Fourteen states and the District of Columbia have launched a medical experiment that doesn't follow any of the rules of science.
By approving the use of marijuana as a medicine — with varying kinds of restrictions — these jurisdictions are bypassing the federal government's elaborate processes for approving medicines.
That's highly unusual. In fact, it's only happened once in recent memory: In the late 1970s, about half the states legalized the use of laetrile, an extract of apricot pits, as a cancer treatment. At least 50,000 cancer patients took it before it was exposed as totally useless.
Nobody argues that marijuana is the new laetrile. For one thing, nobody's claiming it cures any fatal diseases. But it is a departure from the usual rules of evidence for drugs.
Struggling With Chronic Illness
If you want to understand why it's happening, you should spend some time with Ellen Lenox Smith of suburban Rhode Island: a lively, petite, 60-year-old grandmother, former schoolteacher and one-time master swimmer.
When you meet Smith, you don't suspect anything's seriously wrong with her health. But in fact, she has two incurable diseases: One, called sarcoidosis, is ravaging her lungs. The other makes her tendons and ligaments loose and fragile.
"My knee tore, and two weeks later the other knee tore," Smith says. "And the same thing with my shoulder. It was one shoulder and then the other shoulder. So I was tearing like tissue paper, and no one knew why."
After years of misdiagnosis and surgical repairs, Smith learned she has a rare genetic disease of connective tissue called Ehlers-Danlos syndrome.
"My condition causes pain throughout the entire body," Smith says. Most people with Ehlors-Danlos "live on morphine and OxyContin," she says, but she has bad reactions to these and nearly all other painkillers. "I can't tolerate them."
An Unlikely Prescription
Feeling desperate with pain and suffering sleepless nights, Smith consulted pain specialist Dr. Pradeep Chopra. This was about four years ago, just after Rhode Island became the 11th state to legalize medical marijuana. Chopra had never recommended marijuana to a patient, and he never imagined he would.
But in Smith's case, he says, "she had absolutely no other option. So very, very hesitantly, I said, 'Listen, why don't you try medicinal marijuana?' "
Smith says, "I can remember laughing and thinking, 'I wish my parents were alive to hear this conversation!' You spend your life being told to stay away from certain things, and here I have a doctor suggesting it could help me."
Smith appealed to one of her adult sons, who scrounged some pot from a friend. Because of her lung condition, she couldn't smoke it, so she soaked it in oil and stirred the oil into applesauce.
"I tried it that night — scared to death! I mean, I had no idea what to expect," she says. "The only time I'd ever tried marijuana was once in college, and it was so horrible. So I was really nervous about it.
"But it was so amazing! I took this oil, went to bed, and the next thing I know, it was morning," Smith says. "I had literally slept through the entire night for the first time in months."
Vocabulary
| Experiment Jurisdiction Elaborate Legalize Petite Incurable Appeal |
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Discussion
1. Do you agree or disagree, marijuana should be legalized for medical purposes.
2. What is the general public opinion of marijuana in Korea?
3. Do you think the philosophy "If it works do it." is a safe one for medicine?
4. Have you ever wanted to try something not normally accepted but possibly helpful?
5. Do you think if something is natural it always has a beneficial use or not?
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