E
Eboka
Guest
MEDICAL MARIJUANA
Mr. Attorney General, Listen to the Doctors and Patients
John Ashcroft, meet a cancer victim
Kate Scannell
Sunday, February 16, 2003
I want John Ashcroft to leave his desk, come into the chemotherapy
suite and participate in the real consequences of his choices. I want
him to meet the bald, frail woman lying in the hospital bed next to
mine in the chemotherapy suite. I want this 70-year-old woman to ask
him the same medical question she asked me.
Because I was a cancer patient receiving chemotherapy at the same
hospital where I worked, the women with whom I shared the suite
quickly surmised that I was also a doctor. The clues were obvious:
the colleagues dropping by, the "doctor" salutations from co-workers
and the odd coincidence that one of my suite mates was also one of my
patients.
I braced myself for this woman's question, both wanting to make
myself available to her but also wishing that the world could forget
that I was a doctor for the moment. After receiving my cancer
diagnosis, dealing with surgery and chemotherapy and grappling with
insistent reminders of my mortality, I had no desire to think about
medicine or to experience myself as a physician in that oncology
suite. And besides, the chemotherapy, anti- nauseants, sleep
medications and prednisone were hampering my ability to think clearly.
So, after a gentle disclaimer about my clinical capabilities, I said
I'd do my best to answer her question. She shoved her IV line out of
the way and, with great effort and discomfort, rolled on her side to
face me. Her belly was a pendulous sack bloated with ovarian cancer
cells, and her eyes were vacant of any light. She became short of
breath from the task of turning toward me.
"Tell me," she managed, "Do you think marijuana could help me? I feel so sick."
I winced. I knew about her wretched pain, her constant nausea and all
the prescription drugs that had failed her - some of which also made
her more constipated, less alert and even more nauseous. I knew about
the internal derangements of chemotherapy, the terrible feeling that
a toxic swill is invading your bones, destroying your gut and
softening your brain. I knew this woman was dying a prolonged and
miserable death.
And, from years of clinical experience, I - like many other doctors -
also knew that marijuana could actually help her. From working with
AIDS and cancer patients, I repeatedly saw how marijuana could
ameliorate a patient's debilitating fatigue, restore appetite,
diminish pain, remedy nausea, cure vomiting and curtail
down-to-the-bone weight loss. I could firmly attest to its benefits
and wager the likelihood that it would decrease her suffering.
Still, federal law has forbidden doctors to recommend or prescribe
marijuana to patients. In fact, in 1988 the Drug Enforcement Agency
even rejected one of its own administrative law judge's conclusions
supporting medicinal marijuana, after two full years of hearings on
the issue. Judge Francis Young recommended the change on grounds that
"marijuana, in its natural form, is one of the safest therapeutically
active substances known to man," and that it offered a "currently
accepted medical use in treatment."
Doctors see all sorts of social injustices that are written on the
human body, one person at a time. We see poverty manifest as a young
father who suffered a stroke because he could not afford
cholesterol-lowering medications.
specify whether our hypertensive patient might respond differently to
standard treatments based on white male norms. We see the desperate
and damaged homeless arrive in emergency rooms to receive health care
on a crisis-to- crisis basis that rarely ever offers cure.
These social injustices are gargantuan problems that cannot be fixed
in the clinic, and their remedies can only come from broad public
reform. But this one - the rote denial of a palliative care drug like
marijuana to people with serious illness - smacks of pure cruelty
precisely because it is so easily remediable, precisely because it
prioritizes service to a cold political agenda over the distressed
lives and deaths of real human beings.
The federal obsession with a political agenda that keeps marijuana
out of the hands of sick and dying people is appalling and
irrational. Washington bureaucrats - far removed from the troubled
bedsides of sick and dying patients - are ignoring what patients and
doctors and health care workers are telling them about real world
suffering. The federal refusal to honor public referendums like
California's voter-approved Medical Marijuana Initiative is as
bewildering as it is ominous. Its refusal to listen to doctors groups
like the California Medical Association that support compassionate
use of medical marijuana is chilling.
In a society that has witnessed extensive positive experiences with
medicinal marijuana, as long as it is safe and not proven to be
ineffective, why -shouldn't seriously ill patients have access to it?
Why should an old woman be made to die a horrible death for a hollow
political symbol?
I want Attorney General Aschroft to wipe the vomit off this woman's
chest, help lift her belly so she -doesn't hurt as much when she
rolls onto her back, and explain straight to her grimacing face why
she -can't try marijuana. I want him to tell me why it does not
matter to him that almost every sick and dying patient I've ever
known who's tried medical marijuana experienced a kinder death. Face
to face, I want him to explain all these things to her and to me and
to the heartbroken family who is standing by.
Kate Scannell is a doctor in Oakland who is co-director of the
Northern California Ethics Department of Kaiser-Permanente.
Mr. Attorney General, Listen to the Doctors and Patients
John Ashcroft, meet a cancer victim
Kate Scannell
Sunday, February 16, 2003
I want John Ashcroft to leave his desk, come into the chemotherapy
suite and participate in the real consequences of his choices. I want
him to meet the bald, frail woman lying in the hospital bed next to
mine in the chemotherapy suite. I want this 70-year-old woman to ask
him the same medical question she asked me.
Because I was a cancer patient receiving chemotherapy at the same
hospital where I worked, the women with whom I shared the suite
quickly surmised that I was also a doctor. The clues were obvious:
the colleagues dropping by, the "doctor" salutations from co-workers
and the odd coincidence that one of my suite mates was also one of my
patients.
I braced myself for this woman's question, both wanting to make
myself available to her but also wishing that the world could forget
that I was a doctor for the moment. After receiving my cancer
diagnosis, dealing with surgery and chemotherapy and grappling with
insistent reminders of my mortality, I had no desire to think about
medicine or to experience myself as a physician in that oncology
suite. And besides, the chemotherapy, anti- nauseants, sleep
medications and prednisone were hampering my ability to think clearly.
So, after a gentle disclaimer about my clinical capabilities, I said
I'd do my best to answer her question. She shoved her IV line out of
the way and, with great effort and discomfort, rolled on her side to
face me. Her belly was a pendulous sack bloated with ovarian cancer
cells, and her eyes were vacant of any light. She became short of
breath from the task of turning toward me.
"Tell me," she managed, "Do you think marijuana could help me? I feel so sick."
I winced. I knew about her wretched pain, her constant nausea and all
the prescription drugs that had failed her - some of which also made
her more constipated, less alert and even more nauseous. I knew about
the internal derangements of chemotherapy, the terrible feeling that
a toxic swill is invading your bones, destroying your gut and
softening your brain. I knew this woman was dying a prolonged and
miserable death.
And, from years of clinical experience, I - like many other doctors -
also knew that marijuana could actually help her. From working with
AIDS and cancer patients, I repeatedly saw how marijuana could
ameliorate a patient's debilitating fatigue, restore appetite,
diminish pain, remedy nausea, cure vomiting and curtail
down-to-the-bone weight loss. I could firmly attest to its benefits
and wager the likelihood that it would decrease her suffering.
Still, federal law has forbidden doctors to recommend or prescribe
marijuana to patients. In fact, in 1988 the Drug Enforcement Agency
even rejected one of its own administrative law judge's conclusions
supporting medicinal marijuana, after two full years of hearings on
the issue. Judge Francis Young recommended the change on grounds that
"marijuana, in its natural form, is one of the safest therapeutically
active substances known to man," and that it offered a "currently
accepted medical use in treatment."
Doctors see all sorts of social injustices that are written on the
human body, one person at a time. We see poverty manifest as a young
father who suffered a stroke because he could not afford
cholesterol-lowering medications.
specify whether our hypertensive patient might respond differently to
standard treatments based on white male norms. We see the desperate
and damaged homeless arrive in emergency rooms to receive health care
on a crisis-to- crisis basis that rarely ever offers cure.
These social injustices are gargantuan problems that cannot be fixed
in the clinic, and their remedies can only come from broad public
reform. But this one - the rote denial of a palliative care drug like
marijuana to people with serious illness - smacks of pure cruelty
precisely because it is so easily remediable, precisely because it
prioritizes service to a cold political agenda over the distressed
lives and deaths of real human beings.
The federal obsession with a political agenda that keeps marijuana
out of the hands of sick and dying people is appalling and
irrational. Washington bureaucrats - far removed from the troubled
bedsides of sick and dying patients - are ignoring what patients and
doctors and health care workers are telling them about real world
suffering. The federal refusal to honor public referendums like
California's voter-approved Medical Marijuana Initiative is as
bewildering as it is ominous. Its refusal to listen to doctors groups
like the California Medical Association that support compassionate
use of medical marijuana is chilling.
In a society that has witnessed extensive positive experiences with
medicinal marijuana, as long as it is safe and not proven to be
ineffective, why -shouldn't seriously ill patients have access to it?
Why should an old woman be made to die a horrible death for a hollow
political symbol?
I want Attorney General Aschroft to wipe the vomit off this woman's
chest, help lift her belly so she -doesn't hurt as much when she
rolls onto her back, and explain straight to her grimacing face why
she -can't try marijuana. I want him to tell me why it does not
matter to him that almost every sick and dying patient I've ever
known who's tried medical marijuana experienced a kinder death. Face
to face, I want him to explain all these things to her and to me and
to the heartbroken family who is standing by.
Kate Scannell is a doctor in Oakland who is co-director of the
Northern California Ethics Department of Kaiser-Permanente.