Legal Pot Use Denies A Man Transplant

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I don't f+++ing understand this. The guy had a prescription from a doctor for marijuana, and due to a long time infection with Hepatitis C, his liver is failing and he is denied a transplant because of his legal marijuana use.

Click on this bag o' sh*t

I doubt the committee is considering the weed use alone, since the guy thinks he got Hep C from sharing needles in earlier years. They see a past history of drug abuse, and it likely makes them wary.

I do think it's WRONG to exclude him from transplant if medical marijuana use was the only consideration. The situation is sad. I hate to think of the guy dying if he is otherwise eligible for transplant.

He died on Thursday:

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/361 ... source=rss

Very sad.

I think it is crap to use a person's past to exclude him/her from having a future.
What if you needed a new heart and the committee told you this:

" Well, we see that you have a past history of eating Big Macs and french fries. So based on your past treatment of your old heart, we can not see giving you a new one because of your history of eating poorly."

Skahthic, it sounds cruel, but a patient with a history of behavior that would jeopardize the success of a transplant should be a lower priority to receive said transplant. Donated organs are in short supply relative to the number of people who need them, so transplant doctors often have to make hard decisions on how to stretch the limited supply to save the most people. In Timothy Garon's case, his use of marijuana for medical purposes put him at risk of a serious post-op infection. Say he received the transplant, developed the infection, and died, or had to have the new organ removed. He would be no better off, and the organ bank would have one less organ to save a life with, potentially condemning someone else to the same fate Garon suffered.

If someone is taking something on a doctor's prescription, then the medical community should not castigate them. Unfortunately, this particular substance is one area where social opinions are sometimes more influential than medical science.

Given the shortage of organs for transplants, this type of issue will come up again and again in the future. If you had two people that urgently need an organ, how is the decision made on who gets it? Does a 20 year old get priorty over an 80 year old? Does a person with young children get priority points over someone who has no dependents? Does the person with a clean legal record get more favor over someone with a history of criminal convictions? This is a high-stakes situation where somebody loses big, and there are lots of ways to make controversial decisions.

I understand that the use of the marijuana might make him more susceptible to some sort of fungus--- but it IS perscribed, unlike illegal drugs or burgers and stuff. The doctors COULD have gone over ways to prepare the pot to kill off the fungus, like using it in cooked food or heating it somehow ( it still works when cooked--- some people put it in brownies) to kill the fungus. It sounds like they just wrote him off without exploring any kind of options to reduce chances of post-op complications.

The article CowboyFromHell posted at the start of this thread said "Many doctors agree that using marijuana — smoking it, especially — is out of the question post-transplant. The drugs patients take to help their bodies accept a new organ increase the risk of aspergillosis..." This may be an artifact of the reporter's writing style, but it makes it sound like any form of marijuana use puts an immunosuppressed patient at risk of aspergillosis. If this is accurate, it would mean that Mr. Garon would have had to give up marijuana completely post-op (and suffer through the symptoms he was using it to manage). The worry would be that he would have been dependent on that symptom suppression, and suffer a transplant-risking relapse (I think that's why it was stipulated that he go through a treatment program to demonstrate he was clean).

Just to note: Aside from clinical trials, there is no such thing as legal medical marijuana in this country.

now i think of it, you can easily screen weed for aspergillus using a black-light anyway IIRC.

(or simply eat it instead as skathic says)

Hmm, I'm not sure UV screening would be effective enough to prevent an immunosuppressed patient from exposure. I did a quick google search, and the first hit was an article from Kansas State University, outlining the limitations of blacklight detection of aspergillus. The article states that the concentration of kojic acid, the compound produced by the mold that would glow under a blacklight, can be too low to detect, but a sample (in the case of the article, they were discussing corn) could still contain dangerous levels of aspergillus and the toxins it produces. It sounds like more intensive (and time consuming and expensive) tests need to be carried out to give a reasonable measure of a sample's safety, which in Mr. Garon's case could pose major logistical issues.

The article is here for those who would like to read it.