I am writing in response to Tom Sander's column of March 6, which resembled nothing more than a public service announcement for the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws.

While the eye disease suffered by Elvy Musikka is tragic and worthy of compassion, the government's responsibility is to view potential medicines from the standpoint of safety and efficacy before it approves them for therapeutic use.

Among the side effects of marijuana is the damage that it does to the cardiovascular and respiratory systems. The figure used by the American Cancer Society and the American Lung Association is that one or two marijuana cigarettes do as much damage as an entire pack of regular cigarettes because the smoke has a much higher content of carbon monoxide and carcinogens than tobacco cigarettes.

Additionally, no other medicine is administered via smoke, as human lungs were not designed to accept smoke -- as the millions who have died from smoke inhalation would attest, if they could.

Also, current studies being conducted at the Virginia Medical College indicate that Delta 9 tetrahydrocannabinol damages the immune system and reduces the ability to fight disease, increasing the chance of contracting colds, viruses and influenzas and the severity of an illness once you have it.

This also bodes ill for persons taking AZT for AIDS. They take the AZT to prolong their life, and if they were to take marijuana to reduce the nausea caused by the AZT, they might well neutralize its effect by compromising the body's immune system, if the early results prove true.

Very recent discoveries indicate that the receptors in the brain that receive cannabia are located near or in the part of the brain that provides memory and that there are very similar receptors in the immune cells, which may explain the reduction in disease-fighting ability in those cells.

The damage done by marijuana occurs inside the body and over a relatively long period of time, i.e. months or years, making it difficult for the user to relate use and damage, thus facilitating their denial.

Virtually all of the illnesses Sander cites as potentially helped by marijuana have other medicines that are more or as useful with far fewer side effects. Sadly, they are not powerful, psychoactive substances that give you a "high" as a dividend.

Marijuana also damages the reproductive system and the brain. The likelihood of psychological damage to the users and their offspring is a price too dear to pay for early approval of prescription use of this toxic and dangerous substance.

The marijuana apologists have borrowed a page from the tobacco apologists' handbook and declare all studies finding marijuana toxic and dangerous as invalid, inaccurate and bad science. Isn't it peculiar that we demand that the Food and Drug Administration prove that non-psychoactive medicines that we need to restore our health or even save our lives are safe and effective before they are approved and we take them; but, for pschoactive substances that give a "high," we demand a higher standard of proof that they are going to harm us before we stop?

It should be noted that marijuana has been rejected as medicine by the American Medical Association, the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, the American Glaucoma Society, the American Academy of Ophthalmology and the American Cancer Society.

Not one American health association accepts marijuana as medicine. Research into claims of marijuana's usefulness as a therapeutic substance is appropriate and continues; however, it would be grossly irresponsible to release it for prescription use at the present state of knowledge.

Perhaps the intelligent, sensitive and compassionate thing to do is not to falsely raise the hopes of seriously ill people about miracle effects from a toxic, dangerous, unproven and medically unapproved substance.

---- The author is Demand Reduction Coordinator for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration in Miami. He wrote this article for the Sun-Sentinel.