For 3000 Years prior to 1842, marijuana and hashish extracts were the most widely-used medicines in the world.

Marijuana is much safer, more effective and less costly than many alternatives currently in use. The Drug Enforcement Administration's own top administrative law judge, Francis L. Young, dismissed the drug warriors' untrue propaganda when he ruled in 1988 that, "Marijuana, in its natural form, is one of the safest therapeutically active substances known to man."

Beyond the grasp of the U.S. drug-abuse industrial complex and biased mass media, The Lancet, Britain's most widely respected, peer-reviewed medical journal, recently wrote that "The smoking of cannabis, even long term, is not harmful to health . . . Sooner or later politicians will have to stop running scared and address the evidence: cannabis per se is not a hazard to society but driving it further underground may well be." ("Deglamorising Cannabis," Volume 346, Number 8985, November 11, 1995.)

During a random survey of the American Society of Clinical Oncology in 1990, 48 percent of the 1,035 respondents (about 10% of members) said they would prescribe smoking marijuana if it were legal. Another 30 percent said they would need more information. Only 22 percent said they would not prescribe it.

Forty-four percent of the respondents said they had already recommended marijuana to a patient to combat the nausea associated with chemotherapy. However, because a significant percentage of pot arrests are medical marijuana patients, doctors who make these recommendations do so at the risk of their medical licenses and livelihoods.

Let's stop this madness.

Dr. George Robins, the past president of the Oregon Medical Association (OMA), the state affiliate of the AMA, was one of OCTA's Chief Petitioners in 1994-96 and president of the OMA when marijuana was first decriminalized in 1973.

In medical school when alcohol Prohibition ended, he saw first-hand the debilitating economic and social costs of that failed policy. He knows that the war on drugs is doing the same thing to us today. At an October 19, 1995 news conference, when asked if marijuana was more dangerous than aspirin, Dr. Robins said: "I don't believe that it is. The only thing dangerous about marijuana is that it is illegal."

One of Oregon's leading physicians, 82-year-old Dr. Robins is unable to continue as chief petitioner of OCTA for health reasons.