This extract is from the Economist - A frightful little Nun put me on to it.
(theHippy long ago escaped the drudgery of "scalpel and Wax" but cutting and pasting in moderation is cool while the chuffer is warming):
(theHippy long ago escaped the drudgery of "scalpel and Wax" but cutting and pasting in moderation is cool while the chuffer is warming):
IF CANNABIS were unknown, and bioprospectors were suddenly to find it in some remote mountain crevice, its discovery would no doubt be hailed as a medical breakthrough. Scientists would praise its potential for treating everything from pain to cancer, and marvel at its rich pharmacopoeia-many of whose chemicals mimic vital molecules in the human body. In reality, cannabis has been with humanity for thousands of years and is considered by many governments (notably America's) to be a dangerous drug without utility. Any suggestion that the plant might be medically useful is politically controversial, whatever the science says. It is in this context that, on April 20th, America's Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued a statement saying that smoked marijuana has no accepted medical use in treatment in the United States.Do you think that Sativa and her children are a bigger threat to health than a big mac in a Parramatta Road café? Sorry, rhetorical. I'm fresh outa figs.
The statement is curious in a number of ways. For one thing, it overlooks a report made in 1999 by the Institute of Medicine (IOM), part of the National Academy of Sciences, which came to a different conclusion. John Benson, a professor of medicine at the University of Nebraska who co-chaired the committee that drew up the report, found some sound scientific information that supports the medical use of marijuana for certain patients for short periods-even for smoked marijuana.
This is important, because one of the objections to marijuana is that, when burned, its smoke contains many of the harmful things found in tobacco smoke, such as carcinogenic tar, cyanide and carbon monoxide. Yet the IOM report supports what some patients suffering from multiple sclerosis, AIDS and cancer-and their doctors-have known for a long time. This is that the drug gives them medicinal benefits over and above the medications they are already receiving, and despite the fact that the smoke has risks. That is probably why several studies show that many doctors recommend smoking cannabis to their patients, even though they are unable to prescribe it. Patients then turn to the black market for their supply.
In America, this [research] is impossible. But it is happening in other countries. In 1997, for example, the British government asked Geoffrey Guy, the executive chairman and founder of GW Pharmaceuticals, to come up with a programme to develop cannabis into a pharmaceutical product.
At the start of this year, the company made the first step towards gaining regulatory approval for Sativex in America when the FDA accepted it as a legitimate candidate for clinical trials. But there is still a long way to go.
And that delay raises an important point. Once available, a well-formulated and scientifically tested drug should knock a herbal medicine into a cocked hat. No one would argue for chewing willow bark when aspirin is available. But, in the meantime, there is unmet medical need that, as the IOM report pointed out, could easily and cheaply be met-if the American government cared more about suffering and less about posturing.
Our drugs enforcement industry (including the regional cages you see round many country towns) chews up somewhere in the order of eleventy billion dollars per year to maintain. (I made that number up.) I do wonder about the numnuts who are prepared to pay so much for a "small government, low taxation, devil-take-the-loser" kind of society. Just so long as the disabled get reamed they're prepared to abandon their Tory/Conservative principles and let the Government balloon into this caricature that chases kids around playgrounds with beagles. (Sorry Snoop, Woodstock has no sense of humor.)
Drugs are currency, they're not illegal because Joe Blow might harm hisself and his neighbors, or because society may fall apart - they're illegal because that's what gives them value! Col. Oliver North was Hopalong Regan's personal guns-for-drugs dealer. To legalize drugs would would do to the White House what banning the Yen would do to the NYSX.
Ice and meth would disappear overnight if you stopped the profitable manufacture of the precursor to it all - pseudo-ephedrine. (Ephedrine itself was banned decades ago.) That wouldn't help that 2 or 3% of the population biologically destined to chemical addictions, though. They'll always find something new.
Chemical addictions we can see and ameliorate without resorting to violence - it's the insidious, invisible addictions loose in every human's psyche that are driving our culture raving mad. Prohibition is one symptom of that, religion is another. Zero tolerance is a religio-facist Utopian ideal, demonstrably unrelated to the human condition. All of this is maintained by fools, incapable of thinking critically for themselves, screeching self-righteous dogma.
Do you think Afghanistan could have been taken without the Northern Alliance - the drug warlords? Shouldn't the DEA arrest those mothers, rather than some babe with an ekky in her purse? Oh, right, that's different somehow. Let the Twerp who is without sin decide . . .
