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All the latest news stories...May 2012 |
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Angel McClary Raich, a California woman at the center of the recent Supreme Court case on medical marijuana, hasn't changed her treatment regimen since the Court ruled in June that patients who take the drug in states where its medicinal use is legal are not shielded from federal prosecution. A thin woman with long, dark hair and an intense gaze, Raich takes marijuana, or cannabis as she prefers to call it, about every two waking hours - by smoking it, by inhaling it as a vapor, by eating it in foods, or by applying it topically as a balm. She says that it relieves her chronic pain and boosts her appetite, preventing her from becoming emaciated because of a mysterious wasting syndrome. Raich and her doctor maintain that without access to the eight or nine pounds of privately grown cannabis that she consumes each year, she would die. Vaporizer System for the Administration of MarijuanaThe cannabis is placed in the chamber and heated to a temperature below that required for combustion. The balloon fills with vapor that contains the active ingredients without the tar or particulates thought to be responsible for most of the drug's adverse effects on the respiratory tract. The patient inhales the vapor from the balloon. Although Raich has embraced a public role advocating the medicinal use of marijuana, she says that her health suffered during the hectic days following the announcement of the Court's decision, when a whirlwind schedule of press conferences and congressional meetings in Washington prevented her from medicating herself with cannabis as regularly as she needed to. "My body was shutting down on me," she said in an interview from her Oakland home last month. "I'm scared of my health failing. I'm scared of the federal government coming in and doing more harm. [Recently,] the city of Oakland warned there were going to be some raids" on marijuana dispensaries. "We're all just waiting. Sitting on the frontline is extremely stressful." In the Supreme Court case Gonzales v. Raich, the justices ruled 6 to 3 that the federal government has the power to arrest and prosecute patients and their suppliers even if the marijuana use is permitted under state law, because of its authority under the federal Controlled Substances Act to regulate interstate commerce in illegal drugs. In practical terms, it is not yet clear what effect the Court's decision will have on patients. An estimated 115,000 people have obtained recommendations for marijuana from doctors in the 10 states that have legalized the cultivation, possession, and use of marijuana for medicinal purposes. Besides California, those states are Alaska, Colorado, Hawaii, Maine, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington. (Three weeks after the decision was announced, Rhode Island's legislature passed a similar law and soon afterward overrode a veto by the state's governor.) Immediately after the news of the high court's ruling, attorneys general in the states that have approved the use of medical marijuana emphasized that the practice remained legal under their state laws, and a telephone survey of a random national sample of registered voters, commissioned by the Washington-based Marijuana Policy Project, indicated that 68 percent of respondents opposed federal prosecution of patients who use marijuana for medical reasons. Nationally, most marijuana arrests are made by state and local law-enforcement agencies, with federal arrests accounting for only about 1 percent of cases. However, soon after the decision was announced, federal agents raided 3 of San Francisco's more than 40 medical marijuana dispensaries. Nineteen people were charged with running an international drug ring; they allegedly were using the dispensaries as a front for trafficking in marijuana and in the illegal amphetamine "ecstasy." Complete Article: http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/353/7/648 |
