🚀 go-pugleaf

-------- Original Message --------

This is part of the story that AARP magazine asked for and decided not 
to print.

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/la-me-oldpot28apr28,1,4971833.story

Los Angeles Times

April 28, 2005 Thursday

SECTION: MAIN NEWS; Part A; Pg. 1

HEADLINE: COLUMN ONE;

Pot Laws Pain Some Elders;

Senior citizens who use medical marijuana to treat their ailments wonder 
why the federal government wants to just say no to them.

BYLINE: Eric Bailey, Times Staff Writer

Betty Hiatt's morning wake-up call comes with the purr and persistent 
kneading of the cat atop her bedspread. Under predawn gray, Hiatt blinks 
awake. It is 6 a.m., and Kato, an opinionated Siamese who Hiatt swears 
can tell time,
wants to be fed. 

Reaching for a cane, the frail grandmother pads with uncertain steps to 
the iny alcove kitchen in her two-room flat. Her feline alarm clock gets 
his grub, then Hiatt turns to her own needs.  <>

She is, at 81, both a medical train wreck and a miracle, surviving 
cancer, Crohn's disease and the onset of Parkinson's. Each morning Hiatt 
takes more than a dozen pills. But first she turns to a translucent 
orange prescription bottle stuffed with a drug not found on her 
pharmacist's shelf: marijuana.  <>

Peering through owlish glasses, Hiatt fires up a cannabis cigarette with 
a wood-stem match. She inhales. The little apartment -- a cozy place of 
knickknacks and needlepoint -- takes on the odor of a rock concert.  <>

"It's like any other medicine for me," Hiatt says, blowing out a cumulus 
of unmistakable fragrance. "But I don't know that I'd be alive without 
it."  <>

With the U.S. Supreme Court poised to soon rule on whether medical 
marijuana laws in California and nine other states are subject to 
federal prohibitions, elderly patients like Hiatt are emerging as a 
potentially potent force in the 

roiling debate over health, personal choice and states' rights.

 

<>No one knows exactly how many old folks use cannabis to address their 
ills, but activists and physicians say they probably number in the 
thousands. And unlike medical marijuana's younger and more militant true 
believers, the elderly are difficult for doubters to castigate as 
stoners.  <>

Their pains are unassailable. Their needs for relief are real. Most 
never touched pot before. As parents in the counterculture '60s, many 
waged a generation-gap war with children getting high on the stuff.  <>

Now some of those same parents consider the long-demonized herb a blessing.
<>
Patients contend that cannabis helps ease the effects of multiple 
sclerosis, glaucoma and rheumatoid arthritis. It can calm nausea during 
chemotherapy. <>Research has found that cannabinoids, marijuana's active 
components, show promise for treating symptoms of Parkinson's disease 
and Alzheimer's, and perhaps may have anti-cancer properties. <>

A recent AARP poll found that 72% of people 45 and older believe adults 
should be allowed to use cannabis with a physician's recommendation. The 
poll found a similar proportion staunchly opposed to legalizing 
recreational pot.  <>

Even conservative elders such as commentator William F. Buckley and 
former Secretary of State George P. Shultz have supported marijuana as 
medicine.  <>

Betty Hiatt and those like her are "more and more the face of the 
marijuana smoker," said Ethan Nadelmann of the Drug Policy Alliance, 
which advocates treating cannabis like alcohol: regulated, taxed and 
off-limits to teens.  <>

"There's this sense that when you get old enough, you've earned the 
right to live your own life," Nadelmann said. "The mantra of the drug 
war has been to protect our kids. But the notion of a drug war to 
protect the elderly? That's ludicrous"  <>

Stories of suffering elders are not lost on John Walters, President 
Bush's point man in the war on illegal narcotics. But as he beats the 
drum for psychotropic abstinence, the drug czar doesn't mince words. The 
standard of simply feeling different or feeling better" does not make 
pot safe and effective medicine, said Walters, director of the White 
House Office of National  Control Policy. People who abuse illegal drugs 
such as crack cocaine feel a similar burst of euphoria, he said, "but 
that doesn't make crack medicine."

(editors note: cocaine is schedule II under federal law and can be 
prescribed legally)

<>Congress and federal drug regulators have repeatedly rebuffed pleas to 
legalize medical use of cannabis, which is classified as a dangerous 
Schedule I drug, along with heroin and LSD. Walters argues that there is 
not a whiff of clinical proof qualifying smoked pot as medicine. Any 
beneficial compounds that do exist in the leafy plant, he said, should 
be synthesized, sent through the rigors of the regulatory process and 
packaged as a pharmaceutical, not smoked like black-market weed. "This 
is not like growing a rosebush in your yard," Walters said. "This is a 
plant the products of which are used for serious and expensive abuse 
among illegal drugs." Hiatt isn't seeking a recreational high at this 
early hour, with much of <>Seattle asleep.

She was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2001. Chemotherapy left her a 
wreck. She threw up anti-nausea drugs, so her oncologist suggested 
cannabis, legal for medical purposes in the state of Washington.  <>

"I thought he was a little off track," she recalls. "I had never done 
anything like that. I was very uneasy."  <>

A few puffs of pot smoke each morning help quell the nausea caused by 
her prescription drugs, she said. Her appetite is restored and she never 
gets high.  <>

Her two granddaughters, ages 18 and 20, display a ho-hum attitude about 
Granny toking up.  <>

"It's just totally the norm," said Jessica, the older of the two.
<>
Hiatt's son Doug, a defense attorney, endorses his mother's use of 
medical pot, picking up her cannabis every few weeks from a collective 
not far from home.
<>
Her other son doesn't share that unfettered faith. Dan Hiatt, an 
assistant district attorney in Atlanta, was shocked to learn his mother 
was seeking relief from a drug that has landed many a pusher behind 
bars, his mother recalled. (Dan Hiatt declined to be interviewed.)  <>

But he never tried to talk her out of it, Betty Hiatt said. "I don't 
think he likes it, but he accepts it. He loves me. He knows I wouldn't 
be doing it for fun."  <>

Hal Margolin, 73, claims the same dependency.
<>
Pain drove the Santa Cruz resident to the drug. It began a decade ago, 
as the cervical vertebrae at the top of Margolin's back calcified, 
strangling a bundle of nerves and producing a searing sensation in his 
extremities. His feet can feel as if they're being scalded by boiling 
water.  <>

Margolin tried to address the unrelenting agony the standard way, buying 
maxi-packs of Advil and Aleve. An operation made things worse. He lost 
feeling in his fingers and the soles of his feet, and at times was 
reduced to crawling to the bathroom. Despite a prosperous retirement, a 
good marriage and two happy grown children, Margolin contemplated 
suicide.  <>

He tried pot at a friend's urging. A few tokes and the pain seemed to 
recede to the background, Margolin said. "I was no longer obsessing" 
about it.  <>

Finding marijuana early on was no easy task. At times, the bald and 
bespectacled retiree turned to the streets to score his weed.  <>

Dressed in a cardigan sweater against the coastal cool, he would amble 
along the ramshackle blocks next to the town's beachfront Boardwalk. 
Mustering his courage, Margolin would approach one of the street kids he 
figured was dealing. 

Most of the time they scoffed. "They thought I was some kind of 
undercover cop," he says.

<>Now he gets his cannabis from a Santa Cruz dispensary that serves 200 
patients, many terminally ill. In a decade of operation, the cannabis 
cooperative has lost more than 150 clients to cancer, AIDS and other 
ills. A woman who used pot to tame the painful aftereffects of polio 
died last year at 93. Margolin now is among the oldest.  <>

For him, marijuana has been "the difference between clinical depression 
from the pain, and carrying on with my life."  <>

Though part of the U.S. pharmacopeia early in the 20th century, cannabis 
was outlawed during the Depression. In recent decades, advocates have 
repeatedly failed to gain federal approval for doctors to prescribe the 
herb.  <>

An exhaustive 1999 study by the National Academy of Science's Institute 
of Medicine concluded that marijuana can help curb pain, nausea and 
AIDS-related weight loss. The study warned against the toxic effects of 
the smoke, but said cannabis could be given under close doctor 
supervision to patients who don't respond respond to other therapies.  <>

Now several small drug companies are pressing forward with prescription 
forms of the drug, such as the cannabis mouth spray that G.W. 
Pharmaceuticals of Britain is expected to soon begin marketing in 
Canada.  <>

During the buildup to prescription forms, the raw plant shouldn't be 
ignored, said Dr. Raphael Mechoulam, a pioneer in cannabinoid chemistry 
at Hebrew University of Jerusalem. If it helps the elderly fight pain 
until prescription drugs are available, he said, "then why not?"  <>

Not everyone embraces cannabis, even some who try it. Betty Hiatt's 
daughter-in-law, Laura, recalls her own mother's unsuccessful attempts 
to use the drug while being treated for ovarian cancer.  <>

Laura Hiatt's mother initially resisted trying marijuana, but when she 
finally did, "she didn't like it," Hiatt said. "It hurt her throat. I 
was very suprised she even tried it, but she was so sick."  <>

Others found ways around lighting up.
<>
Catherine Ballinger, 94, saw a busy retirement undercut by infirmity. A 
fiercely independent woman who worked for years as a technical 
illustrator during the heyday of Southern California's aerospace 
industry, Ballinger lives in pain. Her right hip and knee grind bone on 
bone and arthritis bedevils her.
<>
She can hardly walk. Pain forced the Torrance woman to give up a beloved 
hobby, painting seascapes while perched on the Pacific bluffs.

<>She was never a smoker, so Ballinger's doctor recommended trying 
cannabis baked into brownies. Her agony receded, Ballinger says, 
allowing her to sleep.

Although no miracle cure, the brownies made life tolerable.

"If those guys in Washington had the pain I suffer," she said, "they 
wouldn't put up all these legal barriers for patients to obtain medical 
marijuana."
<>
Although controversial even in states that have approved it, medical 
marijuana remains illegal in most of the U.S. But even outside havens 
such as California and Washington, a few marijuana patients have enjoyed 
a free pass.
<>
For nearly three decades the U.S. has provided cannabis grown on a 
University of Mississippi farm to a few seriously ill people in a 
special federal program. <>The
effort, launched in the mid-1970s to settle a "medical necessity" 
lawsuit brought by glaucoma patient Robert Randall, was shut to 
newcomers in 1992 as a flood of AIDS patients sought entry. Over the 
last decade, others have sued to get in but failed. All that remain are 
seven survivors, many pushing their golden years.

Randall died in 2001, but Elvy Musikka of Sacramento is a feisty 65. The 
oldest is Corinne Millet, 73, a Nebraska grandmother suffering glaucoma. 
The wife of a surgeon, Millet credits the government marijuana with 
saving her sight.

Irvin Rosenfeld calls their little band the nation's most exclusive club 
aside from living ex-presidents. At 52, Rosenfeld is the youngest -- and 
he expects to be smoking pot as medicine for decades to come. A dozen 
joints a day curb riveting pain from a rare disorder that causes bony 
protrusions to poke like cattle prods into his muscles.<>

Despite his copious marijuana consumption, Rosenfeld has prospered as an 
investment banker in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. His longtime boss marvels at 
his energy. Without marijuana, Rosenfeld said, "Instead of being a 
productive member of society, I'd be a burden."

<>Among medical marijuana's biggest blocs are AIDS patients, including 
many longtime survivors edging toward old age.

<>Doctors diagnosed Keith Vines with the disease in 1986. He nearly died 
in 1993, as AIDS stripped him of 60 pounds. When pills didn't help, his 
physician advised marijuana.  <>

For years an assistant district attorney in San Francisco, Vines felt 
like a "fish out of water" skulking into a medical marijuana dispensary 
the first time.
<>
But pot increased his appetite. Nausea from his medications ebbed. At 
55, he has smoked it for a decade, limiting use to a few times a week.

<>Now this law-and-order guy would love to sit down with John Walters or 
the president, close the door and talk.
<>
He'd tell them about losing friends and feeling despair. He would talk 
about retiring early from a job he loved, after AIDS compromised his 
short-term memory. He'd ask that they stop fighting the sick and elderly.

<>"Survival," Vines said, "is struggle enough."  <>



-- 
"I won't be wronged. I won't be insulted, 
and I won't be layed a hand on. 
I don't do these things to other people, 
and I require the same from them"
J.B. Books (John Wayne)