http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpsrv/WPlate/199709/18/026l091897idx.html

A Debate We Never Had

By Richard Cohen

Thursday, September 18, 1997; Page A21 The Washington Post

In the HelmsWeld heavyweight fight, almost everyone won. Jesse Helms won
because he got his way. William Weld, the former Massachusetts governor,
won because he got national exposure for his likely presidential run, and
President Clinton won because he split the GOP and managed, once again, to
take a nonposition position this time in favor of both Weld and Helms.

So who lost?

We did.

We the people of the United States lost, and not only because Helms, a man
with a brick for a brain, was able to cow the entire Senate. We lost
because the issues that so vexed Helms and caused him to deny Weld a
hearing the medicinal use of marijuana and needle exchange programs for
intravenous drug users were not even debated. Weld favors them both, and
this, we are told, is why Helms hates him so.

But Weld is right, and Helms is wrong. Helms's compassion and concern for
human life, so evident in his furious opposition to abortion, nevertheless
excludes drug addicts for some reason. Maybe he thinks they deserve to die.

True, they are junkies lawbreakers and all of that but the fact
remains that they risk their lives every time they use a shared needle.
With the drug, they may also be getting HIV. Their deaths, both cruel and
protracted, are more often than not going to come at the expense of the
public. Their lives could be saved with needle exchange programs.

Study after study shows this to be the case everything from one by New
York's Beth Israel Hospital to an overall review by a panel of the National
Institutes of Health. It stands to reason, after all, that if drug users
are going to share needles, they are also going to share an HIV risk. If,
on the other hand, they use clean needles, they are not going to get
anything more from an injection than the drug they so crave.

The opposition to needle exchange programs is not so much scientific as it
is moralistic. To some people, it seems just wrong to aid addicts in their
addictions. You can understand such a sentiment. But no evidence suggests
that needle exchange programs abet drug usage, while plenty of evidence
suggests that addicts will use whatever is available to satisfy their
craving. In this case, a perfectly understandable moral argument is
rebutted by some hard facts.

The argument in favor of the medicinal use of marijuana is not quite as
strong but nonetheless it is persuasive. Some studies indicate that
marijuana has a medical benefit for cancer patients and glaucoma sufferers,
reducing pain and the ill effects of chemotherapy. Others suggest that
anything that can be done by marijuana can be done just as well by other
legal drugs.

The fact remains, though, that people who have used pot for medicinal
purposes swear by it. Richard Brookhiser, a senior contributing editor at
the Jesse, take note very conservative National Review, used
marijuana to relieve the nausea of chemotherapy for testicular cancer.

It would be one thing if the drug under discussion was both rare and
extremely addictive. But marijuana is as common as red ties in Washington.
Some 70 million Americans have, as they say, experimented. As for its
addictive qualities, they are largely exag gerated. Some people,
predisposed in some way, apparently do get hooked. The same case, though,
can be made against alcohol and, in spades, about cigarettes.

In both cases needle exchange and the medicinal use of marijuana
Helms is not only dead wrong but also cruel. He personifies the
unwillingness of the political establishment to distinguish between drugs
that are very bad and drugs that are not so bad, and its insistence on
treating our national drug as a criminaljustice matter and not as a public
health issue. It is silliness to the point of cruelty to make a criminal
out of a desperate cancer patient.

Weld gave Clinton an opportunity to make those points. But the president
apparently once shared a needle with a political coward, and so he has said
nothing on the subject. His drug policy has gone from nonexistent in his
first term not a single public service message to mindless in the
second.

As for Weld, he conducts himself like a pedigreed cat haughty,
independent and sufficient unto himself. He lost his ambassadorship and,
probably, the patience of the White House, but he did not lose as much as
the rest of us did the chance to discuss a drug policy that is both
inhumane and illogical.

© Copyright 1997 The Washington Post Company