For more information, contact:
Eric E. Sterling, President
The Criminal Justice Policy Foundation
Tel. (301) 301-589-6020

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WASHINGTON -- A bill to send doctors to prison for up to 8 years, and to strip them of their prescription authority, if they suggest the use of marijuana to their patients, is now pending in the Senate Judiciary Committee. "When cocaine comes into America by the ton and is sold like hamburgers, and when criminal drug gangs are strangling legitimate governments on three continents with corruption and violence, this bill signals a preposterous waste of taxpayers' crime fighting dollars," said Eric E. Sterling, President of The Criminal Justice Policy Foundation. The bill, S.B. 40, is sponsored by Senators Lauch Faircloth (R-NC), Jesse Helms (R-NC), James M. Inhofe (R-OK) and Robert C. Smith (R-NH). It amends the criminal provisions of the Federal drug law to prohibit physicians licensed by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration from offering advice, or responding to a request for advice that suggests the use of marijuana, even while acting in the course of his or her professional capacity. It also requires mandatory revocation of the physician's registration with DEA -- a physician's license to prescribe controlled substances such as pain medication.

This bill creates a federal felony for acts overwhelmingly legalized by voters in California and Arizona in November, and already specifically authorized by law in Connecticut, Louisiana, New Hampshire, Virginia, Vermont and Wisconsin. In fact, from 1979 until 1987 North Carolina law authorized physicians to prescribe marijuana for relief of cancer chemotherapy.

"This bill is an extreme instance of attacking science because it is politically incorrect. Other examples of the political manipulation of science are 'drug czar' General Barry R. McCaffrey's one-sided 'scientific' forum at NIDA tomorrow, and his December 30th threats to doctors to deter them from treating their patients with safe, effective and inexpensive medication -- medication that is politically tainted.

"Doctors may disagree about the medical value of marijuana compared to other medications, but this disagreement is not the basis for a felony. There is no crisis -- not even any evidence -- of doctors improperly recommending marijuana to patients with cancer, AIDS, multiple sclerosis, or other serious diseases -- nationally or locally. The distinguished editor of The New England Journal of Medicine, Jerome P. Kassirer, MD, one of the leading voices of establishment medicine, said three weeks ago, 'a federal policy that prohibits physicians from alleviating suffering by prescribing marijuana for seriously ill patients is misguided, heavy-handed and inhumane,'" said Sterling.

"The senators call their bill the 'Drug Use Prevention Act of 1997.' The Helms-Faircloth bill might better be called the 'Compassion and Good Sense Prevention Act.' America's doctors have to wonder what Senator Inhofe was thinking -- he's the Senator who called the Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Health and Safety Administration 'Gestapo bureaucracies.' How would doctors characterize DEA's threatening probe of California physician Robert Mastroianni, who recommended marijuana to three of his 6000 patients since November?

"I'm surprised that Senators Helms and Faircloth have not proposed to make it a felony for a doctor to recommend that their patients stop smoking tobacco cigarettes. Their bill would be a good joke for Leno, Letterman, Maher or O'Brien, if the consequences in pain and suffering were not so immense.

"Any American who recognizes that they or a loved one may someday need treatment for cancer -- the second most common cause of death in the U.S. -- should be outraged that if a patient asks their doctor about using marijuana and if the doctor says so much as, 'It might help,' the doctor will face prosecution and 8 years in prison," Sterling added.

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