ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, January 30, 1997 TAG: 9701300038
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: BOSTON
SOURCE: Associated Press
The New England Journal of Medicine has come out in favor of allowing doctors to prescribe marijuana for medical purposes, calling the threat of government sanctions ``misguided, heavy-handed and inhumane.''
``Whatever their reasons, federal officials are out of step with the public,'' Dr. Jerome Kassirer, the journal's editor, wrote in an editorial in Thursday's issue. The journal is one of the world's most prestigious medical publications.
After voters in Arizona and California passed propositions letting doctors prescribe pot for medical uses, Attorney General Janet Reno said doctors who do this could lose their prescription-writing privileges, be excluded from Medicare and Medicaid and even be prosecuted.
Some doctors believe marijuana can relieve internal eye pressure in glaucoma, control nausea in cancer patients on chemotherapy and combat the severe weight loss seen in AIDS patients. However, administration officials note that such uses of marijuana have not been proved.
Kassirer said marijuana is safer than some drugs used legally for some of the same conditions, such as morphine.
Furthermore, he said experiments to prove marijuana's value would be hard to do because of the difficulty of measuring nausea and other such sensations.
``What really counts for a therapy with this kind of safety margin is whether a seriously ill patient feels relief as a result of the intervention, not whether a controlled trial `proves' its efficacy,'' Kassirer wrote.
In a written response, retired Army Gen. Barry McCaffrey, director of the Office of National Drug Policy, said marijuana might someday be approved for specific medical purposes.
``But up to this point, smoke is not a medicine,'' McCaffrey said. ``Other treatments have been deemed safer and more effective than a psychoactive burning carcinogen self-induced through one's throat.''
LENGTH: Short : 45 linesby CNB