Pubdate: Sun, 20 Jul 2003
Source: Buffalo News (NY)
Copyright: 2003 The Buffalo News
Contact:  http://www.buffalonews.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/61
Author: Richard Brookhiser, Special to The News
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/pot.htm (Cannabis)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/mmj.htm (Cannabis - Medicinal)
Note: Richard Brookhiser is a senior editor at the National Review.

THE SICK SHOULDN'T BE VICTIMS OF THE DRUG WAR

Earlier this year, the New York State Association of County Health Officials
- - as cautious a bunch as you will find in the medical community - urged New
York lawmakers to pass legislation to legalize the medical use of marijuana.
Unfortunately, the legislative clock ran out on the measure this year,
despite three overwhelmingly positive committee votes.

That must not happen again next year. It is past time to remove patients
fighting cancer, AIDS and other scourges from the battlefield of the war on
drugs.

"The legalization of medical marijuana would be a step forward for the
health of all New Yorkers," the association declared. "Marijuana has proven
to be effective in the treatment of people with HIV/AIDS, multiple
sclerosis, cancer and those suffering from severe pain or nausea."

I knew that already. I discovered marijuana's benefits while receiving
chemotherapy for testicular cancer in 1992. Part way through my treatment,
the conventional anti-nausea drugs prescribed by my doctors stopped working.
Marijuana was the only thing that kept my head out of the toilet.

I was lucky. As a member of the media elite, I probably wasn't at huge risk
for a drug bust. Living in Manhattan, I was able to obtain my illicit herbs
under the relative cover of urban anonymity. But people fighting for their
lives shouldn't have to depend on professional status or the luck of
geography. Putting such patients in jail for the "crime" of trying to
relieve some of the misery caused by their illnesses is pointless and cruel.

The consensus regarding marijuana's medical value grows every day. Just this
May, the journal Lancet Neurology noted that marijuana's active components
are effective against pain in virtually every lab test scientists have
devised to measure pain relief, and even speculated that marijuana could
become "the aspirin of the twenty-first century." The governments of Canada
and the Netherlands have sanctioned marijuana's medical use.

Marijuana does have risks, but so do all drugs. The biggest health concern -
potential irritation to the lungs and airways caused by smoking - has been
largely solved: Recent research has documented that relatively simple
devices called vaporizers can allow marijuana users to inhale the active
ingredients - thus getting the instantaneous relief they need - with almost
none of the irritants in smoke.

Eight states now have laws allowing medical use of marijuana with a
physician's recommendation, and those laws have been successful. Last year,
the General Accounting Office - the investigative arm of Congress -
interviewed 37 law enforcement agencies in four of those states, reporting
that the majority of those interviewed "indicated that medical marijuana
laws had had little impact on their law enforcement activities."

Some feared that medical marijuana laws would increase teen use of the drug.
But the experience of California, whose medical marijuana law has been in
place since 1996, has shown such fears to be unfounded. According to the
official California Student Survey, teenage marijuana use, after rising
steadily through the first half of the '90s, has dropped sharply since
medical marijuana became legal. An independent study commissioned by the
state to investigate the law's effect on young people found no evidence that
it had encouraged or increased adolescent marijuana use.

As a conservative - a truer one, evidently, than the New York Conservative
Party, which opposed the medical marijuana bill - I'm not surprised that
common sense is bubbling up from the state level, while federal marijuana
law remains stuck in the 1930s. Federal law will change eventually, because
science, common sense and human decency require it.

In the meantime, New York should do what it can under state law to make sure
that the sick are no longer collateral damage of the war on drugs.
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MAP posted-by: Josh