Pubdate: Sun, 25 Feb 2001 Source: Boston Herald (MA) Copyright: 2001 The Boston Herald, Inc Contact: One Herald Square, Boston, MA 02106-2096 Website: http://www.bostonherald.com/ Author: Tom Mashberg Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/mmj.htm (Cannabis - Medicinal) DEBATE SWIRLS OVER MARIJUANA AS MEDICINE SPRINGFIELD - Brian Fitzgerald doesn't think the law wants to throw a wheelchair-bound, half-blind father of three like him into jail, but he's still wary about where or when he smokes his pot. ``Without this stuff, my limbs cramp up so much I can't roll myself to the bathroom,'' said the 53-year-old multiple sclerosis sufferer, puffing on a marijuana pipe made from a chicken's claw. ``So I risk being evicted or busted just to be able to get to the john.'' Fitzgerald is one of thousands of Bay State residents who inhale marijuana day upon day for what they insist are medicinal reasons. Desperate to stave off the pain or sickness of MS, chemotherapy, glaucoma, asthma, migraine headaches and other ailments, they cooperate in a vast illicit network, risking prison and profession to acquire their controversial ``herbal remedy'' - a substance the federal government rejects as a prescription medicine and classifies as a narcotic on a par with heroin. This medicinal marijuana underground, the Sunday Herald has found, includes grandparents and teenagers, old-line hippies and hardline Republicans, caregivers and cops, folks who can't walk and folks who run marathons. All insist that pot is a maligned miracle drug that allows the ailing to eat, sleep and breathe, to get to work or just get through the day. All are scorned by antidrug forces, ranging from the U.S. Justice Department to neighborhood crime groups, as lawbreakers with illegitimate claims to pot use. And all are eager for March, when the U.S. Supreme Court will weigh for the first time whether ``therapeutic smokers'' of marijuana can employ the so-called medical-necessity defense to contest federal and state drug charges. ``Federal authorities must rescind their prohibition on medical usage of marijuana for seriously ill patients, and allow physicians to decide which patients to treat,'' said Dr. Jerome P. Kassirer of Weston, former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine and one of many physicians who have come to support marijuana's potential as a therapeutic drug. ``The government should grow it and oversee its distribution,'' said Kassirer, who now teaches clinical medicine at Tufts, ``and doctors should prescribe it, but only to the very sickest people.'' Yet even as the medical community begins to endorse marijuana's potential as a pharmaceutical drug - in 1999, the conservative National Academy of Sciences in Washington said ``marijuana's active components are potentially effective in treating pain, chemotherapy-induced nausea, anorexia from AIDS wasting syndrome, and the involuntary spasticity associated with MS'' - opponents are firm in their determination to block the drug's decriminalization for medical uses. ``All these attempts to legalize marijuana for medicinal purposes are part of an indirect means of achieving total legalization of the drug,'' said William T. Breault of the Main-South Alliance for Public Safety in Worcester. Breault points to studies stating that regular use of marijuana damages the human brain, immune system, reproductive organs and lungs. ``Even more important,'' Breault added, ``the message being spread concerning the so-called medical use of marijuana is very effective advertising to convince kids that marijuana is not harmful. This advertising is many times more effective than those `Joe Camel' ads by the tobacco companies, which lured children to smoke tobacco.'' Despite the passion of anti-pot forces, it has become clear that in Massachusetts, as in many other states, an enormous amount of civil disobedience is under way among citizens who have turned to pot out of desperation and come to believe it has a bum rap. These self-avowed lawbreakers include prominent liberals like Stephen Jay Gould, the Harvard scientist and author, who used pot during abdominal cancer treatment, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, the basketball legend, who says pot helps him stave off migraines. ``Marijuana was the greatest boost I received in my treatment,'' Gould said, ``and the most important effect on my eventual cure.'' Other illicit users include prominent conservatives like Lyn J. Nofziger, the former Reagan administration aide, who says he obtained black-market pot for a teen daughter with lymph cancer, and Richard Brookhiser, senior editor of National Review, who ``had to become a criminal'' to find marijuana while enduring harsh chemotherapy for testicular cancer. ``I am for law and order,'' said Brookhiser, who added that his doctors knew many patients who used pot to subdue nausea or recover hunger during cancer treatment. ``But crime must be fought intelligently. The law disgraces itself when it harasses the sick.'' Although there has been little controlled testing of the medical efficacy of marijuana in recent decades, advocates on both sides insist that some formal studies and hard science bolster their views. According to George Biernson of Woburn, a retired engineer and author of a self-published treatise, ``Dispelling the Marijuana Myth,'' pot ``is more dangerous than heroin, cocaine, alcohol or tobacco'' because its key psychoactive ingredient, delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, stays ``stored in fat cells'' long after it is smoked. ``We have seen that marijuana badly damages immune systems,'' Biernson said. ``How can we justify telling unfortunate AIDS patients they should smoke marijuana to lessen their pain? Instead we should be shouting out: `With your weakened immune systems, you should consider marijuana to be the worst form of poison!' '' And Gen. Barry McCaffrey, the drug czar under President Clinton, belittled medical marijuana during his tenure, saying: ``The argument that this chemical needs to be smoked doesn't make sense.'' But two Harvard professors, Lester Grinspoon and James B. Bakalar, an associate professor and a lecturer in law, respectively, in the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, are among the outspoken backers of marijuana's medical potential. In their 1997 book, ``Marijuana: Forbidden Medicine,'' they write: ``After carefully monitoring the literature for more than two decades, we have concluded that the only well-confirmed deleterious physical effect of marijuana is harm to the pulmonary system.'' They add that weighed against ``the overwhelming anecdotal evidence'' suggesting that pot helps mitigate glaucoma, migraines, uncontrolled spasticity and other tortuous conditions, it is wrong for the federal government to disallow studies of a drug ``known to help sick people feel better.'' ``Driven by its harmful `war on drugs,' '' Grinspoon said, ``the government evidently fears that as more people gain experience with cannabis as a medicine, they will see for themselves that its toxicity is greatly exaggerated and its medical utility badly undervalued.'' So far, the nationwide stirring of civil disobedience among furtive medicinal pot users has led to a modest groundswell at U.S. ballot boxes. Nine states - Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Maine, Oregon, Nevada and Washington - have laws that protect medicinal marijuana users from state prosecutions. Generally, state initiatives allow people with small amounts of pot, and a doctor's letter stating that they benefit from its use, to cite ``medical necessity'' if they are seized on local drug charges. But none of the state laws can deter federal prosecution. Washington refuses to let the states provide pot to residents unless the product comes from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, and that agency has declined to make medicinal pot available to local health officials since 1986. The net result is that anyone growing or otherwise procuring marijuana for medicinal use faces federal arrest and imprisonment. Any physicians who formally prescribe it can be stripped of the federal licenses they need to dispense legal pharmaceutical drugs. This conflict between federal and state laws came to a head last fall in California. A group called the Oakland Cannabis Buyers' Cooperative, which was set up after the state approved the growth and distribution of medicinal pot, was enjoined by the Clinton Justice Department from selling the drug to users bearing doctors' notes, despite what the state law said. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit reversed, saying there ought to be a common-law medical necessity defense. In addition, U.S. District Judge William Alsup ruled physicians could ``recommend'' marijuana to patients without fear that federal authorities would strip their licenses. The Justice Department appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which will hear arguments March 28. Proponents hope that the high court will reconcile the fact that more and more states, including Massachusetts, want to make pot available to sick people, while the federal government does not. Just such a lawful prescription is the hope of Maureen Blake, 53, of Webster, an avowed daily medical pot user who qualifies for federal disability for arthritis, depression and eating disorders. ``I'm tired of being made into a criminal to get the only medicine that works for me,'' she said. ``And I'm sick of being prescribed costly narcotics that make me ill when a bit of cheap pot makes me well.'' - --- MAP posted-by: GD