cannabisnews.com: Keeping Medicine Out of Joint 





Keeping Medicine Out of Joint 
Posted by FoM on May 21, 2001 at 11:20:10 PT
By Joel Miller
Source: Spintech Magazine
"And God said, 'See, I have given you every herb that yields seed which is on the face of all the earth, and every tree whose fruit yields seed; to you it shall be for food.'" -- Genesis 1:29 Bringing up medical marijuana in some circles will have listeners looking for your hidden lava lamp, tie-dye, beard, and ponytail. In the event that they find one of the above, so much the worse for you -- they'll know you're a kook. 
"Cheech 'n' Chong medicine," Gen. Barry McCaffrey christened medical marijuana during his stint as the nation's drug czar, and the general is not alone in his opinion. Others have been just as quick to dip their poison quills in the ink well of ill will. "If marijuana is medicine," says conservative columnist Don Feder, "Dr. Kevorkian wrote the prescription." Taking aim at pro-medpot forces back in April, just after the Supreme Court heard arguments about whether medicinal cannabis should be exempted from the Controlled Substances Act, Feder pulled out all the stops. All the pertinent anti-medpot arguments were sewn into his crazy quilt: it's a front for legalization; marijuana is too dangerous; and the well-worn classic, pot is a gateway to chemical Armageddon. For this last point, Feder used the anecdote of one Ian Katz. Ian started pot at 13 and, after getting into heroin, Ian kicked over at 20. No other factors were mentioned, of course. For Feder fingering pot was enough. He labeled medicinal marijuana "a deadly prescription." On the face of it, such a declaration smacks of absurdity. Journalist Dan Baum points out in is 1996 book Smoke and Mirrors that, unlike other drugs such as alcohol, no recorded overdose from pot exists. And the gateway argument is especially specious in this context because an AIDS patient isn't likely to forgo the marijuana that helps him keep down his food and pills just so he can OD on crack. The only "gateway" here is the one to some relief from illness and pain -- and, if recent history means anything, the government knows it. Such was the case of Robert Randall. Randall was a cab driver-turned-college professor suffering from glaucoma in the early 1970s. By increasing blood pressure in the sufferer's eyes, glaucoma causes blindness. Depressed by his disease and the impotency of the prescribed medications, Randall decided to smoke a few joints with friends one night -- after which he noticed his eyesight improving. He did it again, and his eyes got better still. By 1975, Randall was puffing an ounce of marijuana every week, growing it quietly in the bathroom of his Washington, D.C., apartment. That is, until the authorities found out, nabbed his plants, and brought charges against him. For a legal defense, Randall settled on a "medical necessity" argument after speaking with scientists at the National Institute for Drug Abuse. They told him that the government had known for some time that marijuana was useful in treating his illness. With the science to validate his bathroom pharmacy, Randall became the first defendant to win using a medicinal necessity defense. The immediate result was that Randall could legally smoke the 300 government-rolled joints given to him by the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare just 12 days before acquittal. The payoff, however, for Randall and others suffering from his disease was the establishment of the FDA's Compassionate Investigative New Drug program. The program doled out doobies to federally approved patients. CIND survived clear through the jingoist drug-war years of Reagan and part of the elder Bush administration. It was finally felled only because the specter of thousands of AIDS patients taking advantage of taxpayer-funded pot to treat "AIDS-wasting syndrome" became too much for government health officials to handle. From Randall's case in 1975, CIND provided medical marijuana to patients clear until 1991 -- government ganja. This history makes the Supreme Court's May 14 ruling in the case about which Feder was so agitated both baffling and monstrously disappointing. The question was whether the Oakland Cannabis Buyers Cooperative could, like Randal, use a medical necessity defense against federal laws prohibiting marijuana distribution and cultivation -- actions which California's Proposition 215 had legalized in 1996 for medical reasons. In an 8-0 ruling, the court said no such defense was possible because federal law grants no such medical exemptions. "It is clear from the text of the [Controlled Substances Act] that Congress has made a determination that marijuana has no medical benefits worthy of an exception," explained Justice Clarence Thomas -- who, according to WorldNetDaily columnist Alan Bock, is the only Supreme to admit smoking pot. He did so while studying at Yale Law School and presumably not for medical reasons. "He really should know better," wrote Bock in his May 18 WND column, adding that "On its own narrow terms, Justice Thomas' opinion is just barely defensible if you limit yourself to the artificial reality created by a statute and ignore the real world outside the confines of that abstract construct." And what of that "real world outside"? The Controlled Substances Act was concocted in 1970 -- before most of the recent research on medical usage for marijuana had been finished. If you ignore the immediate federal inconsistency which says what is good for Robert Randall is not good for the Oakland Cannabis Buyers Cooperative, you still run into a massive problem. Sure there's no medical necessity factored into the law, but that's because the law is hopelessly outdated; not in the sense that platform shoes are outdated, but in terms of the real medical science. Our medical understanding of pot has expanded and evolved, leaving the CSA in flat-earth territory. This is not to say that judges should update the books as soon as the latest issue of The New Scientist magazine makes its way onto the reading stack in the Supreme Court lavatory. As Justice Thomas makes clear in a footnote, "Because federal courts interpret, rather than author, the federal criminal code, we are not at liberty to rewrite it." It's too bad that more federal judges don't feel the same way about more federal laws. In fact, as Bock says, "In many circumstances, such judicial restraint would be commendable. But it is difficult to believe that at some level Justice Thomas was not aware that he was not only encouraging the most repressive instincts of the federal government, but he was perpetrating a lie." Thomas had written that, by virtue of being categorized by the government as a Schedule 1 narcotic, "marijuana has no current accepted medical use at all," regardless of the precedent set by Randall and CIND. In fact it is more than a little peculiar that Thomas' opinion contains not a word about CIND. For at least 4,000 years, according to Daniel K. Benjamin and Roger Leroy Miller's "psychohistory" in their 1991 book Undoing Drugs, the psychoactive properties of marijuana have been known and cultivated for their use first by China and India, and later by Middle Eastern nations and Europe, before the time of Christ. Skipping ahead a few years, according to a March 2 story in the London Telegraph, analysis of clay pipes found around Shakespeare's home of Stratford-upon-Avon indicate the Bard's 17th century contemporaries smoked marijuana, as cannabis residues lined the walls of these recently studied proto-bongs. While it can probably be assumed that Romeo and Hamlet's use was largely recreational, Benjamin and Miller point out that pot's medicinal value was soon to be exploited by Western doctors. "By the nineteenth century," they write, "the medicinal value of marijuana was widely recognized in Europe and America, and physicians recommended it as a remedy for insomnia and anxiety, as a pain reliever, and antidepressant, and as [get ready for this] a treatment for the delirium tremens produced by alcohol withdrawal." Alcoholics set free by smoking pot -- imagine that; if you tried that sort of thing today, the poor user would be stuck attending two substance abuse seminars instead of one. Despite its recent pharmacological past, by the Reefer Madness years any use of cannabis was deemed nefarious and considered the province of profligates and (probably worse in the minds of many) black jazz musicians. Randall's case began to turn that around, however, so that when drug czar McCaffrey commissioned a report by the Institute of Medicine after passage of California's Prop. 15 in 1996, the IOM returned with Marijuana and Medicine: Assessing the Science Base. The report detailed not only the accepted uses of medpot but prospective uses as well, pinpointing medicinal value in pain management and dealing with nausea and appetite loss (the two-headed nemesis of many AIDS and cancer patients). It also sounded hopeful notes about possible advances in glaucoma, epilepsy, and "movement disorders." Downplaying any serious threat of addiction, the IOM's biggest worry seems to be that medical marijuana is typically ingested by smoking it, which the report could not bring itself to deem "good medicine." Marijuana can, of course, be taken by other means besides smoking. Users can and do eat the plant and drink tea made from it called bang or bhang (from the Sanskrit word for hemp). Still other methods abound. Since Western medicine tends these days to favor medicine delivered in a pill or syringe over pipes and funny cigarettes, a synthetic THC compound (the psychoactive ingredient in pot) known as Marinol was invented to fulfill that desire. "Unfortunately," says AIDS patient and New Republic columnist Andrew Sullivan, "Marinol isn't that good a drug. The relief from nausea quickly dissipates; even the docs prescribing the stuff don't believe it's as effective as the real thing." Sullivan is well within the pale here. In his invaluable book on the politics of medical marijuana, Waiting to Inhale, Alan Bock points out that many patients suffering from nausea have problems keeping the pills down, making smoking a far more workable delivery method for the drug. According to a survey cited by Bock, in fact, 44 percent of oncologists consider smoking marijuana superior to downing a THC pill, as opposed to the measly 13 percent who favor Marinol. Bock goes on to discuss a California organization called Genesis 1:29, named after the verse quoted at the head of this article. Genesis 1:29 has developed at least two other methods of dosing the drug: vaporizing, in which the cannabis is heated almost, but not to, the point of burning, giving patients their desired THC with much less smoke; and an oil-based inhalant that produces almost no smoke or odor when heated. Both Genesis 1:29 products should put the IOM report authors at ease -- especially since they consider smoked marijuana the best alternative for the next 10-or-so years. Genesis 1:29 has a workable solution today, taking advantage of the marijuana plant's medicinal properties acknowledged by IOM, while mitigating the danger caused by smoking medpot. All of that history and information (and scads more to be sure) was available to Justice Thomas and his fellow Supremes. Without going so far as to grant the medical exception -- which Thomas explained was beyond his role as adjudicator -- the court could have at least acknowledged the history and medical data. Instead, however, the justices simply ignored it. "To me," wrote Alan Bock, "that was a prime example of intellectual cowardice, dishonesty and irresponsibility." Agreed. And while the justices can ignore relevant facts about marijuana's medical properties, more and more Americans are paying full attention -- which means that medpot will no doubt find its own way into the nation's medicine cabinets with or without the U.S. Supreme Court's approval.Joel Miller is commentary editor of WorldNetDaily.com and is currently working on a book about the drug war.Source: Spintech MagazineAuthor: Joel MillerPublished: May 20, 2001 - Volume 4, Issue 6 Copyright: 2001 Joel MillerContact: jmiller worldnetdaily.comWebsite: http://www.spintechmag.com/Related Articles:Court Should Cancel Prescription for Marijuanahttp://cannabisnews.com/news/thread9240.shtmlFighting Cheech & Chong Medicinehttp://cannabisnews.com/news/thread6533.shtmlCannabisNews Articles - Joel Millerhttp://cannabisnews.com/thcgi/search.pl?K=Joel+miller
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Comment #8 posted by kaptinemo on May 22, 2001 at 04:16:07 PT:
Frances, dear Frances
Seeing as you have refused in the past to directly answer any of the questions that have been put to you, why do you think we should do anything else but ignore yours?Since you haven't had the decency to answer some of the very erudite and serious replies that your questions have spawned, why should we seek to reply to your continued sophomoric blather?If you believe that your posts are garnering sympathy, you are mistaken. If you believe you will be able to simply spout your propaganda unchallenged as if you were addressing a roomfull of the equally ignorant, think again. If you think you will be able to point to replies to you as somehow scoring points, I hate to tell you this dear, but you've lost the race before you left the starting gate. The people here are way ahead of you. As I pointed out before, this site is not inhabited by incoherent and inchoate dopers incapable of stringing a cogent sentence together without such hackneyed interjections like "Far out, man!".This site is populated with people whose combined education, professional and life experiences would number several hundred years worth. Doctors, lawyers, professional educators, soldiers, researchers, technicians, you name it, they're all here.All laughing at you and your jejeune silliness.But you are still welcome to visit, Frances; we need a good laugh now and then to counter the insanity that you and your kind have saddled this nation with.
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Comment #7 posted by dddd on May 22, 2001 at 03:11:12 PT
Dear Frances
I want to ask you a personal question.Why,or how did you cometo the point of being such an avid anti-Marijuana crusader?Sincerely.....dddd
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Comment #6 posted by SWAMPIE on May 21, 2001 at 23:47:08 PT
FRANCES
As a kind person,I just sent Frances an E-MAIL explaining to her how to use cannabis without smoking it.If anyone has links to a good vaporizer/recipe site,maybe we can make a new friend???????I very much enjoy all of the articles and comments on this site and sincerely hope we can convince more people that our cause is a worthy one!CANNABIS RULES!!! SWAMPIE
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Comment #5 posted by freedom fighter on May 21, 2001 at 22:35:08 PT
Frances, my sheep
Can you kindly take your thoughts to a trash can..??Probably cannot even answer this simple question..
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Comment #4 posted by frances on May 21, 2001 at 20:19:43 PT:
MARIJUANA CIGARETTES AS MEDICINE
PLEASE explain how a toxic, tar-laden marijuana cigarette is a good medicine.A cigarette that is full of hot carbons, amonia, benzene, carbon monoxide.Do people eat moldy cheese for penicillan? Drink mare's urine for female hormones?PULEESE!!Sick people don't need a lung full of carbon monoxide.
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Comment #3 posted by moldylocks on May 21, 2001 at 18:33:51 PT
good article
I enjoyed this a lot because i am very concerned about medical marijuana. My father who is 41 was in a motorcycle accident two years ago and during the accident his spinal cord was severed leaving him imobile from the chest down He has extremly painful and to him embarrassing spasms witch nothing seems to help, his doctor offered him medical marijuana (we are in NC where its illegal) but my father refused, after a while he decided to try marijuana and something extrodinary happend...he acually STOPED hurting! even thought it was for a few hours it was still better than the perscription drugs.He has tried it again twice since then and each time he feels much better.Well i just thought id tell my story and maybe let some people know that marijuana IS a MEDICINE! please dont take it away from him
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Comment #2 posted by Dan B on May 21, 2001 at 14:04:09 PT:
Another Great Joel Miller Article
Man! This guy published two great articles, back to back, highlighting truth as it relates to the drug war and, here, specifically to medical marijuana. Bravo, Joel!This article is very well put-together. I like the quotation of Genesis 1:29, followed later in the article by an articulation of the advances made by an organization named after that verse. Throughout, this is well-organized, well-written and interesting to read.Dan B
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Comment #1 posted by rbded on May 21, 2001 at 12:34:38 PT:
Supreme Court Decision
 "Day by day,case by case,the Supreme Court is busy designing a constitution for a country I do not recognize." _Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia
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