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Showtime documentary examines medical marijuana issue
07-13-07|Sun-Sentinel|Dave Shiflett

Reefer madness can still be hazardous to your health.

That's the message of In Pot We Trust, a documentary airing this week on Showtime. The show makes a persuasive case that marijuana provides some patients a degree of relief they can't get from standard medications and should be legally available.

Yet many patients continue to face prosecution and even jail for smoking the palliative weed.

The show presents several compelling witnesses: a mother with severe palsy, a stockbroker with bone tumors, a churchgoing woman suffering from multiple sclerosis and a man whose post-traumatic stress problems began when his father took the family to a restaurant and shot his mother.

All insist marijuana relieves their pain and allows them to be productive citizens. Sadly for them, some people in high places fervently disagree.

The hero of the show is Aaron Houston, director of government relations for the Marijuana Policy Project, a group that backs medical-marijuana legislation at the state and federal levels. While a small number of Americans participate in strictly regulated weed-providing programs, millions more risk legal sanction for using pot.

Anyone wondering how lobbyists operate will benefit from watching Houston dog various congressmen, some of whom react as if they'd been approached by a representative from a child-molesting ring.

Houston is used to rejection and clearly comfortable with political combat, describing one opponent as "foaming at the mouth." He also notes that his organization, in finest Washington tradition, dispenses campaign donations to "the good guys."

The show gives plenty of face time to opponents, including former Health, Education and Welfare chief Joseph A. Califano, now head of the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse. There are also various drug czars and law enforcement officials, one of whom insists that "society can perish" if drugs are decriminalized.

The documentary — written, produced and directed by Star Price — doesn't overlook the negative effects of toking. One memorable segment, featuring pro-legalization marchers chanting "We smoke pot and we like it a lot," includes an enthusiast who loses his train of thought in mid-sentence.

Such lapses, to be sure, aren't confined to stoners. We see snippets of congressional debate over medical marijuana legislation that makes you wonder what they're smoking on Capitol Hill. One sputtering pol rails that clerks at his grocery store have turned into dimwits from smoking marijuana, though as Houston points out, such arguments have nothing to do with medical marijuana.



On tv
Program: In Pot We Trust

Airs: 3:45 p.m. Sunday, midnight Wednesday (early Thursday) on Showtime

 

Buzzby

I watched this last night. Its heart is certainly in the right place but the production looks like it was done by bright high school seniors, not professional documentary film makers. It looks like they edited three different cuts of the same half-hour documentary and Showtime decided to show all of them in a row. At the end of each half hour there are credits. Then the next one starts and it contains much of the same footage and tells exactly the same story.

The medical marijuana patients are all very sympathetic. None are archetypical stoners.

One is a widowed mother of four young children. She was born with Cerebral Palsy, has a painful stutter, and a spastic right arm. She is shown driving into a rough part of town to get enough weed for a couple of days. Back at her house, she takes three hits and becomes a different person. Her stutter almost disappears. Her arm relaxes. The strange faces she makes while trying to get a few words out go away. This woman says that she smokes cannabis in order to be able to take care of her children. Her biggest fear is that she'll get arrested for it and have her children taken away from her.

The next patient is a middle-aged woman with MS. She's from Rhode Island and is shown using marijuana for the first time since she became ill. She didn't want to do it until her state made it legal. The look on her face was amazing. She went from nervous and in pain to relaxed and pain-free in less than two minutes.

The third patient was one we've all probably seen before, the stockbroker Irvin Rosenfeld who got medical marijuana under a federal program back in the 70s and was grandfathered in to get it for the rest of his life when the program was shut down. He gets 300 joints from the feds every month, smokes 10 a day, and is your typical high-energy business professional.

The fourth patient is a guy who has suffered from PTSD most of his life. When he was quite young, he was eating with his parents and sister at a restaurant. His father and mother got into an argument. His father pulled out a pistol and blew his mother's head off - all over him. He's just a normal hard-working guy, a pressure-washing contractor who lives in CA and can therefore go to a dispensary that looks like a Starbucks to buy the weed he needs.

An ongoing story was about a bunch of cops tearing up a marijuana plantation in the CA hills. They're out there congratulating themselves about how they're keeping all of this weed off the streets. They honestly don't seem to realize that the supply will always expand to meet the demand. Sunlight, dirt, water, and cannabis seeds are not rare commodities, nor are people willing to take a big risk to make big bucks.

Several drug enforcement officials and Congressunits got to babble their prohibitionist BS on camera and came off looking like stuffed shirts who were out of touch with reality.

There was a funny exchange towards the end of the program. The MPP rep walks up to Rep. Mark Souder (Indiana (R)) and says, “Congressman? Is there any chance you might change your position on medical marijuana? I mean, is there any chance?”

Souder: “There isn’t such a thing as medical marijuana, so I would never change my mind.”

Rep: “Well the Institute of Medicine says says that there is.”

Souder: “There’s no such thing as medical marijuana. There’s no such thing as medical marijuana!”

It sounded like Souder was reciting a mantra to frighten off the bogeyman.

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sterbo

Yea, disappointment like Dan Rather's piece a couple of months ago...

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