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Medicinal Marijuana Pros And Cons Weighed At Hearing
Gregory J. Volpe | Asbury Park Press | 06/09/2006

TRENTON — Before he was a famous TV personality, Montel Williams had a career in the Navy and started an anti-drug program for children.

So Williams choked up Thursday while testifying before the Senate Health, Human Services and Senior Citizens Committee about how only marijuana — not prescribed painkillers — have helped ease the pain multiple sclerosis has dealt him since 1999.

"I'm not only the poster child for MS around the world; I'm the poster child for pot," Williams said. "What angers me so much is that all people consider me a dopehead when all I want to do is wake up in the morning and go to work without pain."

Williams is using his celebrity and personal story to sway state lawmakers to make it legal for certain chronically ill patients to have the drug, if their doctors prescribe it. Opponents say that there's no proof that smoking pot helps and that making it legal at the state level would usurp the federal drug-approval process. Some have also said it's an attempt by some to legalize recreational marijuana.

Senate health committee Chairman Joseph Vitale, D-Middlesex, said that he is close to supporting the idea but that the topic is still so controversial that he won't post it for a vote.

"I don't know if if there's enough people who support it," Vitale said.

Sen. Nicholas Scutari, D-Union, a onetime prosecutor who is pushing the legislation, said he wants it approved quickly but understands it could be a slow education process to garner enough support. He scoffed at those who say it's an attempt to legalize drugs.

"We certainly aren't talking about a population for whom marijuana possibly becomes a gateway drug," Scutari said. "We are talking about very sick people who are in desperate need of relief. These people are not criminals, and it does not behoove us as a society to treat them as such."

Scott Burns, deputy director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, said approving medicine is the job of the federal Food and Drug Administration — not impassioned advocates and state lawmakers.

"No one in this country would want anyone to suffer — that's why we leave that to physicians," Burns said. "The argument always is, "It makes me feel better.' . . . Crack cocaine makes you feel better, so we cannot declare what is medicine solely on the argument that "It makes me feel better.' "

(BuzzNote: But they're not leaving it to physicians. They're leaving it to politicians who make decisions on the basis of how they think it will please a majority of voters, not on the pain and suffering of the minority who need marijuana in order to live a decent life. What do pain killers do, other than "make you feel better"? Many meds, like marijuana, are used for the relief of symptoms, not as cures for a disease. The FDA is no longer an independent science-based agency. It merely provides a rubber stamp for the political whims of the Bush White House.)

Dr. John Morgan, a professor of pharmacology at the City University of New York Medical School, dismissed opponents as spreading myths.

"I have no scientific doubt that smoking marijuana is effective in relieving symptoms in these diseases," Morgan said.

Anti-drug advocacy groups that want to quash the bill say smoking marijuana is dangerous and unproven.

(BuzzNote: Marijuana has been used as a medicine for 5,000 years. How much proof do you need? The dangers? Give me a break! It came out yesterday that an FDA approved drug causes birth defects in 7% of children whose mothers take it during the first trimester. Marijuana, according to the DEA's own Administrative Law Judge, Francis Young, "Marijuana, in its natural form, is one of the safest therapeutically active substances known to man. By any measure of rational analysis marijuana can be safely used within a supervised routine of medical care.")

"I know what it's like to be desperate and afraid you're going to die," said Don Evans, a cancer survivor who heads the Drug Free Schools Coalition. "I deeply resent cancer patients being told marijuana can help you without the scientific evidence backing it up. If I had smoked marijuana, I would be dead today, and my children would be without their father."

(BuzzNote: Huh? No one has claimed that marijuana will cure cancer, only that it relieves pain and nausea. Using marijuana to make life more livable in no way detracts from the use of chemotherapy. It makes people more willing to accept the negative side effects of it.)

Don and Gerry McGrath of Washington Township, whose son Sean died in 2002 of cholangiocarcinoma, or bile duct cancer, said his last 19 months were eased by marijuana; it helped him regain his appetite and strength when nothing else worked.

"Can someone explain why the one medicine that was most effective, least toxic and had the lowest cost for my son was illegal for him to use, while less effective, highly toxic and very expensive drugs were prefectly acceptable?" Gerry McGrath said.

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