Feds Will Punish Doctors Who Prescribe Pot Sanctions Include Criminal Charges Even Though States Ok’d Medical Use

Concerned that the medical use of marijuana will lead to an increase in drug abuse, the Clinton administration will announce a plan today to fight new state laws allowing doctors to prescribe it.

In an interview Sunday on CBS’ “Face the Nation,” the White House drug policy chief, Gen. Barry McCaffrey, said the wide-ranging plan would include provisions to strip the prescription licenses of doctors who prescribe the drug and to prosecute the doctors, even in states where it is legal to prescribe marijuana.

Doctors and advocates of medical use of marijuana denounced the plan, saying it is insensitive to the pain of the seriously ill and ignorant of research supporting marijuana’s benefits for medical conditions from arthritis to AIDS.

“It’s outrageous; it goes against the Hippocratic oath,” said Lester Grinspoon, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard, editor of the Harvard Mental Health Letter and author of two books on the medical benefits of marijuana. “My responsibility as a physician is to provide the best relief I can. In some circumstances, that comes from marijuana.”

Last month, voters in California and Arizona approved referendums by generous margins that allow medicinal use of marijuana. In Arizona, any other illegal drug also could be prescribed if a doctor can cite medical studies showing benefits.

At least 35 other states have passed laws suggesting greater tolerance for the medical use of marijuana. The Massachusetts Legislature approved a bill this year that allows people caught with marijuana to introduce evidence in court that they need it as medicine.

“The American public is not having a problem with medical marijuana, legislatures are not having trouble with medical marijuana,” said Maddy Webster, a board member of the Massachusetts Cannabis Reform Coalition. “The people who are having trouble with it are the drug control bureaucracies.”

Marijuana is said to alleviate pain of arthritis, multiple sclerosis, migraine headaches and spinal cord injuries as well as the nausea that results from chemotherapy and AIDS drugs. Some research also suggests it halts the destructive effects of glaucoma.

In a national survey done by the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard in 1991, 44 percent of physicians said they had recommended marijuana to patients for symptoms of various illnesses.

“Are they talking about arresting 44 percent of the physicians in California?” asked Jon Holmes, Chairman of the Drug Policy Unit for the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts.

McCaffrey said Sunday the administration’s plan would target doctors based on a federal law that prohibits medical use of marijuana, even where state law allows it.

He said government medical authorities will continue to examine the purported benefits of any drug, including marijuana. However, he said, the administration remains confident that existing American medicine offers better remedies than marijuana.

Doctors were split on the California initiative, and medical groups did not endorse it, saying studies were inconclusive.

McCaffrey said many voters in California and Arizona “were asleep at the switch” in approving “hoax referendums” that did not have any serious medical backing.

But Grinspoon said those who want to block medical use of marijuana would reverse their position if they could see the effects it has on terminally ill patients.