Corinne Millet, 1931 - 2007
Death of federal medical marijuana patient leaves onlyfour surviving IND recipients.
Photo courtesy of Patients Out of Time.

Nebraska Investigational New Drug (IND) patient Corinne Millet, who had glaucoma, said that smoking an ounce of government-issued marijuana every week for 17 years saved her sight. The four known remaining IND patients, Irvin Rosenfeld, Barbara Douglas, Elvy Musikka and George McMahon, all get larger dosages than did Millet.

A voice of reason in the drug war on behalf of Patients Out of Time, Millet passed away December 13, 2007 without ever seeing the IND program expand to cover others like her who need the natural -- but federally banned -- medicine.

She particularly supported senior citizens getting easy access to the medication that surprised her by not only helping save her vision, but also reducing her arthritis and assorted aches and pains. A recent AARP poll found 72% of people age 45 or older believe adults should be allowed to use cannabis with a physician's recommendation. (The poll was pulled from the publication in a bow to political pressure.)

Millet was one of the last people to be accepted into the program, followed by Ken Jenks and his wife, two AIDS patients who proved in court that medical marijuana was a medical necessity for them. As a result of that ruling, hundreds of AIDS patients across the country asked to be included in the program.

Secretary of Health and Human Services, Dr. Louis Sullivan, responded to the increase in requests for IND status among AIDS patients by shutting down the IND access to marijuana in 1992. At that time, 15 patients were receiving marijuana, over 30 had been approved and were waiting for their medication to be delivered, and hundreds of applications were waiting for review (Randall & O'Leary, 1998). Only the 15 current patients would be allowed to continue in the program, closing the door to all others.

Also during that time frame, Millet's supply of marijuana was cut off. Millet, a widow and glaucoma patient, sought help from her congressman to regain her supply of medicine, but during the six weeks she spent without her medication, she lost 80% of her peripheral vision (Byrne & Mathre, 1992).

In 1996 The New York Times reported that the very existence of the compassionate-care program contradicts Federal policy and puts the Food and Drug Administration in an "awkward position," said Don McLearn, a spokesman for the agency. Despite its name, the Compassionate Investigative New Drug program, known as compassionate IND, is not a research study with any goals of evaluating the medicinal value of smoking marijuana. Nor is it particulary compassionate, given that its main goal appears to be creating a false impression that patients can get marijuana if they need it, at the same time the Federal government is rounding up patients and caregivers throughout California and the US.

If one is lucky enough to be one of the patients legally prescribed marijuana in the United States, the obvious question becomes; where do you fill your prescription? Luckily (or unluckily) the federal government has its own pot farm, grown as a monopoly (weren't those banned in 1906?) on seven acres in Oxford, Mississippi, then shipped to the Research Triangle Institute in North Carolina for processing - a process that can take nearly two years from harvest to smoke. By the time it reaches the patient, the material can be ten years old or worse.

"It's horrible," says Corinne Millet, sixty-three, who suffers from glaucoma. "I can get the same high off three good tokes from some pot in Amsterdam as I can from smoking a whole government joint."

After two operations and ''trying every drop on the market,'' Millet was told that there was nothing that could prevent her from going blind. The wife of a surgeon, Millet proved that prognosis null and void on Oct. 14, 1989, when she petitioned the federal government and was accepted into the Federal program that provided her with five marijuana cigarettes a day starting Nov.16, 1990: four cured ounces of cannabis per month, which she said allowed her to keep her vision.

But the autocratic federal DEA bureaucracy sits like a demon-guard blocking both access and research, to make sure these voices of reason are not effective against a government that refuses to listen to the voters. Her story is discussed in the acclaimed video, Marijuana as Medicine.