Medical Marijuana - Opinions & Comments

THE HOSPICE RAID AND THE WAR ON DRUGS
By Ethan Nadelmann

September 19, 2002
San Diego Union Tribune
Copyright 2002 Union-Tribune Publishing Co.
Nadelmann is executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance ( www.drugpolicy.org ),
an organization promoting alternatives to the war on drugs.

The war on drugs keeps getting bigger and meaner.

Just when you think the tide is beginning to turn, someone in charge takes it a step further.

Last week, DEA agents armed with automatic weapons raided a hospice on the outskirts of Santa Cruz because it grew and used marijuana for its patients, most of them terminally ill. The founder and director, Valerie Corral, who uses marijuana herself to control debilitating seizures as a result of head trauma following a 1973 car accident, was taken away in her pajamas. Suzanne Pfeil, a paraplegic patient suffering from postpolio syndrome, was told to stand up and then was handcuffed in bed when she could not. All the plants were destroyed.

Of all the medical marijuana clubs, this was the one most true to the hospice spirit. It was a collective, run on a nonprofit basis. Valerie and her husband had created a place that brought peace, love and some measure of freedom from pain to those who came. Like the Brompton Cocktails found in British hospices, which can contain heroin or morphine, cocaine, alcohol and other pharmaceutical ingredients, the medicine was unconventional but effective.

Valerie's hospice was legal under California law, a product of Proposition 215, the 1996 ballot initiative in which 56 percent of voters endorsed the legalization of marijuana for medical purposes. She was and is a member of Attorney General Bill Lockyer's 1999 medical marijuana policy task force. Her hospice was run openly with cooperation from state and local authorities.

The DEA's raid, and the clear directive from the Bush administration and its attorney general to assault and close this facility and others, is a travesty of justice - one that did much to terrorize American citizens and absolutely nothing to protect or improve their health, welfare or safety.

More than two-thirds of Americans believe that marijuana should be legal for medical purposes. Medical marijuana initiatives have won in all eight states where they have been on the ballot, and would likely win in all but a handful. The Canadian government is taking steps to make marijuana available to patients north of our border.

Federal drug policy now lies in the hands of those who might best be described as the John Birchers of the drug war. Like the Southern racists who blocked civil rights reforms in the 1950s and 1960s, today's drug war politicians are out of step with the public, but they don't care. They're on their own crusade, one in which marijuana is as sinful as miscegenation was to the Southern racists or homosexuality is to today's religious fundamentalists.

They're also practitioners of the big lie. "On the face of it," says John Walters, "the idea that desperately sick people could be helped by smoking an intoxicating weed seems ... medieval. It is, in fact, absurd." Never mind thousands of reports by patients and doctors, dozens of studies and the National Academy of Sciences' conclusion that marijuana is therapeutically effective for a number of painful, chronic and terminal medical conditions for which pharmaceutical drugs are often ineffective or introduce negative side effects.

The hundreds of thousands of Americans who use marijuana for medical reasons, and the doctors who care for them, deserve a hearing in which they can defend their use of this unconventional medicine. They deserve the opportunity to give sworn testimony, and to confront the sworn testimony of those who persecute them. That's a job for Congress.

The raid on the Santa Cruz medical marijuana facility was, of course, about more than marijuana. It's part and parcel of the same insanity that drives the bigger war on drugs - one that now incarcerates more people for drug law violations in the United States than all of western Europe (with a much larger population) incarcerates for everything; one that prefers to sacrifice tens of thousands of lives and billions of dollars rather than make sterile syringes legally available to reduce the spread of HIV/AIDS.

More than that, it provides insight into the potential abuse of police power in another war without end on which we have now enbarked. The attorney general of the United States ordered a raid on a medical marijuana hospice not because he had to, but because he possessed both the will and the power to do so. A Congress and a country preoccupied with many other concerns barely noticed.

Is the Santa Cruz raid, and more generally the war on drugs, a preview of what lies ahead in the war on terrorism? Is the future one in which increasingly empowered and emboldened federal police agencies intimidate, arrest and even terrorize not just those who pose true threats to security but also those who challenge little more than the moralistic convictions and political prejudices of power holders in the nation's capital?

I live for the day when our children will look back on the drug wars of today the way we now look back on Jim Crow and the Palmer raids after the First World War, the Japanese-American internment camps of World War II, and the McCarthyite persecutions of the 1950s. That is my moral crusade, and one shared by more and more other Americans as well.
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US WI: OPED: Federal Agents' Actions Reveal The Real Dope
Pubdate: Tue, 24 Sep 2002
Source: Capital Times, The (WI)
Copyright: 2002 The Capital Times
Contact: tctvoice@madison.com
Website: http://www.captimes.com/
Author: Mitch Albom

FEDERAL AGENTS' ACTIONS REVEAL THE REAL DOPE

Her mornings are never that good anyhow because she wakes up with a leg that is withered from polio. Still, this morning was truly bad. She opened her eyes and saw five federal agents pointing rifles at her head.

"Get your hands up!" one of them yelled. "Get out of bed!" yelled another. She told them she was sorry, but she couldn't because she was crippled. They put her in handcuffs and again told her to get up.

Again, she said she couldn't because she used leg braces and crutches and she needed her hands for those.

"Eventually," Suzanne Pfeil says, "they went after the others. They left me lying there, handcuffed in the bed, for an hour."

This was in Santa Cruz, Calif., earlier this month, at a hospice-co-op facility where 80 percent of the people are terminally ill. Does it sound like a place that federal agents need to burst into and raid like something out of "Silence of the Lambs"?

This is our war on drugs.

Pfeil's offense -- and that of the others in her hospice -- is that they use and grow marijuana for medical purposes. This is perfectly legal in Santa Cruz, and it is perfectly legal in the state of California. But under federal law, marijuana is still considered a controlled substance.

So you have dying patients who are pitied by their city and state and outlawed by their country.

Maybe that's why they call it dope.

It's Not About Getting High

Now, let me say this. I don't smoke marijuana. I never have. I was one of those square kids in high school who caused my cooler friends to occasionally lower their voices or disappear to the bathroom for 15 minutes.

So I have no personal agenda -- except one. Compassion. Patients sick enough to need marijuana deserve such compassion. They are trying to relieve their pain. To ease their nausea. They are trying to win a few precious minutes from cancer or AIDS or epilepsy or arthritis. Would you not want that for your ailing mother? For your terminally ill child?

Yet there is a notion among critics that these patients are locking the doors and throwing a Cheech and Chong party, mocking the government's naivete.

Nothing could be dumber -- or further from the truth. I have spent a lot of time with sick people whose only relief is what marijuana gives them. Believe me, they would gladly trade their disease for your sobriety. Any day. Any minute.

"I have post-polio syndrome," Pfiel says. "It involves an incredible amount of muscle and nerve pain. I'm allergic to most pharmaceutical drugs. The marijuana relieves my pain and helps me cope.

"For most us, that's the situation. We're not getting high. We're trying to feel better. Isn't that what medicine is supposed to be about?"

Helping The Less Fortunate

The mayor of Santa Cruz was appalled at the federal agents who busted the co-op. So was the California attorney general. But the Drug Enforcement Administration clung stubbornly to its credo. "Our responsibility is to enforce our controlled substances laws," said Asa Hutchinson, the DEA administrator, "and one of those is marijuana."

So despite the state's blessing and the obvious non-threat of this small, compassionate place, here came the feds, guns-a-blazing.

And you thought it was the stoners who couldn't think clearly.

Look. This is hypocrisy. Last week at a football game, a father got his 14-year-old son so drunk on beer the kid had to have his stomach pumped. But we sell beer openly. I know of people who sneak cigarettes to lung cancer patients. Nobody stops them.

But for some reason, when the sick and dying seek relief through marijuana, they are dopers, potheads or, even worse, criminals.

"It's strange to me that our government does not want to see people who are suffering take care of themselves and do better," Pfiel says.

Right. Mornings, when you're sick and dying, are tough enough. You don't need guns pointed at your head.

US CA: PUB LTE: The Right To Be Free Of Pain
Pubdate: Tue, 24 Sep 2002
Source: Santa Cruz Sentinel (CA)
Copyright: 2002 Santa Cruz Sentinel
Contact: editorial@santa-cruz.com
Website: http://www.santacruzsentinel.com/
Author: Jennifer Sparks

THE RIGHT TO BE FREE OF PAIN

Thank you for giving so much press and engaging in debate about the recent events surrounding medical marijuana. As a caretaker and someone who has watched people living and dying with cancer and AIDS, I felt I should add my own opinions.

People who are dying or going through painful procedures are given a slew of drugs to help deal with pain and suffering. Opium and its derivatives are among the choice painkillers given in cases of extreme pain.

Santa Cruz resident and City Council candidate Phil Baer held up a sign at the rally "decrying the connection he sees between marijuana use and heroin problems in the Beach Flats." I have news for this candidate: heroin, in its processed and controlled form of morphine, is already legal. Maybe his time would be better spent picketing the thousands of hospitals, nursing homes and hospice sights where morphine is used on a minute-to-minute basis as pain control. Is this adding to the Beach Flats' heroin problem? I think not, and these people who are suffering and using marijuana as a treatment for diseases are not either.

Another argument I heard was that medical marijuana is a bad example for kids. As the Sentinel already brought up Martin Luther King, I don't have to go far for an example of people who broke the law to follow their beliefs and increase their freedom. Few could argue that Martin Luther King never broke the law, and yet he never broke the fundamental law of this country that all people should be treated with dignity and respect. The right to be free of pain and to work with a doctor to alleviate suffering is a fundamental right. If we have to fight to uphold it, our children should watch and be proud.

Jennifer Sparks
Santa Cruz

US CA: Hundreds Protest Ban On Medical Marijuana
Pubdate: Wed, 25 Sep 2002
Source: Pasadena Star-News, The (CA)
Copyright: 2002 MediaNews Group, Inc. and Los Angeles Newspaper Group, Inc.
Contact: jim.lawitz@sgvn.com
Website: http://www.pasadenastarnews.com/
Author: Chris Rizo

HUNDREDS PROTEST BAN ON MEDICAL MARIJUANA

SACRAMENTO -- Declaring that the war on drugs has unjustly been extended to the seriously ill in California who use marijuana at the advice of their physicians , hundreds protested at the state Capitol on Monday, calling on the federal government to leave people's medicine alone.

The estimated 500 demonstrators, which included public officials from around the state, came here by the busloads, including a caravan from Los Angeles County all to urge federal officials to respect California's landmark, voter-approved medical marijuana law.

Aboard one of those buses, Marie Santiago, 56, said she made the eight-hour trip to protest the federal government's recent crackdown against medical marijuana growers and those seriously ill and injured patients, who like herself, smoke pot "so life is worth living,' she said, flashing the ornate rhinestone-studded cigarette case in which she stores her stash.

"Before I got cancer, I had never even taken a drag off a cigarette,' said Santiago, of West Covina. "But the chemo made me so sick that I had to so something,' declaring, "I'm in pain. I am not a criminal.'

But, the grandmother of five is a criminal in the eyes of the federal government, and she knows it.

Also on the Capitol's South Lawn picketing was Roger Moore of South Pasadena, who said he has been smoking pot since 1996. He credits his daily toke with helping him to offset the side effects of his chemotherapy treatments for an illness he declined to disclose.

"I can take a hit or two of marijuana, and not have to get up the first thing in the morning to puke my brains out, like I did for years,' said Moore, who got his medical marijuana from the Los Angeles Cannabis Resource Center until federal officials raided the West Hollywood facility on Oct. 25, 2001, confiscating nearly 900 plants and the records of its members.

Santiago and Moore are among the hundreds of medical marijuana users caught in the middle of an intensifying turf battle between state officials and the federal government.

It's a classic fight between federal supremacy and states' rights, advocates say.

The discord centers on whether the federal government should continue to enforce its unequivocal ban on marijuana, or whether it should turn a blind eye to certain cases, since Californians overwhelmingly approved a 1996 ballot initiative that allows for the use of marijuana with a physician's signed recommendation.

California is one of nine states where voters have allowed physicians to prescribe marijuana to patients suffering from such conditions as AIDS, cancer and multiple sclerosis.

Earlier this month, California Attorney General Bill Lockyer sent a letter to U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft and DEA Chief Asa Hutchinson, requesting a meeting to discuss recent actions against growers by the DEA.

In a written statement to organizers, U.S. Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Los Angeles, said he is "very disheartened and outraged' by the recent federally orchestrated actions against medical marijuana growers.

Until recently, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency adhered to a Clinton administration guideline that stated federal agents would not pursue cases of marijuana cultivation if fewer that 100 plants were involved. But so far, several small-scale medical marijuana growers have faced federal indictment, under the Bush administration.

Among those caught up in larger busts is Bryan James Epis, co-founder of the Medical Marijuana Caregivers in Chico, who now faces up to 40 years in federal prison for conspiring to manufacture at least 1,000 pot plants in his home, located about a block from Chico High School.

Advocates on Monday lashed out at federal officials for the conviction and upcoming sentencing of Epis, 35, who is scheduled to be sentenced on Oct. 7, according to his defense attorney, world-renowned barrister Tony Serra.

Steph Sherer, a spokeswoman for Americans for Safe Access, said Epis is an unfortunate casualty from the conflict between the federal law banning marijuana use and California's law, which allows patients to grow their own medicine.

"This should have been a fight between state officials and the federal government,' Sherer said. "But it's patients who are fighting the federal government.'

Caring a sign reading "My dad isn't a criminal,' Epis' 8-year-old daughter, Ashley, said, "The only criminal thing I see is that they are taking him away from me, and I don't appreciate that,' she said, leading a candlelight march around the Sacramento County Jail, where her father has been held since a jury found him guilty in June.

Monday's protest follows an all-but-officially sponsored marijuana giveaway in front of Santa Cruz City Hall last Wednesday , by which protesters including city officials objected to the Sept. 5 raid on the Wo/Men's Alliance for Medical Marijuana.

During the raid, federal agents seized 130 pot plants and arrested Michael and Valerie Corral, the couple that founded the dispensary and helped write Proposition 215.

"We are talking about people who don't smoke marijuana to get high,' said Dr. Philip Denney, a general practitioner who specializes in providing medical marijuana consultations. "We are talking about people who are taking an alternative to ( more dangerous ) medications,' he said.

San Francisco County District Attorney Terence Hallinan, an ardent proponent of medical marijuana, said Monday that the federal government should take a hands-off approach when it comes to medical marijuana dispensaries.

Cracking down on cannabis clubs as they're known is a misappropriation of federal resources, Hallinan told the enthusiastic crowd. Shortly after Proposition 215, or California's Compassionate Use Act, passed, the Drug Enforcement Agency made it known that it would seek to revoke physicians' licenses to prescribe medications of any kind if they recommended marijuana to their patients.

That policy, however, was struck down by the courts, after a group of physicians and patients sued the DEA, claiming that the government's policy would intrude on the doctor-patient relationship by preventing doctors from providing patients all their treatment options.

"We have a lot of compassion for those who are suffering from pain,' said DEA Special Agent Richard Meyer, spokesman for the administration's San Francisco Field office. "But we cannot disagree with ( the protester's ) position more.

"There is no medical association or scientific organization that has come out to say that marijuana is a medication,' he continued, adding that the DEA has a policy of pursuing traffickers and not users including medical marijuana patients.

"I really don't know what the big deal is, here,' said Mark Woo, a 30-year-old East Los Angeles engineer. "I am just trying to live without unbearable pain. Why can't people understand that?"

US OR: Feds Appeal To Overturn Oregon Assisted-Suicide Measure
Pubdate: Tue, 24 Sep 2002
Source: North County Times (CA)
Contact: editor@nctimes.com
Copyright: 2002 North County Times
Website: http://www.nctimes.com
Author: David Kravets, Associated Press
Note: The final paragraph mentions an appeal from doctors about losing their
ability to prescribe for recommending medical marijuana

FEDS APPEAL TO OVERTURN OREGON ASSISTED-SUICIDE MEASURE

SAN FRANCISCO - (AP) - The federal government resumed its bid to ban Oregon doctors from helping terminally ill patients commit suicide, urging a federal appeals court Monday to strike down the only such state law in the nation.

Attorney General John Ashcroft is seeking to sanction and perhaps hold Oregon doctors criminally liable if they prescribe lethal doses of medication, as allowed by the voter-approved Death With Dignity Act.

"The attorney general has permissibly concluded that suicide is not a legitimate medical purpose," Justice Department attorney Jonathan H. Levy wrote in the appeal filed at the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

A federal judge in Portland, Ore., blocked the Justice Department from punishing Oregon doctors -- such as stripping them of their ability to dispense medication if they prescribe lethal doses of medication to the terminally ill.

In a sharp rebuke to Ashcroft, U.S. District Judge Robert Jones ruled in April that the Controlled Substances Act ---- the federal law declaring what drugs doctors may prescribe -- does not give the federal government the power to say what is a legitimate medical practice.

Ashcroft first declared on Nov. 6 that the federal government had such power. The government reiterated that point Monday, arguing the act "prohibits physicians from prescribing controlled substances except for legitimate medical purposes."

Oregon voters first approved the state law in 1994 and overwhelmingly affirmed it in another vote three years later.

The law allows terminally ill patients, given fewer than six months to live, to request a lethal dose of drugs after two doctors confirm the diagnosis and judge the patient mentally competent to make the request.

Oregon Gov. John Kitzhaber, who is a physician, signed the law in 1998. Since then, Oregon has reported that at least 91 people have used the law to end their lives. Most suffered from cancer.

"The Oregon law has proven itself over its five years of use to be careful and moderate and helpful for patients," said Barbara Combs Lee, president of Portland-based Compassion in Dying.

Ashcroft's Nov. 6 directive also banned any lethal prescriptions on grounds they do not qualify as medication under the federal Controlled Substances Act.

"Prescriptions of controlled substances are illicit whenever not made for a legitimate medical purpose, and the attorney general has reasonably concluded that suicide is not such a purpose," Levy wrote.

Oregon Attorney General Hardy Myers challenged Ashcroft in federal court last fall. Ashcroft's directive reversed a 1998 opinion by former U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno.

The state argues that regulating and licensing doctors are responsibilities of state government. Myers argued that Congress intended only to prevent illegal drug trafficking by doctors under the Controlled Substances Act, and it left any decisions about medical practice up to the states.

"The federal government doesn't have authority to say what is a legitimate medical purpose," said Kevin Neely, a spokesman for Myers.

But an Oregon doctors group that opposes the assisted-suicide law rejects the states' rights argument.

"The law works by forbidding Oregon doctors, and only Oregon doctors, from enforcing the nationwide medical ethics against assisted suicide," said Gregory Hamilton, a Portland doctor and spokesman for Oregon-based Physicians for Compassionate Care. "Virtually every medical group in the United States forbids assisted suicide as undermining the doctor-patient relationship."

Oregon has about a month to respond to the appeal. The court has not said when it would hear the case.

Also pending before the San Francisco circuit court is an appeal from doctors challenging Justice Department sanctions -- including losing their ability to prescribe medication -- if they recommend patients use medical marijuana. California, Oregon and six other states allow sick patients to use marijuana with a doctor's recommendation.

The case is Oregon v. Ashcroft, 02-35587.

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