From: [g--n--n] at [zia.aoc.nrao.edu] (Gary Condon)
Newsgroups: alt.drugs
Subject: Medical Marijuana
Date: 16 Aug 91 06:21:18 GMT

Here you go, folks. I saw this while wasting my time away at work and
I thought there might be some interest out there. I've never
transcribed an article before and, consequently, never realized how
laborious it is. I'd just like to thank everyone who spends the time
entering the articles we all find interesting/infuriating. All the
typos are mine but I think I got most of the buggers :-)

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This article is from the July 6-12, 1991 issue of the Economist
(reproduced entirely without permission)

(title) Medical Marijuana: Cross-eyed and Painless
(byline: Cambridge, Massachusetts)

Drugs can be medicinal or recreational: marijuana is both. For nearly
20 years advocates of its medicinal use- to relieve the nausea of
chemotherapy, to treat glaucoma and to help AIDS patients gain weight-
have fought in the American courts to have the drug reclassified so
that doctors can prescribe it. Currently marijuana is grouped with the
most disapproved of drugs, such as LSD and heroin. The government
argues it must remain so because it has no "currently accepted medical
use in treatment". A new study by researchers at Harvard refutes this.
	Mainly because of its effectiveness in treating the vomiting
common among cancer patients during chemotherapy, tetrahydrocannibinol
(THC), the main psychoactive ingredient in marijuana, was approved for
medical use in America in 1985. A synthetic form of THC is sold in
pill form under the trade name Marinol; last year almost 100,000 doses
were prescribed. Smokable marijuana, however, is available to just 34
people through a "compassionate use" programme. To the confusion of
many a police officer, these patients are given a supply of marijuana
cigarettes rolled by government hands at a research farm in
Mississippi.
	Proponents claim that smoking marijuana works better than
taking oral THC.  In 1988 Francis Young, a judge who examines
administrative issues for the Drug Enforcement Agency, recommended
that marijuana be reclassified on the ground that "current acceptance"
of a drug is present if a "respectable minority" of doctors endorse
it. The administration disagreed, claiming that the vast majority of
doctors believe oral THC is as reliable and effective as smokable
marijuana and produces fewer side-effects.
	Enter Rick Doblin and Mark Kleiman, two drug-policy
researchers at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. To test the
administrations thesis, they conducted a random survey of members of
the American Society of Clinical Oncology. Some 1,035 responded, about
10% of America's oncologists. The results, published in the July 1st
issue of the Journal of Clinical Oncology, surprised even Mr.  Doblin
and Mr. Kleiman; nearly half of the respondents said they would
prescribe smokable marijuana if it were legal. Indeed 44% of them said
they had, in effect, done so already by recommending it to one or more
of their patients, despite the possibility of prosecution.
	Nearly two-thirds of the oncologists agreed that marijuana was
an effective anti-emetic, while 77% of the 157 who expressed a
preference said that smokable marijuana is more effective than oral
THC. A majority said that marijuana was no worse than Marinol in terms
of producing bad side-effects.
	Predictably, such numbers have the Bush administration's
drug-policy office all out of sorts. Not long ago it chided Mr. Young
by suggesting that only one in 200 doctors would support medical use
of marijuana, and that this was not a "respectable minority". When
some of Mr. Doblin and Mr. Kleiman's results were published recently
as a letter in the Annals of Internal Medicine, the adverse publicity
led Herbert Kleber, number two in the drug-policy office, to declare
that anyone who really needed medical marijuana could get it through
the compassionate-use programme within 30 days.
	But last week the administration admitted it was planning to
limit that already tiny programme. Now, under strong pressure from
AIDS activists-marijuana has proved especially helpful to people
taking AZT to fight the AIDS virus- Mr. Kleber has said he will soon
call an inter-agency meeting to decide what to do. Meanwhile a federal
appeals court judge has rejected the government's response to Mr.
Young's recommendation that marijuana be reclassified. The court said
the government's interpretation of "current acceptance" was impossible
to meet.
	Despite all this, the administration is unlikely to yield.
There are other, non-medical issues at stake. One official agreed that
to admit that marijuana might ever be "safe and effective" would make
a mockery of the government's strident anti-drugs campaign. In some
ways the research by Mr. Doblin and Mr. Kleiman already has.

(end of article)
the article can be found in The Economist, vol. 320, number 7714, pp.87