US Ignoring Marijuana Research

Sun News ^ | 14 September 2002 | Bruce Mirken

[JediGirl]

Early in the morning of Sept. 5, dozens of armed men stormed a respected medical facility where nearly 300 people desperately ill from cancer, AIDS and other illnesses got their medicine. Brandishing semiautomatic weapons in the faces of terrified patients, including a woman paralyzed from childhood polio, they destroyed all of the medicine and took prisoner the facility's operators.

The work of Osama bin Laden? Hamas? Some other international terrorists?

No. This particular terrorist raid was carried out by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.

The facility they attacked was the Wo/Men's Alliance for Medical Marijuana ( WAMM ) in Santa Cruz, Calif. A co-op run entirely by and for seriously ill people - 80 percent of whom have terminal diagnoses - WAMM sold nothing. All of the medical marijuana grown was given to members without charge.

The facility was supported by the community and worked closely with local officials. According to County Supervisor Mardi Wormhoudt, WAMM operated in an "exemplary" fashion. After the raid - which had been planned and executed with no warning to the local government - Wormhoudt told reporters she was "appalled" by the DEA's action.

The patients WAMM served are desperately ill. For many with AIDS or cancer, marijuana is the only thing that allows them to tolerate the horrendous side effects of the harsh treatments that keep them alive. Others endure excruciating pain that conventional medicines have failed to relieve, but which marijuana helps.

Because of this raid, many of these people will die prematurely - agonizing, horrible deaths - because the only medicine that helped them has been taken away.

What could possibly motivate such cruelty?

Desperation.

All around the world, governments and scientific experts are coming to believe that marijuana shouldn't be illegal - that it is simply not dangerous enough to warrant arresting and jailing even social or recreational users, much less people using it to relieve symptoms of cancer or AIDS. The British government has already moved to make marijuana possession a nonarrestable offense.

On Sept. 4, Canada's Senate Special Committee on Illegal Drugs released the most exhaustive investigation of marijuana data and policy options ever conducted by any government. The 650-page report declared that criminalizing marijuana amounted to "throwing taxpayers' money down the drain in a crusade that is not warranted by the danger posed by the substance."

But marijuana - which accounts for the vast majority of illegal drug use and arrests - is the engine that drives the war on drugs and keeps massive drug-control budgets pumped up.

So even as DEA agents were shoving machine guns in the faces of sick people, White House drug czar John Walters and Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson stood in front of a Washington, D.C., press conference, spouting long-discredited myths as if they were proven facts.

Marijuana, said Thompson, is "a clear and present danger to the health and well-being of all its users" - a statement contradicted by reams of scientific research.

Indeed, in 1995, the prestigious medical journal The Lancet stated flatly, "The smoking of cannabis, even long term, is not harmful to health." This year, the British government's Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs and the Canadian Senate committee came to similar conclusions after extensive study.

But our government's drug war ideologues don't care about science. And they don't care how many sick people they literally torture to death in their desperate effort to pump up a collapsing policy.

[spectre]

Look, clamper...I don't give a care WHAT your pharmacist's wife told YOU. MY OWN INSURANCE company told ME five pills a month. (If you had READ my entire posts, you would have known that I said Some Insurance companies DON'T cover the cost, and ain't that a shame?). So do I need to say anything else?

And yes, compared to the olden days, when chemo was so dreaded, they have made marveleous improvements in the delivery system. Used to be, after Chemo, the patient went home and was dog tired and slept. The newer delivery system is in place, and isn't ADDICTIVE, btw.

PS, I don't care who smokes pot, shoves stuff up their nose, or jabs a needle in their arm...it's their life.

sw

[Yeti]

Nope. Possession is different from use.

You're being more than a little bit disingenuous.

Obviously, use is possession by the letter and intent of the law, or is it your contention now that use is not illegal?

The only legal offences we have for this substance are possession, possession with intent to distribute, distribution, and manufacture.

Are you saying that your original question was really a trick question with no meaning? If so, why inject it into the debate? To quibble over semantics and amphiboly? If not, concede the point.

The crime committed by using marijuana is possession. You get charged with possession if you are in a room full of marijuana smoke, whether or not you have any on your person.

Jeffrey M. Whatshisname is doing four years for having less than an ounce, while elsewhere rapists and thieves get parole because the prisons are overcrowded. Welcome to Libloather's World of Justice.

[tallhappy]

re 128 -- what are you talking about.

You stoners can generally never hold a coherent thought in your heads.

[tallhappy]

Re 143.

Your link corroborated everything I said concerning the ergot poisoning in the middle ages.

It is simply wrong and purely speculative on the Salem thing.

I have read more on this than you ever will and the Salem tie in is new and totally dreamed up.

Another thing to note. Almost none of the literature on this stuff is not particularly trustworthy.

I would note Michael Harner as reliable and probably Thomas Szaz.

[tallhappy]

See, some of us here see this as A CONSTITUTIONAL ISSUE, not per se a drug issue, darn it!

You guys let your emotions override things -- just like the libs. That's the problem.

You'll never accomplish anything that way.

[dyed_in_the_wool]

You stoners can generally never hold a coherent thought in your heads.

Er, uh, proof?
I mean if this is your response to a cogent argument? An ad hominem attack, and all?

[tallhappy]

Ergot poisoning can't even explain all of the events at Salem

Salem is recent enough that this need not be a mystery.

Ergot poisoning is not the basis for it.

I thank you and others for pointing out this new revisionist history. It is new.

This drug addled literature and little sub-culture has been around a long time and hasn't changed much. This ergot at Salem is a new one I hadn't seen.

[tallhappy]

No. What you said wasn't cogent.

I don't know where it came from or what it was based on or why you said it.

It was like you were having an imaginary conversation with some specter of your mind.

And why would calling someone a stoner be an ad hominum?

Seriously, I don't understand the post in question.

[Libloather]

To quibble over semantics and amphiboly? If not, concede the point.
Yes, and no. I took the opportunity of looking up amphiboly. The definition came up - any of a group of complex silicate minerals with like crystal structures that contain calcium, sodium, magnesium, aluminum, and iron ions or a combination of them. Ya got me.

The crime committed by using marijuana is possession.
No, it isn't.

Welcome to Libloather's World of Justice.
Take some time to learn the law. Really cool stuff if you have the ability to comprehend...

[AntiGuv]

Definition: An amphiboly occurs when the construction of a sentence allows it to have two different meanings.

[AntiGuv]

The crime committed by using marijuana is possession.

No, it isn't.

This, however, is not amphiboly. Here you're just flat-out wrong.

[Yeti]

I took the opportunity of looking up amphiboly.

No, you didn't, liar.

Here, the first place I looked, at dictionary.com, for anyone who wants to know what it means, and doesn't already. I should say that it doesn't surprise me that you don't know what it means, since it is a term from analytical logic.

As to the rest of it, you're obviously so unabashedly full of sh!t that there is no point continuing with you.

I have a funny feeling that I am not the first person who ever called you a liar, but -- you are a liar. People lie when the truth is their enemy.

Let the truth be your enema, @sshole.

[Libloather]

Here you're just flat-out wrong.

Yet you can't name ONE person placed behind bars for using pot?

Your argument kinda disintegrates to smithereens - no?

[AntiGuv]

I find it of rather little consequence what someone so incapable of rational thought believes about my argument. I've already addressed your question several times over and otherwise do not think it my responsibility to compensate for such abject failures of our education system...

You are clearly here only to hear yourself speak, and I see no reason to interfere with your self-stroking efforts any further.

[Libloather]

You are clearly here only to hear yourself speak, and I see no reason to interfere with your self-stroking efforts any further.

Yet you STILL can't name ONE person placed behind bars for using pot?

Why do you even try?

[Libloather]

As to the rest of it, you're obviously so unabashedly full of...

Take it easy, dipstick. Calling folks names won't get you any friends around here.

Now, you wanna debate the dictionary - or how I drove your so-called opinion into the ground?

[AntiGuv]

Why do you even try?

Well, now this is an altogether different matter, so I'll answer this question as well. Because anytime I participate on a message board, I assume that there are at least 10 lurkers for every commentator. I don't try to persuade those who are beyond persuasion; I simply address their inanities for those who may observe the exchange.

I have rather little doubt that - despite all evidence to the contrary - you will believe you've prevailed in this debate. In fact, I'd be disappointed since anything less than total self-confidence on your part, however inexplicable, would call my own judgment into question...

[Yeti]

Now, you wanna debate the dictionary - or how I drove your so-called opinion into the ground?

Okay.

I give up.

<sigh>

[Ken H]

I'm not sure I understand the crux of your argument.

Are you making the point that possessing mj is against the law but smoking mj is not?

Or are you saying that no one is in prison for either possession or smoking?

I have no idea what point you are making with not being able to name anyone doing prison time for possession or smoking.

I don't think I could name anyone doing time for assault, burglary, rape, car theft, drugs, or trespassing at a Houston K-Mart. What does that prove or disprove?

[AntiGuv]

Even aside from your excellent point that this proves nothing in and of itself, I nonetheless provided in an earlier post the specific name of someone imprisoned for nothing more than marijuana possession.

I simply pulled up the list of 29,000+ Florida inmates serving time for drug offenses and went through until I found the first one with no other listed convictions (I found one just in the first dozen or so names).

Surely I could find many many more if humoring this question were worth any more time & effort but I now realize it won't make any difference one way or another what I say to libloather.

He will persist in seeing things the way he wants, not the way they really are.