Date: Thu, 13 Jan 2000
Subject: Medical Marijuana Users Speak Out In Washington Post
DrugSense FOCUS Alert #153 January 13, 2000
Medical Marijuana Users Speak Out In Washington Post
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DrugSense FOCUS Alert #153 January 13, 2000
“Pain or Prison,” an oped piece written by three medical marijuana
patients and published in the Washington Post needs little
introduction. The trio makes their case clearly and
convincingly.
What’s remarkable about the piece is that it was printed in the Post,
a newspaper which has offered little support for medical marijuana in
the past. Please write a letter to the newspaper to applaud editors
for highlighting these important viewpoints. Please also suggest that
far from being controversial, the question of medical marijuana has a
simple answer, as long as the issue is studied with a little
compassion and common sense.
Thanks for your effort and support.
WRITE A LETTER TODAY
It’s not what others do it’s what YOU do
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CONTACT INFO
Source: Washington Post (DC)
Contact: http://washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/edit/letters/letterform.htm
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Newshawk: Jo-D and Tom-E
Pubdate: Wed, 12 Jan 2000
Source: Washington Post (DC)
Copyright: 2000 The Washington Post Company
Page: A19
Address: 1150 15th Street Northwest, Washington, DC 20071
Feedback: http://washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/edit/letters/letterform.htm
Website: http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Authors: Greg Scott, Barbara Douglass and Jim Harden
Note: Greg Scott lives in Florida, Barbara Douglas in Iowa and Jim Harden
in Virginia.
Also: The Marijuana Policy Project (MPP) worked with these three
patients to write and submit this in early December, when the federal
government’s new medical marijuana research guidelines formally took
effect. Had MPP paid for an advertisement this size, it would have cost
$7,800. http://www.mpp.org/
PAIN OR PRISON?
Last March the three of us received our 15 minutes of fame. The National
Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Medicine (IOM) featured our medical case
histories in its landmark report, “Marijuana and Medicine: Assessing the
Science Base.” IOM included us as three living examples to illustrate its
conclusion that “there are some limited circumstances in which we recommend
smoking marijuana for medical uses.”
One of us, Greg, smokes marijuana to treat nausea and appetite loss
caused by AIDS. Barbara uses it to treat pain and muscle spasms
caused by multiple sclerosis. Jim needs it to treat nausea from liver
disease and the pain and spasms caused by reflex sympathetic dystrophy.
Each of us has experienced tremendous suffering. We know what it’s
like to be overcome by nausea so severe that one has to leave the
dinner table to vomit. We’ve felt pain more agonizing than we’d ever
imagined possible. We’ve been unable to walk, whether from muscle
spasms or from being literally on our deathbeds.
Marijuana has helped us. It is not a cure, but it greatly reduces our
suffering, permits us to move around and enables us to eat.
There is one major difference among us: Barbara is one of eight
patients in the entire nation who have permission to use medicinal
marijuana through a federal “compassionate use” program, which has
been closed to all new applicants since 1992. Greg and Jim are not so
fortunate – we risk spending a year in federal prison every time we
light a marijuana cigarette.
IOM recognized that we – and countless others like us – should not be
punished for using marijuana to alleviate suffering. The report
recommended that the federal government open a compassionate-use
program to give seriously ill people immediate legal access to the
substance.
IOM’s findings gave us hope. Soon, we thought, the U.S. Department
of Health and Human Services (HHS) would change federal policy so that
thousands of patients nationwide would be able to stop worrying about
being arrested.
But we were mistaken. HHS’s new medicinal marijuana research
guidelines took effect last month, and to our shock, they explicitly
rejected IOM’s recommendation to allow individual patients to apply
for permission to use medicinal marijuana.
When the federal government commissioned the IOM report in 1997, the
stated purpose was to receive guidance on what to do about medicinal
marijuana. Was it too much to expect the HHS would implement IOM’s
recommendations?
Moreover, HHS’s new research guidelines place a much greater burden on
medicinal marijuana researchers than on drug companies that develop
and study newly synthesized pharmaceuticals. It is simply too
difficult for researchers to conduct the kinds of studies needed to
obtain FDA approval of marijuana as a prescription medicine.
This isn’t just our opinion. A statement urging HHS to modify its new
guidelines was signed by a range of organizations including the AIDS
Action Council, the National Association of People With AIDS, the
California Pharmacists Association and the National Black Police
Association. The coalition argues that “many of the new guidelines
would still be too cumbersome to enable research to move forward as
expeditiously as possible” and that patients who are already using
medicinal marijuana should not have to live in fear of being arrested.
We hope HHS takes heed. Our lives depend on it.
Greg Scott lives in Florida, Barbara Douglas in Iowa and Jim Harden in
Virginia.
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SAMPLE LETTER (sent)
To the Editor of the Washington Post:
Thank you for printing “Pain or Prison” (Jan. 12), written by three
medical marijuana patients. The title sums up the utterly cruel (and
utterly absurd) position in which marijuana prohibition places people
like the authors. Why should anyone be forced to face such a horrible
choice?
The authors, citing the federal government’s own study, demolish the
myth that marijuana can’t be medicine. So why are the vast majority of
Americans who find relief with marijuana denied legal access? The drug
warriors tell us that medical marijuana patients must suffer so a
“mixed message” won’t be sent to young people. If, the drug warriors
reason, young people realize that marijuana can have some positive
applications, their little minds will be so confused they will become
unable to just say no. Aside from the insulting view of our children’s
intellectual capabilities, this view places a crushing burden on the
youngsters.
It’s been many years since my youth, but if I realized then that sick
people were being persecuted and denied appropriate medicine on the
pretext that I was being protected somehow, I would have felt awful.
It might have even been enough to drive me to drugs.
Stephen Young
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Prepared by Stephen Young – http://home.att.net/~theyoungfamily Focus
Alert Specialist