“To me it makes sense to give fairly wide latitude to the doctors and their patients, as they would know best what helps them and how to integrate cannabis into their care.”

This is the expert opinion of a specialist in addiction treatment who overcame his addiction to heroin and has his own website offering advice for dealing with the good and the bad in marijuana legalization and the use of “harder” drugs. Dr. Peter Grinspoon’s book Seeing through the Smoke: A Cannabis Specialist Untangles the Truth about Marijuana (p. 100) covers the waterfront. It offers an in-depth examination of drug use.

Most of the book is accessible to any reader, but in parts it is intricate. These sections are addressed to physicians in the hopes of creating a dialogue between doctors who look favorably on legalization and other physicians who think this is a dangerous road to travel.

One of his major purposes is to dispel the shame that often sits heavily on the drug user. Another objective is to make physicians aware that patients who use drugs are competent persons who are all too often misdiagnosed and considered driven by uncontrollable compulsions.

As the advice offered at the start of this article, he lays great stress on the doctor-patient relationship, a key proposal of Freedom Democrats. The book lends professional support and wise knowledge to this political objective of making the doctor-patient relationship a private matter.

In his opinion, addiction is a clinical judgment made after a consultation between a doctor and a patient. It involves an understanding of the patient’s goals and the doctor’s care. He eagerly tries to educate physicians on the use of marijuana as medicine. He is equally opposed to physicians who believe that drug users can’t be trusted and pain medication must be used sparingly. A patient suffering pain with a drug history is often refused pain medication or given such low doses as to provide no real relief for the patient.

The book is filled with suggestions for patients and doctors about finding a common perspective that permits the doctor to work without fear that they are enabling addiction. It is way too easy for a doctor to believe that drug use is laced with such harms, and that the worried physician ignores other gains that are tied to drug use.

In other words, a patient’s marijuana use or other drug use may bring real benefits. Dr. Grinspoon insists that physicians weigh the good and the bad. He reminds us that the bad is often dubious. Medical research has focused on negative outcomes without looking at the real-world gains experienced by users. Such gains should be an objective of the doctor patient relationship.

His book is a polemic against biased research that makes illegal drugs look dangerous, even if the same drug in a hospital or medical setting is used daily. He finds study after study that weights evidence to reach the conclusion that drug use is harmful.

One of Dr. Grinspoon’s hopes is that a common language and approach to evidence can bring a productive dialogue. Unhappily the history of drug research often reveals shoddy methods that bias results. Anyone who has followed the history of drug legalization will not be surprised, but the facts and names of these biased studies are easily found in this thoughtful overview.

While Dr. Grinspoon is often angered by “scientific research” that claims drugs are dangerous, he patiently outlines steps that can make studies fair. One favorite point he hammers home is the popular belief that marijuana interferes with short-term memory. Even studies that make marijuana seem dangerous must admit that this is a temporary condition. While high, a user may have memory difficulties; these disappear as the effect of marijuana dissipates. This conclusion is well established, but all too often the news stories issue unfounded warnings about pot and memory.

Dr. Grinspoon insists that objective research would look at the gains that a person might experience, making the memory lapse insignificant. A user might find his appreciation of a book increases and discover conclusions that would never be found if the person had not used grass.

One of Dr. Grinspoon’s objectives is to make the real-world experiences of drug use be an integral part of scientific research. He is not alone; there are unbiased studies discussing the positive impacts of drug use. He wants the scientific and medical community to find a common set of standards that will permit unbiased research to become the norm.

To be sure, there are dangers surrounding drug use. Dr. Grinspoon softly but firmly wants the banning of sweet edibles that could attract a child, who munches the drugs thinking it is candy but in fact produces massive overdoses. The positive effects of drugs can lead to mistaken beliefs. For example, that a drug will cure cancer.

This is a wise book that takes the guess work out of the growing legalization of drugs by state legislatures. Dr. Grinspoon insists that physicians can and should play an active role in this new legal environment. Physicians can offer real assistance to patients, and he wants the help to increase.