For patients in intractable pain, time is not on their side. Therefore, for supporters, New York's pending legalization of the medical provision and use of marijuana is timely. Meanwhile, the debate continues.

Furthermore, its psychoactive component spawns fears of dependency and abuse, although authorized stimulants, antidepressants and analgesics also produce highs and lows.

While critics allege medical marijuana to be addictive, a so-called gateway to lethal drugs and without medical benefit, they also reject it as valid medicine. So, is medical marijuana "real medicine" or an oxymoron?

This deep-seated question is unsettling.

Why? Because it unearths an unhealthy tension among politics, power and science.

In his "Social Transformation of American Medicine," sociologist Paul Starr chronicles this tension by describing how U.S. mainstream medicine, through licensing and certification requirements, assumed a purportedly more "scientific" medical paradigm that marginalized alternative, including herbal, therapies.

Wedded politics and science then enabled federal agencies' virtual embargo on serious research into marijuana's therapeutic efficacy. To illustrate, the National Institute on Drug Abuse plantation at the University of Mississippi is the only place where researchers can legally obtain marijuana. Yet, with pressure from the Drug Enforcement Agency, NIDA's ongoing denial of research on the plant's medical benefits has blocked important clinical studies.

As Madelon Lubin Finkel, clinical public health professor at Cornell's Weill Medical College asserts, "reasons for this prohibition are clearly politically ideological."

Snipped

Complete Article: http://www.timesunion.com/AspStories/story.asp?storyID=916127

Source: Times Union (Albany, NY)

Published: Sunday, March 28, 2010

Copyright: 2010 Capital Newspapers

Contact: tuletters@timesunion.com

Website: http://www.timesunion.com/

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