Should we legalize use of medical marijuana?

THE BATTLE OVER medical marijuana heightened last month when federal agents raided a Santa Cruz medicinal-marijuana farm owned by Valerie and Michael Corral. While marijuana is illegal under federal law, California is one of nine states, including Washington, that have passed laws allowing some patients with debilitating or terminal illnesses to use marijuana, with a doctor's recommendation. Here are two opposing views in this latest chapter of the war on drugs.

Yes: Federal crusade brutalizes ill people

By Ethan Nadelmann
Special to The Times

The war on drugs keeps getting bigger and meaner. Just when you think the tide is beginning to turn, someone in charge takes it a step further. What happened in California last month could happen in Washington soon.

On Sept. 5, Drug Enforcement Administration agents armed with automatic weapons raided a hospice on the outskirts of Santa Cruz because it grew and used marijuana for its patients, most of them terminally ill.

The founder and director, Valerie Corral, who uses marijuana herself to control debilitating seizures as a result of head trauma following a 1973 car accident, was taken away in her pajamas. Suzanne Pfeil, a paraplegic patient suffering from postpolio syndrome, was told to stand up and then handcuffed in bed when she could not. All the plants were destroyed.

Of all the medical-marijuana clubs, this was the one most true to the hospice spirit. It was a collective, run on a nonprofit basis. Valerie and her husband had created a place that brought peace, love and some measure of freedom from pain to those who came. Like the Brompton Cocktails found in British hospices, which can contain heroin or morphine, cocaine, alcohol and other pharmaceutical ingredients, the medicine was unconventional but effective.

Valerie's hospice was legal under California law, a product of Proposition 215, the 1996 ballot initiative in which 56 percent of voters endorsed the legalization of marijuana for medical purposes. She was and is a member of California Attorney General Bill Lockyer's 1999 medical marijuana policy task force. Her hospice was run openly with cooperation from state and local authorities.

The DEA's raid, and the clear directive from the Bush administration and Attorney General John Ashcroft to assault and close this facility and others, is a travesty of justice . one that did much to terrorize American citizens and absolutely nothing to protect or improve their health, welfare or safety.

More than two-thirds of Americans believe that marijuana should be legal for medical purposes. Medical-marijuana initiatives have won in all eight states where they've been on the ballot, and would likely win in all but a handful. The Canadian government is taking steps to make marijuana available to patients north of our border.

Federal drug policy now lies in the hands of those who might best be described as the John Birchers of the drug war. Today's drug-war politicians are out of step with the public but they don't care. They're on their own crusade, one in which marijuana is as sinful as miscegenation was to the Southern racists.

They're also practitioners of the big lie. "On the face of it," says John Walters, director of the federal Office on National Drug Control Policy, "the idea that desperately sick people could be helped by smoking an intoxicating weed seems ... medieval. It is, in fact, absurd."

Never mind thousands of reports by patients and doctors, dozens of studies and the National Academy of Sciences' conclusion that marijuana is therapeutically effective for a number of painful, chronic and terminal medical conditions for which pharmaceutical drugs are often ineffective or introduce negative side effects.

The hundreds of thousands of Americans who use marijuana for medical reasons, and the doctors who care for them, deserve a hearing in which they can defend their use of this unconventional medicine. They deserve the opportunity to give sworn testimony, and to confront the sworn testimony of those who persecute them. That's a job for Congress.

The raid on the Santa Cruz medical marijuana facility was, of course, about more than marijuana. It's part and parcel of the same insanity that drives the bigger war on drugs ... one that now incarcerates more people for drug-law violations in the United States than all of Western Europe (with a much larger population) incarcerates for all crimes; one that prefers to sacrifice tens of thousands of lives and billions of dollars rather than make sterile syringes legally available to reduce the spread of HIV and AIDS.

More than that, it provides insight into the potential abuse of police power in another war without end on which we have now embarked. Ashcroft ordered a raid on a medical-marijuana hospice not because he had to, but because he possessed both the will and the power to do so. A Congress and a country preoccupied with many other concerns barely noticed.

Is the Santa Cruz raid, and more generally the war on drugs, a preview of what lies ahead in the war on terrorism? Is the future one in which increasingly empowered and emboldened federal police agencies intimidate, arrest and even terrorize not just those who pose true threats to security, but also those who challenge little more than the moralistic convictions and political prejudices of power-holders in the nation's capital?

I live for the day when our children will look back on the drug wars of today the way we now look back on Jim Crow and the Palmer raids after World War I, the Japanese American internment camps of World War II and the McCarthyite persecutions of the 1950s. That is my moral crusade, one shared by more and more other Americans as well.

Ethan Nadelmann is executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, a New York-based organization that promotes alternatives to the war on drugs based on science, compassion, public health and human rights.

No: Addictive drug has no medical value

Bt Gregory M. Gassett

Special to The Times

Arguments for the legalization of "medical" marijuana do little to ensure that the facts concerning marijuana are openly discussed and only further confuse the issue for the American public. The truth is that marijuana is a highly addictive drug and has no medical value.

Marijuana is one of the most abused drugs in this country. It is one of the first illegal drugs young people are exposed to and some experiment with. Using marijuana often lowers their inhibition against trying other, less-forgiving drugs such as Ecstasy, cocaine, methamphetamine and heroin. The drug's effects cause memory loss, trouble with problem-solving, loss of motor skills and an increase in heart rate, panic attacks and anxiety. Marijuana weakens the body's immune system, which further complicates any potential recovery from a serious medical condition.

Marijuana trafficked across the United States is up to 25 times more potent than it was in the 1960s, which makes it much more addictive. Drug traffickers in Mexico and Canada flood this country with vast amounts of marijuana, and citizens of this country grow it with little regard for the damage they are causing. The misleading message that young people receive concerning this drug contributes to their decision to use marijuana.

If adults are misconstruing the facts surrounding marijuana use for their own benefit, how can a 10- or 11-year-old make a decision on the harmful effects of marijuana or other drugs? If elected officials openly violate the law by distributing marijuana, as recently occurred in California, how can they possibly have the best interests of their community and its young people at heart?

The insinuation that smoking marijuana has widespread support and can assist people suffering from AIDS, Lou Gehrig's disease and many other terminal illnesses is misleading. While some people openly support the legalization of marijuana for medical purposes, it is from a misinformed position.

It does not matter that they are elected political figures; a misguided decision is still a bad one, no matter who makes it. Legalizing marijuana through a political process bypasses the safeguards established by the Food and Drug Administration to safely test all drugs.

Others utilize the medical-marijuana claim as a ploy to legalize marijuana altogether, and then will work toward the legalization of other dangerous drugs as well. They work to misinform, mislead and weaken your resolve. Operators of "compassion marijuana distribution centers" have attempted to legitimize themselves in California, Oregon, Washington and elsewhere for too long.

Misinformation causes confusion for the public seeking to make a rational decision on this issue. Legalizers often cite a 1999 White House-commissioned study by the Institute of Medicine, which they say concluded that marijuana has medical benefits. This is not true. The study concluded that smoking marijuana is not good medicine. It went on to state that although marijuana delivers the active ingredient tetra hydrocannabinol (THC), smoking marijuana also delivers harmful substances, including most of those found in tobacco smoke.

No medicine prescribed today is ever smoked. Marijuana contains over 400 chemicals, and when smoked it easily introduces cancer-causing chemicals to the body. Does this sound like good medicine? Marijuana contains numerous compounds and could never deliver the precise effect sought by a medical doctor assisting a patient.

The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) supports research into the study of all drugs, including THC. As a result of that research, Marinol was developed, and has been available to the public since 1985. The active ingredient in Marinol is synthetic THC, which battles the nausea and other discomforts associated with chemotherapy in cancer patients, and loss of appetite, often associated with AIDS patients. Marinol is an alternative drug approved by the medical community and the Food and Drug Administration.

We have all witnessed the horrific consequences of drug abuse in our country over many years, and it is appalling. The DEA, and other law-enforcement agencies, take the legal measures necessary to combat drug traffickers, including those who grow and distribute marijuana, and who often hide behind "medical marijuana" claims that have misinformed and confused the public.

Accepting the notion that marijuana is harmless leads young people to experiment with it, and allows legalizers the path they seek to undermine the successful drug-prevention programs that law enforcement, community leaders and schools have engaged in.

You can make a difference. Speak out against the false claims of legalizers and put this issue to rest. Enough is enough, America, and it's time that you stood your ground and said so.

Gregory M. Gassett is assistant special agent in charge for the Seattle Field Division of the Drug Enforcement Administration.