Britain's medical-marijuana mavens rolled out an eye-popping ad campaign for their cause. The glossies, which run gratis in readables such as the top-selling Daily Teleraph, follow the National Medical Association's unanimous vote endorsing cannabis as a treatment for nausea, pain and other conditions related to sickness. "Our goal is to make people aware of the therapeutic quality of marijuana and, in the end, make it available as a prescription medicine," said Clare Hodges, of the Alliance for Cannabis Therapeutics (ACT), which persuaded Time Out and The New Statesman to donate pages. ACTivists followed up the print success with a radio campaign. The herb blurbs will run as long as space is available, said Hodges, who has multiple sclerosis. While AIDS merited not a single mention amidst all the horn blowing, Hodges attributed this to an information gap-her own: "I felt we couldn't put that [AIDS reference] in the advert because it was just hearsay. I get masses of mail from people with MS and arthritis who use cannabis, but I hadn't been in contact with anyone with AIDS." Since the ad fad, Hodges has met with folks from the London Lighthouse Centre for AIDS.
