It has been a long wait for Dr. Donald Abrams,but last week he got the nod
from the federal governmenthe could proceed with a comprehensive research
project to study the impact of smoking marijuana by HIVinfected patients.

Perhaps the ice jam created by attitudes frozen in drugwar intransigence
has begun to break; maybe reliable scientific information on the medical
uses, if any, of marijuana can be gathered. California voters can be proud
that they started the warming trend.

Dr. Abrams and his team of researchers at an AIDS project at the University
of California, San Francisco, have tried to do similar research before.
Three times in recent years Dr.Abrams, a highly respected researcher who
has received numerous grants from government agencies, has designed studies
to test how marijuana interacts with AIDS drugs, especially protease
inhibitors.

He knew that many of his patients were smoking marijuana, and wanted to
know whether the marijuana affected the levels and effectiveness of the
antiAIDS drugs, as some other substances do.

"This is safety test, not an efficacy test," Dr. Abrams told us on Friday.
"It would take a much larger and more comprehensive test to determine
efficacy" whether smoked marijuana is actually helpful to AIDS
patients. Anecdotal information suggests that marijuana helps to control
nausea caused by some AIDS drugs and to restore patients' appetites,
counteracting what is called "AIDS wasting syndrome."

Dr. Abrams has wanted to undertake tests on interaction between marijuana
and AIDS treatments for several years. But the federal government controls
the only legal source of marijuana for medical experiments, produced on a
plantation in Mississippi. And for at least a decade, it has refused to
provide marijuana to medical researchers. Perhaps coincidentally, this
situation allowed foes of medical marijuana to say, accurately enough, that
no recent controlled studies of medical marijuana have been done to
validate or invalidate the many anecdotal stories that seem to indicate
helpfulness.

Dr. Abrams's earlier proposals were all rejected. But since the passage of
Prop.215 in California and Prop.200 in Arizona, federal officials have
found themselves pushed into admitting that more genuinely scientific
studies might not be a bad idea, even promising a wideranging federal
research effort.

If the longawaited approval of Dr. Abrams's study is an indication that
the federal government is ready to approve other responsible studies,
that's good news indeed.