Posted on 05/06/2006 11:30:14 AM PDT by JTN
THE FOOD AND Drug Administration is contradicting itself. It recently reiterated its position that cannabis has no medical utility, but it also approved advanced clinical trials for a marijuana-derived drug called Sativex, a liquid preparation of two of the most therapeutically useful compounds of cannabis. This is the same agency that in 1985 approved Marinol, another oral cannabis-derived medicine.
Both Sativex and Marinol represent the "pharmaceuticalization" of marijuana. They are attempts to make available its quite obvious medicinal properties — to treat pain, appetite loss and many other ailments — while at the same time prohibiting it for any other use. Clinicians know that the herb — because it can be smoked or inhaled via a vaporizer — is a much more useful and reliable medicine than oral preparations. So it might be wise to consider exactly what Sativex can and can't do before it's marketed here.
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
Ping
Actually none.
Must be because it's the weekend.
The benefits of MJ are pretty well known. The problem is in finding a way to package it in such a way as to benefit the drug companies. We can't have people growing their own cures in their own back yards, can we? How would the Feds tax that?
But, as a full fledged advocate of drug use for its own sake he isn't really credible to my mind.
It is poor medicine and there is everything on the market that is superior to hemp medications.
I do know they allow old hippies dying from cancer to mostly smoke it legally as they die, but it isn't of much value as a real drug.
Great as the gateway drug to snare kids though.
The best available evidence is that there isn't much of a gateway effect, if there is one at all.
For example, a study by the British government:
It may well be that most hard drug addicts started off as soft drug users, but one cannot conclude from that fact that hard drug use is caused by previous experience of soft drugs. There may be many confounding social and psychological factors which are hard to observe and measure, and which simultaneously contribute to the drive towards both soft and hard drugs. Once an attempt is made to correct statistical estimates for the likely effects of these confounding factors, the implied gateway effects become much smaller.The analysis, based on recent survey data on nearly 4,000 children and young adults, finds:
No significant impact of soft drug use on the risk of later involvement with crack and heroin.
Very little impact of soft drug use on the risk of later involvement in crime.
A significant but small gateway effect probably exists linking soft drug use to the social drugs ecstasy and cocaine. However, after correcting for the likely effect of underlying unobservable factors, the predicted long-run consequence of even a complete removal of soft drugs from the scene would only be a one-third cut in the prevalence of ecstasy and cocaine.The policy implications of gateway effects are not straightforward. Even if it is true that soft drug use increases the risk of later involvement in hard drugs and crime, this does not automatically justify the adoption of a strict policy on soft drugs. By linking soft and hard drugs under the same banner of illegality, a strict policy stance may have the perverse effect of amplifying the gateway effect and increasing the prevalence of hard drugs in the long run. Before translating empirical findings on the size of gateway effects into policy prescriptions, one must have a clear idea of how the gateway effect arises.
In any case, gateway effects are probably too small to be a major factor in the design of anti-drug policy.
The biggest gateway drug, without question, is alcohol. And it's cheap, socially acceptable, easily obtainable, potent and consistent.
Just don't get caught smoking tobacco. They'll ticket ya for it on the sidewalks in some places.
Opposite ... the overwhelming majority of marijuana users do not go on to use harder drugs.
If you look at violent offenders in jail, they almost all mixed pot with other crap
Which tells the rational mind that it was the other crap rather than the pot that was related to their crimes.
Tobacco is another.
Pretty much all jailed criminals have nice pot habbits though. Seems to be part of a criminal culture to me.
If their parents allow that, that would be child endangerment.
Just do what you're told and be happy with it. Don't ask questions. Everything will be ok.
That's because as a thinker, you're somewhat limited, and have proved it for years now on FR WoD threads.
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