Written by Janet
Pamela Hughes was standing behind a van in a park, when a police officer came up to her and asked her what she was doing….she didn’t lie, she told him she was smoking a cannabis cigarette.
She presented the stunned policeman with a written recommendation from her doctor and a copy of Maryland’s “Compassionate Use Act,” which reduces the penalties for possession of medical marijuana. She honestly thought she wasn’t breaking the law. The officer called for backup that included a canine unit.
Hughes ended up spending several hours in jail. She fought the charges and won, but only after a lot of time, stress and money — three things that her fibromyalgia, a chronic condition characterized by widespread pain and fatigue, and a reoccurrence of stage IV cancer were already monopolizing.
Hughes and several other patients told the House Judiciary Committee last week that while Maryland’s Compassionate Use Act was a step forward for its time, the law merely provides them with a false sense of security.
The patients testified on behalf of a bill that would establish a task force to evaluate the effectiveness and fairness of the current law and consider whether medical marijuana should become legal in the state. They said medical marijuana provides relief for certain ailments in ways no other medication can replicate.
No one testified against the bill, and a vote on the legislation has not been scheduled. Medical marijuana has been legalized in 13 states, including California, Maine, Rhode Island and Vermont. U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said recently that federal law enforcement will no longer target providers that are operating within state law, a major departure from the Bush administration’s stance on the issue.
The Darryl Putnam Compassionate Use Act, passed by the General Assembly in 2003, was a compromise between those advocating the legalization of medical marijuana and those against such a move. The act is named after Putnam, a former Green Beret and Howard County Farm Bureau director who advocated for the legalization of medical marijuana. He died of cancer in 1999.
The Compassionate Use Act reduced the penalties for marijuana possession to a maximum $100 fine, provided a patient has a recommendation from a medical doctor. However, patients still have to buy their “medicine” on the street and face the health and legal risks inherent in doing so.
Now those with drug offense records now can be evicted from subsidized housing. John McCarthy, an AIDS activist who has been HIV-positive for 18 years, said that medical marijuana has allowed him to reduce his pill intake from 45 to 13 pills a day. Most of those pills had been prescribed merely to alleviate the side effects of other pills, which include vomiting, headaches and neuropathy, a condition “where the nerve endings burn.
The American College of Physicians, which calls itself the “largest medical-specialty organization and second-largest physician group in the United States,” has endorsed the use of non-smoked marijuana in cases where it has been proven to have therapeutic value.
Jerrod Menz, president of A Better Tomorrow Treatment Center Inc., a drug and alcohol rehabilitation center in Murrieta, Calif., said some young people in his state are faking back pain and other hard-to-prove ailments in order to legally obtain marijuana. He said a client in his early 20s recently admitted telling his doctor he was suffering from foot pain, which helped him obtain a medical marijuana card after a five-minute examination.
Menz said doctors need to use more care in their examinations to better prevent people from abusing the intent of medical marijuana laws. He said that some problems could be prevented by having the federal government regulate medical marijuana like any other drug, although he did not endorse such a move.
Delegate Henry Heller, D-Montgomery, the sponsor of the bill, said the task force would also consider establishing research programs at Johns Hopkins University and the University of Maryland medical schools. He said this would not only allow further research on medical marijuana, but also help provide a safe product.
