Alter Thinking on Marijuana as Medicine
San Francisco- Ten years ago, on Nov. 5, 1996, California voters created shock waves by passing Proposition 215 - the first law effectively removing criminal penalties for medical use of marijuana. I was a journalist then, but what happened in the following years turned me into an activist.
As a report specializing in health and social issues, I got an assignment from AIDS Treatment News to investigate what the medical literature said about marijuana. After spending many hours in the medical library of the University of California, San Francisco, I emerged with a stack of medical journal articles - and was completely blown away.
Despite federal hostility that greatly impeded research, literally thousands of years of evidence showed that marijuana relieved nausea, vomiting, certain kinds of pain and other disabling symptoms. Moreover, it did so with remarkable safety. One item that startled me was a 1995 editorial in The Lancet - one of the world's top medical journals - which state, “The smoking of cannabis is not harmful to health.”
This was a slam-dunk, I thought. If the voters of California break the ice, America's prohibition on the medical use of marijuana will collapse under the weight of its own stupidity.
It wasn't so easy. California did start a trend: Eleven states, containing one-fifth of the U.S. population, now have medical marijuana laws.
But even before the California vote, the federal government's disinformation machine went into overdrive. A decade later, federal officials continue to claim that marijuana has no proven benefits and is too dangerous to be used as medicine, despite the fact that those claims are laughably false.
Since 1996, research involving HIV/AIDS patients has shown that medical marijuana is safe, does indeed stimulate the appetite, and helps patients suffering nausea from their anti-HIV drugs to adhere to these difficult regimens.
New research shows that THC, the component responsible for marijuana's “high,” might prevent Alzheimer's disease. It interferes with the development of plaques that encrust the brains of Alzheimer's patients, which seem to play a central role in the disease's devastating effect on brain functions. And it does so much more effectively than any known drug.
Medically, the case is closed. Marijuana works, often when conventional drugs fail. It's safe - literally safer than Tylenol, which causes about 500 overdose deaths each year in this country. The case is closed as far as the public in concerned as well. The latest national survey - a Gallup poll released in November 2005 - found 78 percent support for allowing physicians to prescribe marijuana.
State legislators have begun to catch on. Three of the newest medical marijuana laws - in Hawaii, Vermont, and Rhode Island - were passed by legislatures. The only missing element is in Washington. Congress and the Bush administration still cling to the federal law that incredibly treats marijuana more harshly than cocaine, morphine, and methamphetamine, all of which are permitted for medical use.
It's time for our elected representative to acknowledge science, compassion, and simple common sense, and end our government's insane war on the sick. This debate should have ended years ago.
