Make it stop hurting

Updated below with show-time and location. 

Debra J. Saunders writes in the San Francisco Chronicle:

YVONNE Westbrook of Oakland uses medical marijuana to control the spasms of multiple sclerosis. Valium left her with a heavy, drugged feeling. “A few tokes and the spasticity calms right down,” she noted in the documentary “Waiting to Inhale,” which will be shown at the Oakland International Film Festival on Thursday.

“Waiting to Inhale” will be shown on Thursday at the Oakland International Film Festival. Good to know, because the filmmaker doesn’t have this event listed on his website yet, but perhaps it will be updated soon.

Berkeley’s Jed Riffe, who made the documentary, also taped a debate in Washington, D.C., last week on medical marijuana. David Murray from the White House drug czar’s office spoke against legalization of marijuana, while two drug-war opponents, Rob Kampia, executive director of the Marijuana Policy Project, and Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, spoke in its favor.

Murray was not exactly in an enviable position. A former colleague had canceled last minute. So there he was, taking an unpopular position alone, debating two opponents and a moderator sympathetic to legalization, columnist Clarence Page, as well as an audience filled with people who — I’m guessing here — either just want to smoke pot to get high or (worse for Murray) have a sick loved one such as Westbrook or Rosenfeld.

It gives me great hope and courage to see that the White House “drug czar’s” office will no longer run away from debates that they cannot win. We are not arguing about dangerous chemicals here, this is not a debate about the drug war. This is about cannabis. Some people get these confused and I want to make it clear that cannabis is safer than most pharmaceutical drugs.

Murray argued that doctors are not “the principal proponent” of pushing “smoked marijuana as medicine.” True, the American Medical Association isn’t pushing for medical marijuana. But the California Medical Association has supported medical marijuana. More important, doctors across the country have recommended marijuana to patients — at the risk of their own careers.

Indeed, it was doctors who sued first the Clinton administration, then the Bush administration, to fight federal efforts to keep them from recommending marijuana, as permitted by Proposition 215, the medical marijuana measure passed by California voters in 1996. The doctors won. And here’s something I learned from Nadelmann: the federal government had to pay more than $700,000 to reimburse groups such as his for the legal fees they incurred fighting the bad policy.

In other words, the big national association, which is highly political and dominated by the pharmaceutical industry, doesn’t support medical marijuana because it would be very unprofitable to have a natural alternative to patented and synthetic drugs which their income depends upon selling in large quantities and at high prices.

But look, when you go to a doctor, you don’t go to the AMA. You go see a human being who is skilled in the art of medicine, who knows what it is to have a condition like whatever you might have, and wants to help you to treat it with the least harmful approach that will be most effective. Some doctors have differences of opinion as to what is best and most effective, no doubt. But it is in the purview of the individual doctor with the individual patient to make recommendations about what is best for that patient.

Doctors are regulated inasmuch as they write prescriptions and perform procedures, but not in making recommendations. The latter is not only a matter of doctor-patient confidentiality, but is furthermore an exercise of free speech. You can disagree but you cannot prohibit a doctor from telling a female patient about her birth control options. You cannot require a doctor not to inform a patient who is suffering from a condition that cannabis treats that it would be helpful if it were possible to have.

Anyhow, read the whole article and go see the film if you can. I have to go see a doctor about something myself today, so the blogging will be light for a few hours today.

Update: More coverage and discussion at Cannabis News. Transcript of the medical marijuana debate is available at the DPA.

Update 2: Waiting to Inhale will be shown from 9:00pm-10:45pm on Thursday, September 21, 2006 at the Malonga Theater, 1428 Alice Street in Oakland, California.