So which excuse will they use now?
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New Study Shows Medical Value of Marijuana
By Rob Kampia, AlterNet
Posted on February 22, 2007, Printed on February 22, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/48322/
Ever since California and other states began passing medical marijuana
laws in 1996, the federal government has claimed that -- as a 2003 White
House press release put it -- "research has not demonstrated that smoked
marijuana is safe and effective medicine." A new study, just published
in the journal Neurology, definitively refutes that claim and underlines
the urgent need for the federal government to change its prohibitionist
policies.
The study, conducted by Dr. Donald Abrams of the University of
California at San Francisco, found marijuana to be safe and effective at
treating peripheral neuropathy, which causes great suffering to HIV/AIDS
patients. This type of extreme pain, which is caused by damage to the
nerves, can make patients feel like their feet and hands are on fire, or
being stabbed with a knife. Similar pain is seen in a number of other
illnesses, including multiple sclerosis and diabetes, and cannot be
treated effectively with conventional pain medications. Standard pain
medicines -- even addictive, dangerous narcotics -- have little effect
on this type of pain.
Marijuana doesn't cure neuropathy, but in the UCSF study marijuana was
clearly shown to give relief. In this randomized, double-blind,
placebo-controlled trial (the design that's considered the "gold
standard" of medical research), a majority of patients had a greater
than 30 percent reduction in pain after smoking marijuana. For many,
that level of relief means having a bearable quality of life.
This result is all the more remarkable because researchers like Abrams
are only allowed to test government-supplied marijuana, which is of
notoriously poor quality. There's every reason to believe the results
would be even better if scientists were permitted to study a
better-quality product.
Abrams' study is only the latest in a growing mountain of research
showing that medical marijuana can provide real -- and potentially even
life-saving -- benefits. In a study published last year of patients
being treated for the hepatitis C virus (HCV), those who used marijuana
to curb the nausea and other noxious side effects of anti-HCV drugs were
significantly more likely to complete their treatment. As a result, the
marijuana-using patients were three times more likely to clear the
deadly virus from their bodies -- in other words, to be cured -- than
those not using marijuana.
Clearly, the White House and its drug czar, John Walters, should abandon
their rigid, unscientific rejection of medical marijuana and start
reshaping federal policy to match medical reality.
Unfortunately, this is unlikely; what's more likely is that the Bush
administration will ignore the scientific data during its last two years
in power, just as it has for the past six years.
That puts the ball in Congress's court. There are a number of actions
Congress can take to put federal medical marijuana policy on a path
toward sanity.
The first, and simplest, is to prohibit the Drug Enforcement
Administration from spending money to raid and arrest medical marijuana
patients and caregivers in the 11 states where the medical use of
marijuana is legal under state law. This taxpayer-friendly act would
remove the cloud of fear that now hangs over tens of thousands of
desperately ill Americans and those who care for them.
But that should be just the beginning. Everything about federal medical
marijuana policy should be reconsidered. That includes the arbitrary
rules that needlessly hamper research, as well as the absurd law that
classifies cocaine and methamphetamine as having more medical value than
marijuana, which is grouped with heroin and LSD as having "no currently
accepted medical use."
The guiding principle must be to handle medical marijuana as science,
common sense, and simple human decency dictate. Recent research leaves
no doubt that our government's war on the sick and dying must end
immediately.
Rob Kampia is executive director of the Marijuana Policy Project in
Washington, DC.
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http://www.alternet.org/drugreporter/48322/
--
John Hachmann aa #1782
"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities"
-Voltaire
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