Is the War on Drugs Becoming A War on the Elderly?

"Tennessee law enforcement officials don't typically arrest those who are ill [for marijuana use]. They target kids and young adults, racial minorities, people who remind them of the 1960s, guys with long hair or an earring." H. Wallace Maroney, Memphis attorney, quoted in the Nashville Scene

As my previous post indicates, that may be changing, at least here in Nashville where police are throwing the book (and making up charges, galore) at elderly cancer victims who dare to alleviate their pain with the use of medical marijuana.

Move over murderers and rapists, Nashville's elderly pot smokers are coming to join you in prison.

Do we really want to imprison our parents and grandparents? Is there that much free space in our jails and prisons? Do we have the necessary medical facilities in our prisons to care for all the elderly pot smokers? Are the people in charge insane?


ELDERLY PATIENTS THROW NEW WRINKLE IN MARIJUANA DEBATE

Reaching for a cane, the frail grandmother pads with uncertain steps to the tiny alcove kitchen in her two-room flat. Her feline alarm clock gets his grub, then Hiatt turns to her own needs.

She is, at 81, a medical wreck and a miracle, surviving cancer, Crohn's disease, and the onset of Parkinson's. Each morning Hiatt takes more than a dozen pills. But first she turns to a translucent orange prescription bottle stuffed with a drug not found on her pharmacist's shelf -- marijuana.

Peering through owlish glasses, Hiatt fires up a cannabis cigarette with a wood-stem match. She inhales. The little apartment -- a cozy place of knickknacks and needlepoint -- takes on the odor of a rock concert. "It's like any other medicine for me," Hiatt says, blowing out a cumulus of unmistakable fragrance. "But I don't know that I'd be alive without it."

With the US Supreme Court poised to soon rule on whether medical marijuana laws in California and nine other states are subject to federal prohibitions, elderly patients such as Hiatt are emerging as a potentially potent force in the roiling debate over health, personal choice, and states' rights.

No one knows exactly how many elderly use cannabis to address their ills, but activists and physicians say they probably number in the thousands. And unlike medical marijuana's younger and more militant true believers, the elderly are difficult for doubters to castigate as stoners.

Their pains are unassailable. Their needs for relief are real. Most never touched pot before. As parents in the counterculture '60s, many waged a generation-gap war with children getting high on the stuff. Now some of those same parents consider the long-demonized herb a blessing.

Patients contend cannabis helps ease the effects of multiple sclerosis, glaucoma, and rheumatoid arthritis. It can calm nausea during chemotherapy. Research has found that cannabinoids, marijuana's active components, show promise for treating symptoms of Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's, perhaps even as anticancer agents.

A recent AARP poll indicated that 72 percent of people age 45 or older believed adults should be allowed to use cannabis with a physician's recommendation. ( The poll indicated a similar proportion staunchly opposed to legalizing recreational pot. ) Conservative elders such as commentator William F. Buckley and former Secretary of State George P. Shultz have supported marijuana as medicine.

Hiatt and those like her are "more and more the face of the marijuana smoker," said Ethan Nadelmann of the Drug Policy Alliance, which advocates treating cannabis like alcohol: regulated, taxed, and off-limits to teens.