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Sanjay Gupta Discusses Medical Marijuana 
Posted by CN Staff on October 09, 2014 at 16:20:42 PT
By Luca F. Schroeder, Contributing Writer
Source: Harvard Crimson
Massachusetts -- CNN Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta discussed the possibilities and challenges in expanding medical marijuana at the Institute of Politics on Wednesday.The John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum event, moderated by Harvard Medical School associate professor Staci A. Gruber, comes just two days after the Harvard-affiliated McLean Hospital announced a “landmark new program” examining medical marijuana. The program will “explore the potential impact of medical marijuana on cognition, brain structure and function,” according to the announcement, and was funded by a $500,000 gift from best-selling crime writer Patricia Cornwell.
Gupta started off the conversation by discussing his “about-face,” referring to the well-known 2013 CNN column in which he apologized for misrepresenting marijuana to the American public.“I realized that I had in my own way probably dismissed many patients as malingers who were just trying to get stoned,” Gupta said. “And there are a lot of those people. But there are also a lot of very, very legitimate patients as well for whom not only I realized that medical marijuana was working for them, it was working for them when nothing else had.”He discussed how he afterwards looked at the evidence and found a “very distorted picture” of marijuana in the medical world, with a disproportionate number of studies “designed to find harm.” Gupta highlighted the stigma around supporting medical marijuana as a major challenge limiting scientific research on the topic.Gruber then shared a clip from Gupta’s documentary “Weed,” highlighting the story of Charlotte Figi, a five-year-old suffering from severe epilepsy. Charlotte and her family had tried several toxic anti-epileptic drugs—but none of them worked, and Figi was still having around 300 seizures a week.Medical marijuana was ultimately the solution to Figi’s condition, and, as Gupta emphasized, Figi’s story is “emblematic of [the story] of hundreds of families.”Families like Figi’s, he pointed out, are “medical marijuana refugees”: they can now gain access to medical marijuana in Colorado but can lose their children and be put in prison for drug trafficking if they attempt to leave the state.“I think it’s interesting to see how his viewpoint changed,” Zarin I. Rahman ’18 said. “Maybe we all need to be exposed to these families that he was, to maybe change our mind on this as well.”Gupta repeated throughout the evening that the “policy has outpaced the science.” The states, he said, are moving forward without waiting for the science, and the issue is only compounded by the fact that the “policies and the laws we have in [the US] make it challenging for the science to get done.”The important thing to do at this point in the legalization process, Gupta concluded, is to let marijuana, like any other medicine, “stand on its [own] merit scientifically.” When more scientific studies have been conducted, he said, when that “takes away some of the stigma surrounding this [issue], we can more easily get to the point where we can establish the thresholds” for marijuana use.Source: Harvard Crimson, The (MA Edu)Author: Luca F. Schroeder, Contributing WriterPublished: October 9, 2014Copyright: 2014 The Harvard Crimson, Inc.Contact: letters thecrimson.comWebsite: http://www.thecrimson.com/URL: http://drugsense.org/url/1cV63uFsCannabisNews Medical Marijuana Archiveshttp://cannabisnews.com/news/list/medical.shtml 
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Comment #2 posted by Sam Adams on October 10, 2014 at 11:06:11 PT
health care chattel
Once you realize that our health care system is set up by our greedy masters to extract as much money as possible out of an increasingly sick population you'll understand why cannabis is illegal.It's a company store mentality. If you have any money left over after taxes, hyper-inflated real estate prices, utility and gasoline prices, road tolls, fees, etc, they'll squeeze the rest out when you get sick and need treatment.Growing plants at home for medicine? Not part of the program.
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Comment #1 posted by The GCW on October 09, 2014 at 17:31:48 PT
Get completely out of the way.
Right now. Get completely out of the way. We know enough yesterday and today for government to stop confronting (read: caging) citizens who wish to use cannabis medically or otherwise.We know enough to realize cannabis simply and honestly isn't going to contribute to problems that are associated with the alternatives, which include highly addictive and deadly pharmaceuticals or beer, wine and whiskey etc.Regulate the plant now. The science will enable citizens to decide if they prefer to use the pharm pills or the Godly plant.Some instances people will make different choices for different needs.-0-I appreciate the help, for sure, but...Gupta may feel He's on the high road by making a distinction between honest medical usage and such but then by extension seems opposed to people using the plant similar to beer, wine and whiskey.For that, Gupta is a strain of cannabis prohibitionist that I'm not comfortable with. We're not waiting on a "stigma" change or another Gupta change.
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