ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, January 17, 1997 TAG: 9701170036
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-9 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DENNIS PERON
I CO-WROTE California's Proposition 215, the medical-marijuana act, as a tribute to my lover, Jonathan West, who died of AIDS. Marijuana was the one drug, among more than 20 others he was legally prescribed, that eased his nausea and stimulated his appetite. It also cheered him up. I wanted to leave for Jonathan, and all the young people who have died of AIDS, a legacy of love and compassion.
What started out as a eulogy for Jonathan has become a much larger and deeper mission of mercy, embracing the sick and dying from all walks of life. And voters in California and Arizona, where a broader proposition was on the ballot, approved the idea that patients could legitimately be given marijuana if it was recommended by a physician. In Arizona, patients also could get heroin or LSD, if it was recommended by two licensed doctors.
In California, Proposition 215, otherwise known as the Compassionate Use Act, was passed for Scott Hager, a 34-year-old Para-Olympic athlete whose house was raided by police for growing marijuana plants that he used to control violent muscle spasms caused by his quadriplegia.
It's for Byron Stamate, a 74-year-old retiree who was arrested for growing marijuana to treat his girlfriend's chronic back pain.
For Samuel Skipper, an AIDS patient, who was arrested for growing his own marijuana and went to prison, where he was stabbed and beaten up by inmates. For Karen Thompson's 15-year-old son with Crohn's disease who sometimes threw up 40 to 50 times a day after chemotherapy for his illness. For Hazel Rodgers, a 78-year-old glaucoma sufferer who credits marijuana with helping to save her eyesight. And for John Boyce, a law-abiding man who was pained at the end of his life that he had to do something illegal to get relief from his chemotherapy nausea.
We tried to help these people using the legislative process. We finally prevailed. But the Clinton administration is still taking a hard line. It is threatening doctors that they could face criminal charges and lose their licenses to prescribe many kinds of drugs if they recommend marijuana, which remains a Schedule I controlled substance.
In 1993, in response to nonbinding referendums passed in San Francisco and Santa Cruz, the California legislature passed SJR8, which urged the federal government to change marijuana to Schedule II, allowing physicians to prescribe it. California became the 37th state to do so. But federal policy did not change.
In 1994, the California legislature passed a bill to permit physicians to prescribe marijuana. Gov. Pete Wilson vetoed the bill, despite bipartisan support and the California Medical Association's endorsement.
In 1995, with bipartisan support, the California legislature passed AB1529, which would have let patients cultivating and possessing marijuana avoid arrest by citing medical necessity. Again, Wilson vetoed it.
This California legislative history explains why patients resorted to a statewide ballot initiative. And why the proposition won 56 percent of the state's voters.
Despite an overwhelming body of evidence (both anecdotal and clinical) supporting marijuana's medicinal value, the Drug Enforcement Agency has refused to budge. Recently, retired Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey, President Clinton's drug czar, announced that the Institute of Medicine at the National Academy of Sciences would spend $1 million studying the medical use of marijuana and report back in 18 months. Let's hope its conclusion matches what we already know.
Meanwhile, the administration wants to arrest doctors who approve marijuana for their patients. Will it start with the Food and Drug Administration's own Dr. Alan Leshner, who monthly supplies marijuana from the FDA's Mississippi marijuana farm to eight patients?
At one point, the federal government said it would bring charges against doctors. Now, it says it wants more time to do research. How many oncologists, AIDS specialists and neurologists will be harassed - and how many patients must suffer - before the administration stops this insanity?
We drafted the Compassionate Use Act of 1996 so doctors who trust their own experience could recommend marijuana for medical use without breaking the law. The initiative specifically said ``approval or recommendation'' by a physician to let doctors express their opinion about marijuana without violating federal statutes.
This wording protects patients from incarceration by relying on a doctor's freedom of speech under the First Amendment. Physicians shouldn't have to risk losing their medical practice by simply exercising their constitutional rights. And patients shouldn't have to endure needless suffering while the federal government ``studies the issue.''
The government's war on drugs is well-intended, but it has always been a war on Americans. I believe that hard drugs, such as heroin and cocaine, should never be legalized, but drug addiction should be treated medically. And when a drug like marijuana has shown its medical effectiveness, it shouldn't be denied to those who would most benefit. Why criminalize them? And why penalize their doctors? In California and Arizona, the people have spoken. They want a new drug policy.
Dennis Peron directs Californians for Compassionate Use, a not-for-profit group advocating legalization of medicinal marijuana treatment. He wrote this for Newsday.
- L.A. Times-Washington Post News Service
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