Voice of the people (letter).

Legal Or Not, Pot Is Just Bad Medicine

February 01, 1997|By David S. Noffs, Life Education Center

ELMHURST — Not even George Orwell could have dreamed of our drug policies today. The Ministry of Truth in Orwell's classic "1984" looks downright legitimate next to doctors prescribing marijuana cigarettes as medicine.

Marijuana is a dangerous and addictive psychoactive substance that can cause cancer, organ damage, impotence, significant memory loss and psychotic episodes, to name a few reactions. Two referendums held recently in Arizona and California asked voters to approve the legal use of marijuana as medicine, and both passed.

While the heavily funded California Marijuana Initiative outcome was not really a surprise, the Arizona Marijuana Initiative is still clouded in controversy because voters may not have known what they were voting for. The use of marijuana cigarettes for medicine has not been endorsed by one major medical organization in the United States. Most medical, health, law-enforcement and drug- and alcohol-treatment professionals agree that the ingredient in marijuana most likely to help offset nausea attributed to the latter stages of cancer treatment therapy can be administered more effectively using a prescribed drug called Marinol in liquid (oral) form.

Work is being done on development of a THC suppository that is more effective than other forms but not as popular as the smoked variety.

Although pro-drug groups such as NORML have for decades supported the use of marijuana cigarettes for recreational use and claimed it to be harmless (in much the same way as tobacco companies still claim their products don't cause cancer), they have now found a new and more successful strategy to legitimize marijuana cigarettes under this new claim that they have medicinal value.

The ramifications for adolescent drug use are enormous. Already, many drug counselors in the Chicago area I have spoken with are facing adolescents in treatment facilities who are questioning whether they need to quit their pot habits. After all, they say, it's legal to smoke it in California!

While the new laws will almost certainly face court challenges, based on the fact that marijuana use is illegal under federal law, pro-drug groups are basking in the glory and laying grand plans for promoting their drug of choice. They have found new terminology to market their drugs: "medical marijuana" and "harm minimization."

Both terms simply mean legalized drugs in a way that will sell to the public. If we allow drug advocates like NORML and a plethora of others to teach our children that marijuana cigarettes are no different from aspirin, then there is no reason not to tell them that heroin and crack are no different from cough medicine, and so goes the argument and so go the lives of thousands of youngsters up in a puff of medicinal pot smoke.

This is how this war on drugs is being fought today, and you'll have your say when the question appears on your election ballot very soon. Call it propaganda or call it reefer madness, but not even George Orwell could have imagined how crazy the world would be in 1997.