Smoking a ‘joint’ relieves his agony
“We have a situation in which the Federal Government continues to spend money trying to find negative effects of marijuana while making it difficult for anyone to investigate the positive of it.”
-Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, September 25, 1978
Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, September 25, 1978
“Philadelphian Stephen Kotran was an unscheduled speaker at a recent fund-raising banquet for the National Association for the Reform of Marijuana Laws. He’d asked for a chance to tell the audience his story.
Kotran, 43, said he has glaucoma… an eyesight destroying disease. He said he’s found that smoking marijuana relieves the pressure in his eyes (a symptom of glaucoma) and thus helps him save his sight. And his doctor agrees.
But he has to get his marijuana illegally – “on the street,” as the saying goes – because there is no legal source in Philadelphia.
“What can I say?” Kotran asks. “Marijuana is illegal but I know without it, I’d be blind by now.”
You hear this kind of story with increasing frequency these days. Stories about people who contend there are medical uses for marijuana, uses now prohibited by law. And, just in the past few weeks, several suits (one involving an 80 year old glaucoma victim in Philadelphia) have been filed to challenge this law.
The most recent suit on behalf of Richard Csandi, 41, director of a drug rehabilitation center in Allentown, PA. Csandi is terminally ill with cancer and is being kept alive through chemotherapy treatments. He takes drugs so strong they have caused all his hair to fall out and make him so ill, he throws up for seven hours straight after treatment. Conventional medications to combat the nausea have not helped him, Csandl claims, but marijuana has. Puffing a single “joint” lessens his nausea, sometimes eases it so completely, he can even eat a meal after treatment.
Csandi admits that he can follow Kotran’s desperate example – defiantly buying marijuana from his local illegal dealer – and, in fact, has been doing so. But he finds this method unsatisfactory on the other than legal grounds. For one thing, as director of a drug rehab center, he opposes the indiscriminate use of drugs on principle. He wants his doctors to be able to prescribe his. Further, marijuana bought on the street is not pure, the “dosage” is irregular, to say the least, and it is very expensive. (two ounces, not an unusual medical supply, cost about $80. It could probably be grown for about 80 cents. But obviously, those who face jail for selling it insist on being well paid for their risks.)
Why can’t people suffering from glaucoma or cancer get marijuana from their doctors?
Well, at the moment, they can’t because Federal law classifies marijuana as a dangerous drug like heroin. Doctors are prohibited from prescribing it. Pharmacists can’t stock it. Even medical researchers have a hard time obtaining it for study. This despite the fact that a National Commission on Marijuana and Drug Abuse (headed by former Pennsylvania Governor Raymond Shafer) concluded, back in 1972, that marijuana in moderate amounts was not harmful to anyone.
And so we have a situation in which doctors may legally give a dying man drugs so powerful they make his hair fall out and his stomach retch for hours, but they are not allowed to give him a weed that relieves his pain and which a government commission has called relatively harmless.
We have a situation in which the Federal government continues to spend money trying to find negative effects of marijuana while making it difficult for anyone to investigate the positive benefits of it, claimed by Dotran, Csandi and others.
No one is claiming marijuana is any “miracle cure”, just that it relieves some symptoms, some pain, and that those suffering should be able to get it.
There is an obvious need now to both revise our marijuana laws and to redirect our research. The sooner the better.
The so called “booze generation” and the “grass generation” do not see eye to eye on a lot of things, but I’d like to think that on the medical uses of marijuana, at least, the two might finally get together.”
– Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, September 25, 1978