Marijuana as medicine

Scientific study of claimed benefits is overdue

Usually, scientists study the efficacy and safety of a drug before
the public can use it. But when it came to "medicinal" marijuana,
California did things backward.
Last fall, voters approved Proposition 215, which legalized
marijuana for medical purposes. Today, the state Senate is expected to vote
on a bill to fund a $1 million study on whether marijuana is a useful
medicine.
The bill, authored by Sen. John Vasconcellos, DSan Jose, and
supported by the California Medical Association, would provide the grant to
the University of California to establish a medicinal marijuana research
project. Grants from other private and nonprofit sources are expected to
follow.
The Senate should approve this bill. A definitive scientific study
is overdue.
Proposition 215 resulted in an unregulated, chaotic situation in
which anybody can claim it's legal to smoke pot as long as some health
practitioner says it's OK.
Californians used the ballot box to decide whether a medicine is
safe, which is absurd.
Such decisions must be made by science. Had Proposition 215
supporters been socially responsible, they would have put forward a ballot
initiative to fund a major study on medicinal marijuana, as Vasconcellos
and the CMA have done.
In its original form, the Vasconcellos bill read like it was
written by marijuana advocates, and consequently we wouldn't have supported
it. It would have compounded Proposition 215's mistakes, including
establishing a statewide marijuana distribution task force to help provide
the drug to patients. That's putting the cart before the horse.
We must find out whether marijuana really has proven medicinal
value before even thinking about a system to distribute it.
The original wording assumed that marijuana is medicine, and
claimed that the legislation should be passed to "address the immediate
needs of Californians who have a legitimate medical use for marijuana."
Until the University of California study is done, nobody knows
whether there is any medical use for marijuana. All such advocacy language
and the distribution system proposal were stripped from the bill, leaving
only the $1 million grant "to develop and implement medical marijuana
studies."
That's all this bill should do. If UC researchers find some medical
benefit to marijuana, then they can devise methods to administer it to
patients.
In supporting Vasconcellos' bill, the California Medical
Association lamented that medicinal marijuana was legalized before it was
proven to have medicinal value.
The CMA believes this bill will help right that wrong. We agree.
The University of California research should provide guidance for future
state regulations on medicinal marijuana.
This bill would begin the nation's seminal study on medicinal
marijuana. Smaller studies have been done, but this will be the first major
effort by a premier research university. The federal government dropped the
ball on medicinal marijuana research; California must pick it up.
The pareddown Vasconcellos bill is a sensible approach to this
issue. After years of controversy about marijuana as medicine, we could
finally find out the truth about it.