Pubdate: 15 May 2001
Source: Richmond Times-Dispatch (VA)
Copyright: 2001 Richmond Newspapers Inc.
Contact:  http://www.timesdispatch.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/365
Author: A.J. Hostetler, Times-Dispatch Writer

DATA NOT YET IN POT'S CORNER

VCU scientist: Public opinion works faster

The drive to allow patients the legal use of marijuana to alleviate
pain and suffering will have to come from the public, not the courts
or legislators, says a Virginia Commonwealth University researcher.

Billy R. Martin, who heads VCU's pharmacology and toxicology
department, helped craft a federal report calling for further study
on the drug's medical uses.

The 1999 report summarized the status of marijuana research for the
Institute of Medicine, which advises Congress on medical issues. It
said more study was needed to determine whether and how much
desperately ill patients could benefit from pot.

Then, as now, the issue of medical marijuana rested more on politics
than science, Martin said yesterday.

Although there are plenty of personal accounts, there is just not
enough clear-cut scientific evidence that marijuana eases anxiety and
pain, stimulates the appetite and reduces nausea and vomiting, he
said.

"Science, for marijuana, is not going to play much of a role" in the
drug's legalization as medical treatment, he said. "This is really
going to be a political decision rather than a scientific decision."

He said patient advocacy groups and grass-roots supporters, not
scientists such as himself, wield the necessary influence to change
the federal law banning pot.

"It really comes down to what various groups of people consider
acceptable evidence," Martin said.

Yesterday's Supreme Court ruling will not affect ongoing marijuana
research, much of which examines the multiple roles played in the
brain by pot's psychoactive ingredient, THC, said Martin, who has
studied the drug for more than two decades.

If the court ruling had favored medical marijuana, in some ways that
would have made the research not necessary, he said, because there
would have been less need to prove the benefits of the drug.

Martin said he did not know of anyone in Virginia who had sought and
received marijuana under the 1979 state law allowing physicians to
prescribe and pharmacists to dispense medicinal marijuana to cancer
and glaucoma patients without the parties involved facing prosecution.

Critics of marijuana's medical use note that a drug based on THC is
on the market. Marinol is federally approved to treat nausea and
vomiting associated with chemotherapy, as well as the anorexia and
wasting that AIDS patients often suffer. But marijuana advocates say
it does not work as well as the real thing.

While smoked marijuana also has been promoted as a treatment for
glaucoma, the Institute of Medicine report concluded it only
temporarily reduces some of the eye pressure associated with the
disease.

The New England Journal of Medicine has editorialized in favor of
medical marijuana, and the American Medical Association has urged the
National Institutes of Health to support more research on the subject.
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