Another Vote Against McCaffrey
Last November, when California and Arizona voters approved propositions permitting doctors to recommend the medical use of marijuana, federal drug czar Barry McCaffrey called the vote a “tremendous tragedy.” Any doctors who recommend marijuana to a patient, he warned, will risk federal prosecution or the immediate removal of their authority to prescribe certain compounds. Marijuana remains on the government’s list of banned drugs.
In saying he acted “to protect the public interest,” McCaffrey was, of course, second-guessing the solid majority of voters who approved the propositions. Now an editorial published in this week’s New England Journal of Medicine suggests that McCaffrey may also have been acting against a sense of the public interest in the medical profession.
Calling the prohibition of medical marijuana use foolish, hypocritical and inhumane, the journal, a leading arbiter of mainstream American medical opinion, said that for many seriously ill patients marijuana seems to provide “striking relief” from nausea, vomiting, pain and other “devastating symptoms.”
The journal suggests, as we have, that the federal Drug Enforcement Administration change marijuana’s classification from so-called Schedule 1, meaning it is a drug of abuse with no clinical value, to the DEA’s Schedule 2, which includes drugs such as morphine that are medically useful despite being risky or addictive. Reclassification could resolve the problem of prescribing marijuana for medical purposes, but a parallel second step is essential: The DEA should make a concerted attempt to fund new research on marijuana’s medical efficacy to assure the public that its medical use is indeed sensible.
Earlier this month, McCaffrey’s office gave the National Academy of Science a million dollars to study past data on the medical effects of marijuana. His announcement of the grant was puzzling, however, for he had repeatedly asserted that no such data exist.
The data exist. In 1982 a National Academy of Science study concluded that “cannabis and its derivatives have shown promise in the treatment of a variety of disorders.” But other studies raise serious medical and social concerns about the use of the drug for any reason. More research is required. Now is the time to do it, when the issue is clearly drawn by a vote of the people.
