught up in the hysteria of the drug war,
doctors are prohibited from conducting research on marijuana and patients
are deprived of its benefits."

"Seriously ill patients should not be threatened by arrest and jail due to
their use of a treatment that can relieve their symptoms and suffering,"
commented American Public Health Association Executive Director Mohammad N.
Akhter, M.D., M.P.H. Former U.S. Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders, M.D.,
agreed, saying, "Seriously ill people should have the benefit of all
medications recommended by their physicians, including legal access to
medical marijuana. Have we lost all of our compassion, even for the sick and
dying?"

Conservative activist Lyn Nofziger added bluntly, "The only people who
oppose the use of marijuana for medical purposes are those who have never
needed it, or have no member of their family who has needed it."

The federal government still supplies seven patients with government-grown
marijuana under the so-called "Compassionate Investigational New Drug" (IND)
program begun in 1978, but the program was closed to new patients in 1991.
In a 1999 report commissioned by the White House Office of National Drug
Control Policy, the National Academy of Sciences' Institute of Medicine
(IOM) suggested that the federal government give seriously ill people legal
access to marijuana on a case-by-case basis, much like the IND program. The
IOM report noted that such an approach would give relief to suffering
patients while also generating useful data.

The government has not acted on the IOM recommendation and, instead, the
Bush administration has recently stepped up its enforcement against medical
marijuana distribution centers. In a series of raids in California, armed
DEA agents have shut down medical marijuana providers who worked closely
with local governments and law- enforcement agencies, seizing patient
records and forcing thousands of sick people to turn to unreliable and
potentially dangerous street sources for their medicine.

"During the 2000 presidential campaign, George W. Bush said that states
should be able to address the medical marijuana issue `as they so choose,'
but his administration has moved in precisely the opposite direction," said
Robert Kampia, executive director of the Marijuana Policy Project, which is
providing staff time and financial support to the coalition. "Why is our
government waging a war on patients when the president keeps saying he needs
more resources to fight terrorism? Mr. Bush has warned that when people buy
drugs, some of the money goes to criminals and terrorists -- yet his
administration's own actions have driven thousands of patients away from
locally authorized medical marijuana providers and into the arms of street
drug dealers."