cannabisnews.com: Good To Grow





Good To Grow
Posted by CN Staff on June 07, 2005 at 22:33:07 PT
By Sally Satel
Source: New York Times
Washington, D.C. -- Relief for medical marijuana patients was snatched away this week. In Gonzales v. Raich, the Supreme Court ruled that such patients will be subject to federal prosecution even if their own state's laws permit use of marijuana. Now, short of Congress legalizing medical marijuana, the only way that its users can avoid stiff financial penalties or jail is if it is turned into a prescription medicine approved by the Food and Drug Administration. Justice Stephen G. Breyer said as much during oral arguments last November with his comment that "medicine by regulation is better than medicine by referendum."
Fair enough. The problem is that the very agencies integral to facilitating the research and development of medical marijuana have actually been impeding progress.The first obstacle is ideological. The Drug Enforcement Administration has fought marijuana's use as a medicine, maintaining that it has no therapeutic value. (It hasn't helped that activists have tried to use medical marijuana as a wedge to liberalize drug laws.)But scientific consensus says otherwise. Surveying a range of findings, a federally commissioned Institute of Medicine report issued in 1999 noted the active ingredients in marijuana, cannabinoids, can relieve chemotherapy-induced nausea, stimulate appetite and suppress pain in patients who have failed to get relief from conventional treatments. Other countries have embraced such findings. Last April, for example, regulators in Canada approved a marijuana extract delivered in an oral spray for relief of symptoms of nerve pain associated with multiple sclerosis. A more imposing obstacle to developing medicine in the United States is that there is only one legal source of research marijuana: a farm in Mississippi run by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, part of the National Institutes of Health. As gatekeeper of the supply, the drug abuse institute must review and approve all proposed marijuana research projects, a hurdle for researchers that is both onerous and redundant: they already must undergo at least three other oversight evaluations (from the Food and Drug Administration, the D.E.A. and their own institutions) before they can enroll their first subject.One scientific team has been trying for two years to get a mere 10 grams of marijuana from the drug abuse institute for its effort to develop a device that heats marijuana but doesn't burn it, thereby providing nontoxic and immediate relief to patients. Since the drug abuse institute's mission does not include the development of marijuana into a commercial prescription medicine, any expanded studies with the marijuana plant must be privately financed. But, in a Catch-22, private resources are out of reach as long as only federal marijuana - which is notoriously weak and poorly manicured - can be used.After all, a pharmaceutical development team must have a stable source of raw material with adequate purity. Researchers need to be able to control the ratio of active to inert compounds in the plant by manipulating growing conditions. Unless a pharmaceutical company could be sure of producing a drug or device for commercial sale, it won't invest millions of dollars in clinical trials.One solution is to get the National Institute on Drug Abuse out of the marijuana supply business. Let researchers get marijuana directly from the government-approved Mississippi farm or from overseas sources like the Dutch Office of Medicinal Cannabis. Better yet, permit a privately financed D.E.A.-approved farm, like the kind that Lyle Craker, a medicinal plants expert at the University of Massachusetts, has been hoping to create for the last three years. In addition to producing higher-potency, cleaner marijuana, such a farm could offer strains with varying levels of cannabinoids that may contribute to marijuana's therapeutic effects.Developing cannabis into an approved and effective prescription medication can be a goal within reach. But it will take a federal government that is truly open to the research that it claims to value.Sally Satel, a psychiatrist and resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, is the co-author of "One Nation Under Therapy: How the Helping Culture Is Eroding Self-Reliance."Source: New York Times (NY)Author: Sally SatelPublished: June 8, 2005Copyright: 2005 The New York Times Company Contact: letters nytimes.com Website: http://www.nytimes.com/ Related Articles & Web Site:Angel Raich v. Ashcroft Newshttp://freedomtoexhale.com/raich.htmThe Court and Marijuanahttp://cannabisnews.com/news/thread20809.shtmlAnother Label-Defying Rulinghttp://cannabisnews.com/news/thread20808.shtmlIn The Grip of Reefer Madnesshttp://cannabisnews.com/news/thread20807.shtml
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Comment #11 posted by jose melendez on June 08, 2005 at 12:46:47 PT
no backing down
"One scientific team has been trying for two years to get a mere 10 grams of marijuana from the drug abuse institute for its effort to develop a device that heats marijuana but doesn't burn it, thereby providing nontoxic and immediate relief to patients. " - NYTImes Mainstream media woke up and smelled the coffee!
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Comment #10 posted by FoM on June 08, 2005 at 07:44:32 PT
kaptinemo
My Freedom To Exhale site which isn't included in CNews stats has averaged approximately 1000 individual page hits per day for the last two days and that makes me really happy too.I update my Raich vs Ashcroft page a couple times a day with the current news and it by far is the most accessed page I have right now.http://www.freedomtoexhale.com/raich.htm
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Comment #9 posted by FoM on June 08, 2005 at 07:33:48 PT
kaptinemo
I just looked at the stats and they are doing pretty good but it's June. I thought they would be higher because of all the activity but they are still up over this time of year from last year. June and July are always the two slowest months. 
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Comment #8 posted by afterburner on June 08, 2005 at 06:54:51 PT
Scientific Debate Moves to the Front Burner
Unintended consequences: the US Supreme Court ruling on Raich v. Gonzales (Ashcroft) and its dissent has ignited a flurry of media reports, calling for Congressional action, questioning the punitive regulatory system of not only cannabis patients but even cannabis research as well. Our years of telling the truth on the back burner, crying in the wilderness, have finally found a National audience, the US Media and the 80% public supporters of medical cannabis.Knowing the short attention span of media subscribers and the short cycle of 'hot' story coverage -- can you say tsunami victims -- we must do everything in our power to keep this story alive. (More demonstrations, more Letters To the Editor, more videophones and digital video cameras.) Document and squawk. "Won't Back Down."
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Comment #7 posted by cloud7 on June 08, 2005 at 06:51:14 PT
kaptinemo
http://cannabisnews.com/stats/
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Comment #6 posted by OverwhelmSam on June 08, 2005 at 06:22:56 PT
Couple Of Points
If we pass medical marijuana laws in every state and municipality, the federal law will become completely unenforceable.Jail for a dying person seeking to relieve their pain is no longer a concern involving health, or addictiveness. Perhaps the case needed to be brought to the Supreme Court now is Cruel and Unusual Punishment!
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Comment #5 posted by jose melendez on June 08, 2005 at 04:26:31 PT
no relief, NO RESPECT
Too Little, Too Late: "Justice" Concedes Law is Bunkhttp://www.marijuananews.com/news.php3?sid=819 "We acknowledge that evidence proffered by respondents in this case regarding the effective medical uses for marijuana, if found credible after trial, would cast serious doubt on the accuracy of the findings that require marijuana to be listed in Schedule I.""Respondents are correct that the CSA exceeds Congress commerce power as applied to their conduct, which is purely intrastate and noncommercial."
CannabisNews Stats
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Comment #4 posted by kaptinemo on June 08, 2005 at 03:54:39 PT:
Unrelated: FoM, what are the latest hit stats?
After this week, they have to be well up there...
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Comment #3 posted by kaptinemo on June 08, 2005 at 03:46:01 PT:
They keep missing the point
Which is essentially this: prior to 1937, save for a few States, cannabis was simply legal. Period. No huge bureaucracies to pontificate endlessly, no legions of pinch-faced bureaucrats dreaming up layer upon layer of rules, no rat maze of regulations to traverse...you just grew it and used it.What we have happening here is all these talking heads running on and on about preserving a system that does nothing but create misery...a wholly artificial system that is like one of Rube Goldberg's overly complicated machines (see here http://www.rube-goldberg.com/html/gallery.htm for those too young to know what I'm talking about) designed to do something simple, like throw a light switch. As has been mentioned here by Hope, deadly poisonous houseplants, toxic to both man and beast, are sold nonchalantly over the counter at just about any chain store's garden section. But they create all these unnecessary rules and regulations for cannabis, which hasn't killed anyone in historical record. Ol' Rube must be shaking his head in the Afterlife; he only meant his work as a joke, not to be taken literally...and certainly not as government policy.
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Comment #2 posted by Max Flowers on June 07, 2005 at 23:02:23 PT
A correction
The article says: Now, short of Congress legalizing medical marijuana, the only way that its users can avoid stiff financial penalties or jail is if it is turned into a prescription medicine approved by the Food and Drug Administration.This is not accurate at all... it implies that all or most medical cannabis patients will inevitably end up busted by the feds. Nothing of the kind is the actual fact. In reality, something like 1% or less of all patients (and this is only the ones that we know of) ever end up encountering federal law enforcement due to their activities. That means that 99% of the time, they get away with it. I'm sure the feds don't want people to know that this is the case... however, it *is* the case.
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Comment #1 posted by Sam Adams on June 07, 2005 at 22:54:54 PT
great article 
Her book sounds very interesting as well. The Times could really help out by strongly editorializing in favor of the bill currently being considered in their state (NY) legislature. Obviously some of the legislators and media in RI have made a clear decision to flaunt the Republican Bush administration on this issue. More state med MJ laws passing is probably one of the best ways to put the heat on the DEA, NIDA, & other agencies blocking research. Which really should be crime - this is really blatant corruption & persecution at its worst - these admininstrators should be prosecuted on some kind of obstruction charge. You can't just sit in a government office and refuse to play by the rules. Why is no one named here? It seems like the state-worship of the media causes them to confine their indictments and condemnations to huge, faceless bureaucracies - the way to accountability is to find who is responsible and turn up the media heat on those persons.
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