inbox

December 2007

Marijuana’s Medical Use

I read with interest your December 2007 cover story, “Users, Abusers, & Others Talk About Pot.” I noticed that not one of the interviewed were medical users. One doctor interviewed acknowledged some of the positive medical applications of Marijuana Inhalation Therapy (MIT). As a Stage IV cancer patient fighting pain, anorexia, nausea, and depression in every moment, I feel you have left out very important testimony regarding a much maligned natural pharmaceutical. My experience has been that it outperforms a host of expensive legal prescription drugs. It alleviates the nausea, depression, anorexia, and pain that plague cancer patients. Most of the symptoms I have listed are due to the therapies used to fight cancer – chemotherapy and radiation. These therapies are destructive, and expensive. Treating cancer is expensive. One chemo treatment can run $10,000. A course of radiation therapy is far more expensive. The anti-nausea prescription used is very expensive – several hundreds of dollars, and in my opinion, not that effective. At the risk of sounding like a conspiracy nut, might Big Pharma be against the use of a substance which is nonpatentable?

The anti-marijuana interests view treating this drug as a prescription drug is a slippery slope toward full legalization. So what? It seems that any drug that carries with it the risk of abuse carries a stigma. Oxycontin is a real boon to those suffering from cancer pain. But getting that prescription filled is a major hassle. But at least it is obtainable legally. All we patients who can benefit from MIT ask is that marijuana be treated in the same way as Oxycontin. Hassle us if you must, but at least give us legal access. That might drastically reduce the consumption of expensive, less efficacious prescription drugs.

But that’s the problem. Big Pharma will do anything to keep its products moving at maximum volume, including pressuring legislators and regulators to maintain the status quo, regardless of the suffering of the people they purport to help.

The science is in. Marijuana helps cancer patients and those with many other illnesses. But it as if our voices don’t count in this debate. As so much other science is redacted under the Bush administration, so is the science regarding medical marijuana.

Readers, please contact your legislators and demand that they listen to us patients, and at least consider changing the laws and regulations so that legitimate medical use of marijuana may be added to the legal and regulated pharmacopoeia.
Name Withheld By Request

As we go to print with the December eightyone, it looks like the November issue will be our most widely read issue ever.
 — Editor Â