AIDS Treatment News, a San Francisco-based bi-monthly medical journal, voiced support for efforts to allow the use of marijuana as a medicine in its most recent issue.
The following excerpt is taken from the “Comment” section of the January 23 issue.
“The public has strongly supported legitimate medical use of marijuana for years. Whenever given a chance to vote or express its opinion in surveys, almost all of the opposition is from government officials and anti-drug professionals. Meanwhile, the scientific case for medical use keeps growing stronger. Far more dangerous psychoactive drugs, like morphine, are successfully allowed in medical use. Somehow marijuana has become a symbolic or political hard line to be maintained by anti-drug believers regardless of human cost. The costs will mount until the public can organize itself to insist that those who urgently need this medicine can obtain and use it legally.”
The issue also featured articles on medical marijuana patient Will Foster — an Oklahoma man sentenced in 1997 to serve 93 years in prison for growing marijuana to treat the inflammation of severe rheumatoid arthritis — and the experimental anti-inflammatory drug CT-3 that is derived from a marijuana metabolite.
For more information, please contact either Paul Armentano or Allen St. Pierre of The NORML Foundation at (202) 483-8751.