Medical Marijuana: Major AIDS Organizations Seek Legal Access
Major AIDS organizations--including the AIDS Action Council, San Francisco AIDS Foundation, AIDS Project Los Angeles, Northwest AIDS Foundation, Latino Commission on AIDS, AIDS National Interfaith Network, Mothers' Voices to End AIDS, and Whitman-Walker Clinic--have asked General Barry McCaffrey, director of the Office for National Drug Control Policy, to help change Federal policy to allow patients to legally use marijuana when recommended by their physician. Here is the text of the February 17 letter, which is an excellent statement on this issue. [JSJ]
Dear General McCaffrey:
As advocates and care givers for people living with HIV disease and AIDS, we are writing to urge you to help break the bureaucratic logjam that is keeping a potentially life-saving medicine virtually inaccessible to thousands of people living with AIDS and other debilitating illnesses.
That medicine is marijuana. Marijuana's therapeutic uses are well documented in scientific literature. Recent scientific studies have confirmed what has been reported to us by hundreds of people living with HIV - that marijuana can be safely used to reduce nausea and vomiting, stimulate appetite, and promote weight gain. Marijuana is widely recognized by physicians specializing in AIDS care as an important component of treatment for some patients who suffer from symptoms of advanced-stage HIV disease and the multiple-drug therapies used to manage HIV.
Today, thanks to one federally approved clinical study of marijuana for people living with AIDS, sixty-four patients receive marijuana legally from supplies grown by the federal government. However, thousands of Americans, many of them people living with HIV, use marijuana as a medicine illegally, putting themselves at risk of arrest and prosecution. Because the practice is illegal, most patients use marijuana without medical supervision. Marijuana's illegality means that patients cannot be sure of obtaining standardized products that are free of contaminants. People should not have to risk their health or jail to receive needed medical care.
For this reason, thirty-five state legislatures have passed laws supporting the use of marijuana as a medicine. In addition, voters in six states (Alaska, Arizona, California, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington) and the District of Columbia have recently approved ballot measures legalizing the medical use of marijuana within their borders - nearly one in five Americans lives in a state whose voters have approved medical marijuana. Now, the nation is looking to the federal government to begin to show compassion and flexibility on this issue.
You may be aware that the standard Food and Drug Administration approval process has been streamlined for several medications important to people living with HIV disease and AIDS. Drugs shown to fall within an acceptable standard of safety have been made available to patients before completion of all scientific trials proving effectiveness. This special procedure has helped thousands of patients to obtain life-extending benefits from new medications, and has contributed directly to building the science base for such new drugs.
Our request is simple. Just as other promising AIDS medications have been made available prior to final FDA approval, so too should marijuana, when recommended by a physician, be made available to patients who choose to use it.
There is not much question about the relative safety of marijuana - it has been heavily studied around the world. These studies have revealed an important fact: there is no lethal dose of marijuana. Besides this finding, occasional marijuana smoking under controlled circumstances has not been proved to be dangerous. In sum, the known risks of marijuana are clearly within a range of acceptability sufficient to allow individual physicians and patients to monitor its use, and its results. Under these circumstances, making marijuana immediately available on a quasi-experimental basis to people living with AIDS, when their physicians request it, is a moderate step that can add to the federal government's responsiveness to the epidemic.
We appeal to you, General McCaffrey, because you are in a unique position to provide leadership on this issue. Science and compassion should dictate our nation's policy regarding medical treatment. However, politics has stood in the way of the approval of marijuana as a legal medication, and the full development of a science base leading to FDA approval could still be years away. We call upon you to be a part of the political solution. We ask that you publicly encourage your colleagues in the administration to respond positively to the scientific and public support for making marijuana medically available.
