Lungren Backs Study on Medical Marijuana Use

Atty. Gen. Dan Lungren, the most vocal critic of California’s new medical marijuana law, announced his support Tuesday for a $3-million research program intended to settle the decades-long dispute over the drug’s benefits and failings for the ill.

The decision by the state’s conservative top lawman to back a bill by liberal state Sen. John Vasconcellos (D-Santa Clara) unifies two political opposites who have clashed repeatedly over medical marijuana.

Although hundreds of studies have been conducted on marijuana since it was declared illegal in 1937, most of that research has been dismissed either by fans or foes of the drug as being biased.

Lungren, a gubernatorial hopeful who boasts a long history as an anti-drug warrior, decided to back Vasconcellos’ bill only after it had been sufficiently modified to ensure that the state-funded research, slated to be conducted over three years by the University of California, would be unassailably objective.

“California needs a definitive study,” Lungren said at a news conference. “I do not fear the findings of an unbiased research project.”

Gov. Pete Wilson, who must approve the funding, continued to express qualms Tuesday. But the bipartisan push for research in the nation’s most populous state could mark a sea change in the battle over marijuana as medicine.

If studies go forward in California and produce solid results one way or another, it could have significant ramifications for the state’s new medical marijuana law, Proposition 215, as well as the nationwide debate on the drug.

The California law legalized marijuana possession by patients and doctors if the drug was recommended by a physician.

“In many ways Lungren’s endorsement today was like Nixon going to China,” said Dave Fratello, spokesman for the group that sponsored Proposition 215. “Evidence that could lead to federal [Food and Drug Administration] approval would change the debate on this fundamentally. But the opponents are gambling that the studies will come out ambivalent, if not negative.”

The bill (SB 535), currently in the Assembly Appropriations Committee, would provide $1 million for the first year of study and recommend similar financing the next two years.

Research would explore the effectiveness and medical hazards of administering marijuana as a therapeutic drug for AIDS-related wasting, nausea and vomiting from cancer chemotherapy, neurological disorders such as epilepsy and problems associated with glaucoma.

Vasconcellos and Lungren both expressed hope that the state testing program could attract additional funding from the federal government and private philanthropists but emphasized that any donations must have no strings attached.

Earlier this month, an expert panel urged the National Institutes of Health to help design and fund new clinical trials of medical marijuana. But federal officials, who for years have been politically reluctant to back research into marijuana’s uses as medicine, have not made it clear how big a player they will be in such a research effort.

Lungren, who opposed Vasconcellos’ bill when it was introduced earlier this year, changed his mind after the senator agreed to several changes. One of the most significant concessions is meant to ensure the objectivity of research personnel through peer review, including evaluations of past public statements on the issue.

But the attorney general also gave a little. If the federal government, which controls the one farm producing research-grade marijuana, balks at requests for the drug, Lungren’s office would be required to turn over suitable marijuana seized by state drug agents.

Lungren’s endorsement contrasts sharply, at least on the surface, with his very vocal opposition to Proposition 215 and his actions prior to election day. He earned headlines and was lampooned in the Doonesbury comic strip after he ordered state agents to raid a San Francisco marijuana buyers club run by a chief advocate of Proposition 215.

The attorney general emphasized Tuesday that he has never opposed good research into medical marijuana. His early rejection of the Vasconcellos bill, he said, sprang from concerns that it was too broadly written and would produce flawed research.

Lungren also said he still believes Proposition 215 “was a dumb idea” and that California voters failed to recognize that the measure was a smoke screen for the drug legalization movement.

Some foes of the drug war suggested that Lungren was playing politics.

“When Proposition 215 gets more votes in California than Clinton did, you don’t get much mileage from continuing to oppose it,” said Ethan Nadelmann, director of the Lindesmith Center, a drug policy think tank. “It’s very hard to be opposed to research. I think that is what it boiled down to.”