Carol Rosenfield hurts. Pain and fatigue smother her, arriving without warning. Sometimes, the 58-year-old West Hollywood woman says, symptoms of her multiple sclerosis strike so hard she feels as if she's melting, "like the Wicked Witch of the West."
What she wants -- what she says she needs -- is Dr. Geoffrey Guy's medicine.
On the far side of the Atlantic, Guy and his fledgling British pharmaceutical company are poised to release a prescription drug packed with equal parts potential and controversy. Contained in a tiny spray bottle, the drug developed by GW Pharmaceuticals is named Sativex. Most know it by its street name: marijuana.
Even in advance of its expected approval in Britain, the medication is roiling anew the long and bitter standoff over medical marijuana in America, a conflict that has knotted California since 1996, when voters approved cannabis as medicine.
Despite the U.S. government's long resistance to marijuana for the ill, the Bush administration is privately voicing a cautious interest in Guy's medication. Apart from the drug's potential benefits to patients, some administration officials see it as a step toward ending the emotionally charged duel between the nine states that have legalized medical cannabis and the federal government, which stands by its unbending ban on marijuana for any use.
Instead of hitting the street-corner drug dealer, medical marijuana patients could get a doctor's prescription filled at the neighborhood pharmacy. The sick who stick with smoked cannabis would risk seeing sympathy ebb, sparking a new wave of raids on the dozens of cannabis dispensaries that have survived to serve California patients.
Though such potential pitfalls aren't lost on pot activists, some see a different future. By vaulting a long-demonized substance from the fringe to the pharmacy, they contend, prescription elixirs such as Sativex could help reshape public opinion about a drug maligned by federal officials as Cheech and Chong medicine.
Rosenfield doesn't plan to stand on the sidelines and wait. She doubts the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and federal Drug Enforcement Administration will give Sativex a green light any time soon. If it gets into British pharmacies and receives good reviews, Rosenfield vows, she will find a way to obtain the marijuana extract, crossing the Atlantic herself if necessary.
