The Clinton administration is telling lies about the medical use of marijuana.
On Dec. 30 Clinton administration drug czar Gen. Barry McCaffrey – a man with no medical training on his resume – stood before the TV cameras and grimly told the American people that the laws passed by California and Arizona voters allowing medical use of marijuana were “hoax initiatives” that had nothing to do with helping sick people. Propositions 215 and 200 were nothing but a sinister backdoor attempt to legalize drugs, the general told us.
Bruce Hunt knows better. He is taking one of those multidrug cocktails that have given many AIDS patients such an astonishing boost. But the medicines that are helping him fight the deadly virus also produce unbearable gastrointestinal problems – nausea, diarrhea, cramps – and nothing that he and his doctor have tried has helped. Nothing that is, except marijuana. “Usually a puff or two will take care of it in minutes,” Hunt says.
Without marijuana, he couldn’t take the drugs that are keeping him alive. With it, he has a shot at survival.
Hunt’s situation is far from unique. Thousands of people suffering through chemotherapy or taking potent anti-HIV drugs could tell the same story. But in the paranoid fantasy world McCaffrey and the rest of the Clinton administration’s drug police inhabit, these people don’t exist. Or maybe they just don’t count.
McCaffrey has told other whoppers, repeatedly insisting that “there is not a shred of evidence that smoked marijuana is useful or needed.”Wrong again.
In a 1988 study of cancer chemotherapy patients published in the New York State Journal of Medicine, Dr. Vincent Vinciguerra reported that 78 percent of patients who had shown no improvement on standard anti-nausea drugs “demonstrated a positive response to marijuana.”
Numerous other reports exist as well. In April 1995 the British Journal of Aneasthesia commented, “In recent years data have accumulated which supports a therapeutic effect of cannabis for nausea and vomiting caused by chemotherapy for neoplastic disease (that is, cancer and related conditions), spasticity and muscle spasms associated with spinal cord lesions or multiple sclerosis, and glaucoma.”
McCaffrey isn’t the only administration official playing fast and loose with the truth. Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala got into the act: “All available medical research tells us that marijuana is dangerous to our health.”
In fact, there is overwhelming medical evidence that marijuana is far less dangerous than many drugs that physicians routinely prescribe. Doctors are allowed to prescribe drugs like morphine and cocaine that are highly addictive and that can easily kill you if you take too much, but marijuana is not physically addictive and no fatal marijuana overdose has ever been recorded in medical literature. In a November 1995 editorial the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet stated flatly, “The smoking of cannabis, even long-term, is not harmful to health.”
Yes, it would be nice to have more data, and the government’s promised review of existing information – if it is conducted honestly – may be a useful first step.
But if the government hadn’t spent the last several years blocking the efforts of scientists to study marijuana’s therapeutic effects, we would have that information already.
Bruce Mirken is a San Francisco-based freelance writer. Write to him at: Progressive Media Project, 409 E. Main St., Madison, Wis. 53703.
