Physician Advocates for Medical Marijuana

Vermont -- As he opened his remarks about medical marijuana, Dr. Joseph McSherry said he couldn't be as informative as he would like to be.

"I asked a very good friend, who happens to be a medical marijuana patient, what I should tell you today," McSherry said. "He said to tell you not to ask a doctor. Doctors don't know (expletive) about medical marijuana."

McSherry, a neurophysiologist and PhD associated with Fletcher Allen Medical Center and the University of Vermont, said his friend is largely correct: There have been few scientific studies on the effects of marijuana as a medicine, and even less research has been conducted on its medical effects in humans.

"You'll probably be more educated than your doctor by the time we get through," McSherry told his audience at the Godnick Center in Rutland on Friday.

He walked the audience through the limited medical data on cannabis and the properties of the chemicals in marijuana other than THC that can have beneficial effects.

Canabanoids, McSherry said, can boost the effectiveness of other painkillers, inhibit the growth of tumors and alleviate wet macular degeneration, which causes blindness in some cases.

McSherry said that inhaled marijuana can be very effective at treating sudden swift pains, while many other painkillers, including marinol — a legal prescription drug that is a capsule of THC in sesame oil — can take too long to take effect.

"I don't approve of smoking for anybody," he said. "There's got to be a better way of doing it, but the U.S. government hasn't been interested in doing any research.

"If you eat it, the chemicals peak in two to four hours. Eating it is probably the worst way of intaking THC," he said. "If you inhale it, THC levels peak in a few minutes and it actually goes away in the first hour."

He noted that researchers in other countries are trying to develop different types of medical cannabis for patients.

Two members of the audience who said they use the drug for medicinal purposes offered compelling testimony about its benefits. Neither identified themselves.

The first patient said that at one point he had been on 17 different medications to treat his multiple sclerosis — some to counteract the side effects of other medications.

"Now I think I'm on four medications now," he said. "I'm not on medications for the side effects of medication. I'm not drugged out or high. From 17 meds, down to four."

A second patient said he had lost more than 50 pounds while undergoing chemotherapy before using marijuana to counteract the nausea.

"I went from 236 pounds down to 176," he said. "Part of the problem was the sickness of chemo. I couldn't hold down food, and marinol did not work for me. Cannabis did work."

Members of the audience had many questions about medical marijuana, from its chemical properties to the intricacies of growing plants to use for medicine.

"If you have a seed that has a known history of consistent product, you will get a consistent product medically," McSherry said. "That's why I think patients ought to be able to grow their own."

One audience member wondered how patients who don't grow it can access medical marijuana.

McSherry said "compassionate clubs" have formed in California that allow medical marijuana patients to bring in prescriptions to be filled with marijuana of a known quality rather than forcing patients to rely on what they can find on the black market, he said.

"In Vermont, if you have a friend or a grandson … you can make a provision to register with the state that you're a registered patient and they're a registered grower," he said, adding that Vermont's medical marijuana law does not shield users or growers from federal prosecution.

McSherry sees access to the drug as an uphill battle. He said many doctors are resistant to the notion of medical marijuana.

"There are very definitely a lot of doctors who are very adamant it's not a medicine," he said. "There are doctors that believe if it were a medicine, the FDA would approve it and pharmaceutical companies would make cannabis that you can take as a product.

Reefer Madness ... and Other Tales from the American Underground
Eric Schlosser - Author
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Book: Paperback | 129 x 198mm | 352 pages | ISBN 0141010762 | 26 Feb 2004 | Penguin
Reefer Madness ... and Other Tales from the American Underground

'Schlosser provides a view of the country and its people that is both rich and disturbing'
The Times Literary Supplement

Eric Schlosser, the man who wiped the smile off the happy meal with Fast Food Nation, strips America bare …

In this outrageous, irreverent, no-holds-barred odyssey into the US underworld, he looks beneath the country’s shiny, happy surface and uncovers what’s really made it so rich: porn, pot and illegal immigrants.

Meet the cannabis crusaders who risk life imprisonment in a deranged government ‘war on drugs’ that punishes marijuana offences more harshly than murder. Take an uncensored look at the sex industry and its leading players, from feminist strippers to Reuben Sturman, the billionaire Walt Disney of porn. Enter the hidden world of the migrant workers who are ruthlessly exploited by big business fat cats. And discover how these dirty dealings, secret vices and underground economies are part of a global black market on which we all depend.

Reefer Madness is a storming must-read for anyone who’s ever felt they’re not being told the whole story about where the real money is made, and a shockingly funny glimpse of a nation on the brink of insanity …

In the state of Indiana, a person convicted of armed robbery will serve about six years in prison; someone convicted of rape will serve about eight; and a convicted murderer can expect to spend twenty-five years behind bars. These figures are actually higher than the national average: eleven years and four months in prison is the typical punishment for an American found guilty of murder. The prison terms given by Indiana judges tend to be long, but with good behaviour, an inmate will serve no more than half the nominal sentence. Those facts are worth keeping in mind when considering the case of Mark Young. At the age of thirty-eight, Young was arrested at his Indianapolis home for brokering the sale of seven hundred pounds of marijuana grown on a farm in nearby Morgan County. Young was tried and convicted under federal law. He had never before been charged with drug trafficking. He had no history of violent crime. Young's role in the illegal transaction had been that of a middleman—he never distributed the drugs; he simply introduced two people hoping to sell a large amount of marijuana to three people wishing to buy it. The offence occurred a year and a half before his arrest. No confiscated marijuana, money, or physical evidence of any kind linked Young to the crime. He was convicted solely on the testimony of co-conspirators who were now cooperating with the government. On February 8, 1992, Mark Young was sentenced by Judge Sarah Evans Barker to life imprisonment without possibility of parole.

Marijuana is such a familiar part of youth culture in the United States, and the smell of pot smoke is now so commonplace at high school and college parties, that many Americans assume a marijuana offence rarely leads to a prison term. In fact, there are more people in prison today for violating marijuana laws than at any other time in American history. About 20,000 inmates in the federal prison system have been incarcerated primarily for a marijuana offence. The number currently being held in state prisons and local jails is more difficult to estimate; a reasonable guess would be an additional 25,000 to 30,000. And Mark Young's sentence, though unusual, is by no means unique. Dozens of marijuana offenders may now be serving life sentences in federal penitentiaries, without hope of parole. If one includes middle-aged inmates with sentences of twenty or thirty or forty years, the number condemned to die in prison may reach into the hundreds. Other inmates—no one knows how many—are serving life sentences in state correctional facilities across the country for growing, selling, possessing, or even buying marijuana.

The phrase "war on drugs" evokes images of Colombian cartels and inner-city crack addicts. In many ways that is a misperception. Marijuana is and has long been the most widely used illegal drug in the United States. It is used more frequently than all other illegal drugs combined. Approximately one-third of the American population over the age of twelve have smoked marijuana at least once. About nineteen million Americans smoked it in 2000. More than two million smoke it every day. Unlike heroin or cocaine, which must be imported, anywhere from a quarter to half of the marijuana used in the United States is grown here as well. Although popular stereotypes depict marijuana growers as aging hippies in Northern California or Hawaii, the majority of the marijuana now cultivated domestically is being grown in the nation's midsection—a swath running from the Appalachians west to the Great Plains. Throughout this Marijuana Belt drug fortunes are being made by farmers who often seem to have stepped from a page of the old Saturday Evening Post. The value of America's annual marijuana crop is staggering: plausible estimates start at $4 billion and range up to $25 billion. In 2001 the value of the nation's largest legal cash crop, corn, was roughly $19 billion.

Marijuana has well-organized supporters who campaign for its legalization and promote its use through books, magazines, Web sites, and popular music. They believe marijuana is important not only as a benign recreational drug but also as an herbal medicine and as a commodity with industrial applications. Marijuana's opponents are equally passionate and far better organized. They consider marijuana a dangerous drug—one that harms the user's mental, physical, and spiritual well-being, that promotes irresponsible sexual behaviour, that encourages disrespect for traditional values and threatens the nation's youth. At the heart of the ongoing, bitter debate is a hardy weed that can grow wild in all fifty states. The two sides agree that countless lives have been destroyed by marijuana, but disagree about what should be blamed: the plant itself, or the laws forbidding its use.

The war on drugs launched by President Ronald Reagan in 1982 began largely as a campaign against marijuana, organized by conservative parents' groups. After more than a decade in which penalties for marijuana offences had been reduced at both the state and federal levels, the laws prohibiting marijuana were made much tougher in the 1980's. More resources were devoted to their enforcement, and punishments more severe than those administered during the "reefer madness" of the 1930s became routine. All the legal tools commonly associated with the fight against heroin and cocaine trafficking—civil forfeitures, enhanced police search powers, the broad application of conspiracy laws, a growing reliance on the testimony of informers, and mechanistic sentencing formulas, such as mandatory minimums and "three strikes, you're out"—have been employed against marijuana offenders. The story of how Mark Young got a life sentence reveals a great deal about the emergence of the American heartland as the region where most of the nation's marijuana is now grown; about the changing composition of the federal prison population; and about the effects of the war on drugs, twenty years after its declaration, throughout America's criminal justice system. Underlying Young's tale is a simple question: How does a society come to punish a man more harshly for selling marijuana than for killing someone with a gun?

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