Iowa holds national conference on medical use of marijuana

Greg Smith

Wednesday, April 5, 2000 | 11:41 a.m.

IOWA CITY, Iowa - Barbara Douglass suffers from multiple sclerosis. To ease the pain in her back and legs, she smokes cigarettes.

Marijuana cigarettes.

"When the leg is just killing you, you rub it and rub it. Sometimes you rub it so much and so hard you can bruise yourself," said Douglass, who lives in Lakeside, a town of 589 people just southeast of Storm Lake in northwest Iowa.

"The marijuana helps. It eases the pain and spasms. I believe smoking marijuana helps me deal with the disease that I'm forced to deal with," she said.

Douglass, who says the marijuana also has dramatically improved her vision, carries a letter from her doctor stating that she participated in a now-defunct federal program that allows her to carry the pot.

She'll have the letter - and her tin box of marijuana cigarettes - with her on Thursday when she travels to the University of Iowa for a three-day conference on the therapeutic use of marijuana.

Organizers say the conference is the first of its kind in the nation. They put it together in response to a report last year by the Institute of Medicine, a federal advisory panel, that said marijuana can help fight pain and nausea and should be tested further in scientific trials.

"If there can be some enlightenment, that would be wonderful. I think that people need to know the whole picture of marijuana. That, in fact, it's not just a recreational drug but has medicinal value," said Melanie Dreher, dean of Iowa's College of Nursing.

It is against federal law for doctors to prescribe the drug.

Yet voters in the District of Columbia and in the states of Alaska, Washington, California, Arizona, Nevada, Oregon and Maine have approved laws allowing doctors to recommend medical marijuana use for patients suffering from cancer, glaucoma and other conditions.

The U.S. Justice Department is challenging those laws.

Al Byrne Jr. is co-founder of a group called Patients Out of Time, which asked Iowa to host the conference. He said the government and law enforcement agencies are fighting the medicinal use of marijuana for one simple reason.

"If they give up their control and pass that control to the health care community, then they're out of a job," said Byrne, who lives in Howardsville, Va., and will be attending the conference.

Says Dreher, a former board member of NORML, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws: "This conference is not about the legalization of marijuana. It's about the medical use of marijuana.

"I'm pretty convinced it has therapeutic value."

Byrne smoked marijuana to relieve eye pressure from glaucoma and said his father, Al Byrne Sr., also smoked it in the late 1960s to relieve the nausea and pain from his liver cancer.

That came on the advice of the elder Byrne's doctor. So Byrne, a naval officer at the time, bought pot illegally on the street from a friend.

"Within 15 seconds, I saw him literally change. Within 15 seconds to a minute, my father said, 'You know, I don't believe this, but I'm hungry as hell, could you make me a sandwich?' "

Eating food - otherwise known by recreational users as getting the "munchies" - helped his father last another two months before he died, he said.

Douglass, too, said smoking pot for her pain also helps her appetite. But she gets upset when asked if she gets high as a result of smoking.

"Just think about it. There you are, you've got this disease and you need something to relieve the pain. That's certainly not going to be a high," she said. "We're a different group of people than those who smoke it for a high."

Douglass, who is 43 years old, developed MS in 1988. Three years later, she was one of 15 people nationwide chosen to receive medical marijuana through the Compassionate Care Program, a federal program begun in the late 1970s but discontinued in 1992.

Seven of the patients have since died, Byrne said. Of the remaining eight, six will be attending the conference, he said.

Douglass and the others are grandfathered into the federal program and continue to receive government-issued marijuana cigarettes, which she says are as long as a 100-sized cigarette.

Douglass splits them in half when she smokes. But she insists they be re-rolled.

"I don't know if it's poor-grade paper or what, but the paper stinks. The smell is ungodly," she said.