MEDICAL MARIJUANA PROPONENTS MOVE TOWARD MAINSTREAM

(AP) -- After seeing Washington state voters shoot down a medical marijuana measure in 1997, Rob Killian tried a new strategy this year: no tie-dye.

Killian and other medical marijuana proponents realized it wasn’t the prospect of giving sick people the drug that bothered most voters. The fear was that supporters of the measure secretly wanted to make all drugs legally available, and not just for the ailing.

(Marijuananews note: The 1996 initiative was not just about medical marijuana, but was –like Arizona Prop 200 – a broad overhaul of all the drug laws and was not a "hempy" project, but one backed by establishment anti-prohibitionists. This year the initiative was strictly about medical marijuana, but they avoided associating with anyone who doesn’t look like me.)

So they remade their image. Ties instead of tie-dyed T-shirts. Short hair. Think suburban moms.

It worked.

By courting the mainstream, medical marijuana proponents succeeded in getting measures passed last week in Washington as well as Alaska, Arizona, Oregon and Nevada.
(Marijuananews note: Mainstreaming the issue has always been our goal. Whatever best protects the patients. However, where was the mainstream when the only people talking about medical marijuana were the marijuana reformers. Marijuana did not suddenly develop its medical value when the "mainstream" woke up.)

And that, say activists, is the future of the movement.

"I don’t fit in well with general drug legalization groups. I don’t wear hemp T-shirts, I don’t use drugs ... I’m a bit of a geek," said Killian, a family physician who led the campaign to put the measure on the ballot. "But part of it was that we were unknown to the public last year. This time I spent hours with people from both sides of the political landscape ... that’s how we were successful in mainstreaming the issue."

Things have changed since 1996, when medical marijuana backers shocked many—including federal drug officials—by getting measures on the ballot and approved in Arizona and California. Arizona’s was put on hold by legislators but reaffirmed by voters this year.

This year, they were more organized and more sophisticated, attracting new support from legislators, law enforcement officials and state and national medical leaders.

Advocates argue, and some research has suggested, that marijuana can help some patients, principally by relieving nausea after chemotherapy or increasing the appetites of cancer and AIDS sufferers. Marijuana also is touted as helping some patients control glaucoma.

"We’re still amateurs and drug policy reform is still a nascent political and social movement, but we’re not rank amateurs anymore," said Ethan Nadelmann, director of the New York-based Lindesmith Center, a research project of billionaire philanthropist George Soros. Soros and several others funded the measures this year and in 1996.

With their new image and ballot box successes, medical marijuana proponents say they’ll focus next on getting measures passed in other states, promoting more scientific research.

Now Nevada Attorney General Frankie Sue Del Papa says she won’t enforce her state’s new constitutional amendment—if it’s reaffirmed as required in 2000 -- without federal approval. Oregon officials say they haven’t decided what to do.

Federal officials haven’t yet decided their next move. While in 1996 they threatened to arrest doctors who prescribe marijuana, Justice Department spokesman Gregory King said Friday the department will review the new laws before making any decision.

"Just as we have in the past, we’ll make enforcement decisions on a case-by-case basis," he said.

Opponents of the medical marijuana movement say its new mainstream image can’t hide the underlying goal of all-out legalization.

After all, they note, the Arizona measure and the first, failed Washington measure also legalized other drugs for medical reasons. And they point to comments Soros and others have made about the country’s failed drug policy and possible alternatives, including limited decriminalization—such as making heroin available to addicts in order to reduce crime and help them kick their habits.

"They’ve been successful by misrepresenting their intentions and by preying on the American public’s compassion," said Barnett Lotstein, special assistant to Maricopa County Attorney Rick Romley in Phoenix. "If they want to really have a debate on this, why characterize this as a medical marijuana issue?"

(Marijuananews note: Okay, but will someone explain how the alleged motives of some of the backers of any  proposition effect the validity of the arguments. Is logic a part of the conspiracy? Have any of these people even heard of logic? And if motives are all that important, why is that only the motives of anti-prohibitionists are ever questioned?)

Some medical marijuana backers feel the public is ready for a broader debate and that voters passed the new measures because they are open to new drug control strategies.

Others said it shows a growing interest in alternative medicine.

"Instead of accusing the medical marijuana proponents of not being scientific, we were the ones not being scientific," Dr. John Nelson, an obstetrician-gynecologist in Salt Lake City and a member of the AMA’s board of trustees, said of the AMA’s new position on medical marijuana. "We were trying to open our minds."

"There’s a whole group of doctors calling for a public health model of drug addiction, treatment instead of incarceration," Killian said. "There’s a lot going on."

Copyright: 1998 Associated Press.

November 8, 1998
From the Associated Press
By Michelle Boorstein

NEARLY NO RESEARCH DONE ON POT

Despite ongoing controversy over marijuana’s medical efficacy, almost no research is being done on the topic.

Some proponents of medical marijuana say sufficient research was performed in the 1970s and ‘80s, when the federal government provided marijuana for studies done mostly by states.

Many of those studies were suspended in 1991 when the National Institutes of Health concluded there wasn’t enough proof that marijuana would be better than a synthetic version of tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, the drug’s major chemical component.
See
Two Days After The Medical Marijuana Initiatives
The DEA Proposes Making Marinol A Schedule III Drug!! "Like Codeine With Tylenol."
More Like Cynicism With Desperation
and links

Proponents said the studies were going to prove the opposite, but the government stopped supplying the marijuana.

Work was mostly suspended until 1996, when California and Arizona passed initiatives to legalize marijuana and other drugs for medical use.

An expert panel formed by the Institutes of Health found in August 1997 that existing research showed some patients can be helped by the drug, principally to relieve nausea after cancer chemotherapy or to increase AIDS patients’ appetites. The drug also has helped some patients control glaucoma, the panel found.

The institutes’ director, Dr. Harold Varmus, said at the time that applications for marijuana research were welcome, but the agency has approved only one project, a study of smoked marijuana in AIDS patients.

"The government is saying out of one side of its mouth that we need more research, but then they don’t provide the marijuana," said Bill Zimmerman, director of Americans for Medical Rights, a private advocacy group which sponsors state initiatives to legalize medical marijuana.

Others, however, say research isn’t funded because marijuana is so hard to study. It’s difficult to create a placebo that accurately replicates the experience of smoking the drug and to measure how much of the drug each patient ingests from the smoke. In addition, no drug companies are lined up to invest in it.

"There isn’t a government conspiracy to discourage it," said Dr. Reese Jones, a psychiatry professor at University of California-San Francisco and a longtime marijuana researcher.

(Marijuananews note: Dr. Jones was the opening speaker at the first medical marijuana workshop sponsored by NIDA in February of last year. He got up and explained that marijuana wouldn’t work for glaucoma because its effects on eye fluid pressure quickly wore off on people with normal eye fluid pressure. I asked him how he knew that this would be the same for people with glaucoma. He replied that this was just assumed. Later in the day a professor of ophthalmology explained that the effect did not wear off on people with glaucoma.)

"The issue is, what else are we not going to do in order to pay for it?"
(Marijuananews note: Well, for starters we might save money by not arresting patients. Then we might save more money by jot buying the expensive pharmaceuticals that could be replaced with much cheaper marijuana. Then we might stop funding research by people who don’t know what they are talking about. There is no telling how much money we could save on that.)