🚀 go-pugleaf

Anonymouse wrote:
> 
> FOR A VERY FEW PATIENTS, U.S.  PROVIDES FREE MARIJUANA
> 
> WASHINGTON - Every weekday morning around 11 o'clock, a middle-aged
> stockbroker named Irvin Rosenfeld gets up from his desk and walks to a
> breezeway outside his office in Boca Raton, Fla.  There, alongside the
> potted palms and smokers taking their breaks, he lights up a cigarette
> of his own -- not tobacco, but marijuana, sent to him by the Federal
> Government.
> 
> The arrangement is 16 years old and perfectly legal.  Rosenfeld, who
> suffers from a rare bone disorder and smokes to relieve his pain, is
> part of an exclusive club of Americans who receive a free can of
> marijuana cigarettes each month under a "compassionate use" program
> sanctioned by the Food and Drug Administration and the National
> Institute on Drug Abuse.
> 
> There are only eight participants in the program.  "I'm one of the
> fortunate people," Rosenfeld said.
> 
> Or at least, blessed with good timing.  Since 1992 the door has been
> shut on the little-known program, which began in 1978 and at its height
> had no more than about 20 patients.  Now, however, the question of
> whether the Government should be providing an illegal drug to a chosen
> few has been thrust into the spotlight by a new study showing that
> marijuana is beneficial for certain conditions, including pain, nausea
> and the severe weight loss associated with AIDS.
> 
> The study, the most comprehensive review of the literature about medical
> marijuana to date, was commissioned by the White House and conducted by
> a committee of 11 scientists appointed by the Institute of Medicine, a
> branch of the National Academy of Sciences.  A report on the study
> concluded that the benefits of smoking marijuana were limited by the
> toxic effects of the smoke, but nonetheless recommended that the drug be
> given under close supervision to patients who do not respond to other
> therapies.
> 
> Yet, it does not appear likely that the list of Government-approved
> marijuana smokers will grow any time soon.  Indeed, that the program
> continues to exist at all is testimony to the Government's schizophrenic
> approach to one of the thorniest questions in law and medicine: whether
> doctors should be able to write prescriptions for marijuana.
> 
> On the one hand, the Institute on Drug Abuse pays the University of
> Mississippi to grow what a spokeswoman called a "consistent, reliable
> source of research-grade cannabis" for Rosenfeld and the others.
> 
> A North Carolina manufacturer receives $62,000 a year from the
> Government to roll the cigarettes and ship them Federal Express, in
> sealed tins of 300 each, to the patients' doctors and pharmacists.
> 
> Rosenfeld, who is 46, carries a folded letter in his wallet, dated March
> 17, 1983, from the Food and Drug Administration, authorizing him to use
> a substance that might otherwise bring a Federal prison term of up to
> five years.  Most days, he smokes in his car while driving to work; "I
> get no euphoric effect," he said.
> 
> The F.D.A.  letter, he added, has been helpful on those rare occasions
> that the police have pulled him over.
> 
> On the other hand, Congress has prevented the District of Columbia from
> releasing the results of a recent ballot question that asked voters to
> decide if marijuana should be made legal for medical purposes.  And the
> Clinton Administration has moved to shut down marijuana buyers' clubs in
> California and has threatened to prosecute doctors who write
> prescriptions for the drug.
> 
> "Why allow eight patients to have legal access to marijuana but
> criminalize thousands of other patients in very similar circumstances
> who have the same conditions, virtually identical medical histories?"
> asked Chuck Thomas, spokesman for the Marijuana Policy Project, a
> nonprofit group in Washington that lobbies to make the drug legal for
> medical use.  "Why deny them legal access?"
> 
> That question is now before a Federal judge in Philadelphia, where 165
> patients have filed a lawsuit seeking to force the F.D.A.  to grant
> wider access to the drug.  The the case is scheduled for trial in June.
> 
> "The compassionate access program is an acknowledgment by the Government
> of the United States that marijuana has medicinal value," said Lawrence
> Hirsch, the lawyer for the patients.  "It is fundamentally unfair for
> the Government to supply marijuana for medical necessity to eight people
> in the United States, when the rest of the potential candidates for
> therapeutic cannabis are excluded."
> 
> In response, a spokesman for the Department of Justice argues that
> Congress has made the possession and distribution of marijuana illegal
> and that the F.D.A.  has no obligation to make further exceptions.
> 
> The Government hopes the program will eventually become extinct through
> attrition; some of the patients who were enrolled have died.
> 
> Those who remain owe their precious exceptions to a 51-year-old glaucoma
> patient, Robert Randall of Sarasota, Fla.  While the Institute of
> Medicine has found marijuana is not particularly useful for glaucoma,
> Randall begs to differ.  In 1973, when he was a college student in
> Washington, Randall said, he found that smoking marijuana helped ease
> the pressure on his eyes.
> 
> "So I grew four little marijuana plants on my sun deck on Capitol Hill,
> to make up for those times that I couldn't afford to buy it," he said.
> "Then I got arrested."
> 
> As his case worked its way through the legal system, Randall sued the
> Federal Government, contending that his smoking was a "medical
> necessity." In 1976 a judge agreed, he said, and he began receiving
> marijuana under the supervision of a doctor at Howard University.
> 
> But that arrangement unraveled in 1978, and he sued again.  The
> Government settled the case through the compassionate use program, under
> which the F.D.A.  gives patients access to unapproved drugs if no other
> therapies will help them.
> 
> "The marijuana is mediocre," said Randall, who was the first enrollee.
> "It's what you would expect from a Government-controlled monopoly.  But
> it works."
> 
> Randall later helped others apply, among them Rosenfeld and two Iowa
> patients, Barbara Douglass and Ladd Huffman.
> 
> Both have multiple sclerosis, a condition for which the Institute of
> Medicine found marijuana beneficial.  They met in 1990 after a local
> newspaper published an article about Huffman, who had been arrested for
> growing the drug in a shed behind his home.  In 1991 they applied for
> Federal marijuana together.
> 
> Both received F.D.A.  approval.  Ms.  Douglass began receiving the drug
> shortly therafter.
> 
> "It relaxes the muscle spasms," she said.
> 
> But the program was shut down before the final paperwork was finished
> for Huffman.
> 
> A spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services said today
> that the department determined that the marijuana was no longer
> necessary because of the advent of the drug Marinol, a capsule
> containing marijuana's active ingredient that was approved by the F.D.A.
>   in 1985.
> 
> Huffman says Marinol does not work.  "With these capsules, you take them
> and about an hour later you get so stoned you can hardly function," he
> said.  But, having been sentenced to two years' probation for his
> marijuana offense, he is afraid to smoke the drug again.
> 
> As for Rosenfeld, he has pangs of conscience, knowing that people like
> Huffman have been prosecuted for buying a drug he gets courtesy of the
> taxpayers.  And he worries that his supply could be cut off at any time,
> particularly if the Government loses the lawsuit in Philadelphia.
> 
> "I'm not against the Government," he said.  "I appreciate what they do
> for me."
> --

I am sure he does appreciate it! But why is this man allowed
to drive his car under the influence of a drug? Isn't that
a dangerous game to play?

Richard