Medicine-You-Can-Smoke and the FC

Claremont, San Dimas, and a whole bunch of the FC are dealing with regulating medical pot centers. See the comments on medical marijuana developing beneath this post.

Frankly, the issue bores me. If we were to treat marijuana like any other pain killer from the opiate family or otherwise, we would let scientists isolate the good properties from the bad and make medicine by putting the good into pill form the best they can. In fact, they have already done so, its perfectly legal, and the drug is called Marinol. So 1) I support continued research by scientists to develop drugs that use the THC or whatever else is in pot that can help people suffering with pain. 2) I have sympathy with those who argue that the federal government should leave this issue up to the states.

Given those two provisos, the problem is that many in our state want to smoke their "medicine" in massive amounts. As it currently stands, you can get a prescription for pot because you tell the right doctor that your feet hurt from wearing high heels. Come on, people.

I'm no fan of the feds, but I think this position paper has it largely right:

There are no FDA-approved medications that are smoked. For one thing, smoking is generally a poor way to deliver medicine. It is difficult to administer safe, regulated dosages of medicines in smoked form . . . Morphine, for example, has proven to be a medically valuable drug, but the FDA does not endorse the smoking of opium or heroin. Instead, scientists have extracted active ingredients from opium, which are sold as pharmaceutical products like morphine, codeine, hydrocodone or oxycodone. In a similar vein, the FDA has not approved smoking marijuana for medicinal purposes, but has approved the active ingredient-THC-in the form of scientifically regulated Marinol.

I'm willing to treat pot as a potential resource for medicine the same way as we treat everything else in nature. But that's not good enough for the vast majority of marijuana advocates in this state. They'd like to ignore the basic precepts of western medicine so they can smoke their pain-killer. And yes, kids, it is true that there are lots of other things that are worse for you than pot, but this doesn't change the fact that it does have some harmful side effects.

I'm not willing to play a shell game with science for the sake of an underlying legalization agenda. And that's what is really behind a lot of this politicized "medical" debate—the notion that pot is some kind of miracle drug with no harmful side effects that should be legalized. And that debate is perfectly legitimate in its own right. I don't want to get into that debate here, I just want people to be honest about where they really stand while they are posturing for the sake of the medicine they want to smoke.

In any event, I think when the FC consider whether or not they should allow such clinics, the issue should be a no-brainer. As the LAT blog said recently, our state law on the issue is being abused. And, as I obviously see it, it was a screwy law to begin with.

(Scroll through our Claremont archives for more on the issue.)