DRUG-WAR BULLETINS: The New Yorker

DRUG-WAR BULLETINS
Three of them:
1. In Seattle, a fifty-six-year old man died last Thursday after being refused a liver transplant because he had followed his doctor’s recommendation to use marijuana to ease the symptoms of hepatitis C. From the Associated Press story:
His death came a week after a doctor told him a University of Washington Medical Center committee had again denied him a spot on the liver transplant list. The team had previously told him it would not consider placing him on the list until he completed a 60-day drug-treatment class…

The Virginia-based United Network for Organ Sharing, which oversees the nation’s transplant system, leaves it to individual hospitals to develop criteria for transplant candidates.

At some, people who use “illicit substances”—including medical marijuana, even in the dozen states that allow it—are automatically rejected. At others, patients are given a chance to reapply if they stay clean for six months.

The cruelty and stupidity of this beggars belief. This patient did not need “drug treatment.” He was already undergoing drug treatment. Nor did he need to get “clean.” He was already clean. It’s the drug war that’s dirty. (H/t: John Leone.)
2. Until about a week ago, Marie Day Walsh was a hyper-respectable fifty-three-year-old housewife living in suburban comfort in Del Mar, California, near San Diego, with her husband of twenty-three years. They have two grown daughters and another still in high school. Then came a knock on the door. She was arrested and carted off to jail.
The back story: In 1975, when she was a nineteen-year-old hippie in Saginaw, Michigan, and her name was Susan LeFevre, she got arrested for peripheral involvement in a heroin deal. While awaiting trial, she took college courses. Hoping for mercy, she pleaded guilty. The judge, full of righteous wrath, sentenced her to ten to twenty years in prison. After a year or so, she walked away from a prison work site, escaping as she had offended: nonviolently. She had never been in trouble before and has never been in trouble since. Now she will probably be extradited to Michigan and imprisoned until she is in her sixties. Take a look at her and see if you think she is a menace to society.
3. Two years ago, a large-scale study by Dr. Donald Tashkin, of U.C.L.A., a pulmonologist whose previous studies of marijuana had been used by drug-enforcement authorities to support their view that pot is dangerous, unexpectedly concluded that there is no connection between marijuana smoking and lung cancer, even among heavy pot smokers, which he defined as people who had smoked more than twenty-two thousand joints, i.e., a joint a day for sixty years. The study, which was funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, further suggested that pot might actually have some preventive effect.
The story didn’t get a lot of publicity, though the Washington Post did run a story on page A3. It will not surprise you to learn that it has had no effect on the nation’s drug “policies.”
Dr. Tashkin reiterated his findings last month before an audience of doctors and nurses. According to Fred Gardner’s detailed report,
Tashkin and his colleagues at U.C.L.A. conducted a major study in which they measured the lung function of various cohorts for eight years and found that tobacco-only smokers had an accelerated rate of decline, but marijuana smokers—even if they smoked tobacco as well—experienced the same rate of decline as non-smokers. “The more tobacco smoked, the greater the rate of decline,” said Tashkin. “In contrast, no matter how much marijuana was smoked, the rate of decline was similar to normal.” Tashkin concluded that his and other studies “do not support the concept that regular smoking of marijuana leads to COPD [Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease].”

On the other hand, imprisonment, disqualification for organ transplants, and the activities of the federal drug harassment industry remain hazardous to your health.