Posted on 06/26/2006 8:22:44 AM PDT by bassmaner
If ever a piece of legislation should pass readily through the U.S. House of Representatives, it is a measure sponsored by Rep. Maurice Hinchey, D-N.Y., and Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif., that would prevent the Department of Justice from using tax dollars to prosecute medical-marijuana patients in states that have legalized medical marijuana. Because it is a good bill, expect it to fail.
Polls show that some three out of four Americans support allowing doctors to prescribe medical marijuana for patients who need it. Members must know that constituents within their districts use marijuana to control pain and nausea -- their families would like to live without the fear of prosecution. As Time Magazine reported last year, research shows that the drug has salutary "analgesic and anti-inflammatory effects."
Republicans should be drawn to the states' rights angle of the bill, while Democrats should go for the personal stories of constituents who have found relief, thanks to medical marijuana.
Yet when the House last voted on the measure in 2005, it tanked in a 264-162 vote. As the House is scheduled to consider the measure this week, few expect the measure to pass. "I wish I could tell you it's going to pass," Marijuana Policy Project spokesman Bruce Mirken conceded by phone last week. "I can't realistically expect that."
Over the last decade, two big hurdles existed: Republicans and Democrats. Last year, a mere 15 Repubs voted for the measure -- down from 19 GOP members who supported it in 2004. On the other side of the aisle, Democrats are moving toward the light. In 1998, the Clinton Justice Department filed suit against California medical-marijuana clubs. Last year, however, an impressive 145 Dems voted for Hinchey-Rohrabacher.
Martin Chilcutt of Kalamazoo, Mich., has written to his local GOP congressman, Rep. Fred Upton. A veteran who believes he got cancer because of his military service, Chilcutt told me that his Veterans Administration hospital doctors supported his use of medical marijuana when he had cancer.
Upton's office told me that Upton believes Marinol, the legal synthetic drug that includes the active ingredient in marijuana, should do the trick.
I asked Chilcutt if he had tried the drug. "I don't like Marinol at all," Chilcutt replied. It takes too long to work, it is hard to calibrate the dose you need, and "it made me feel weird." He prefers marijuana because it works instantly -- "You can control the amount you're using, and you get instant feedback."
Upton also fears sending the wrong message to kids about marijuana. But federal law has long allowed the sick access to needed pain control with drugs more powerful than marijuana. Only bad politics can account for the fact that marijuana is a Schedule 1 drug under the Controlled Substances Act, and thus deemed more harmful than cocaine and morphine -- drugs that can kill users who overdose.
Alex Holstein, a former GOP operative and conservative activist, is lobbying Republicans on behalf of the Marijuana Policy Project. He believes that regardless of their position on medical marijuana, Repubs in the California delegation should support Hinchey-Rohrabacher because state voters approved Proposition 215 -- and Republicans should stand up for states' rights and the will of California voters.
As it is, President Bush should direct the Justice Department to lay off medical-marijuana users -- because it is the right thing to do for sick people.
It's not as if the administration doesn't know how to sit on its hands and not enforce existing law. Last week, The Washington Post reported that under Bush, the number of employers prosecuted for hiring illegal aliens plummeted from 182 in 1999 to four in 2003.
If the Bushies can look the other way when well-heeled employers break the law, they can look the other way when sick people try to relieve unnecessary pain.
Nixon Commission - 1972
DEA's Young Commission - 1988
"Licit and Illicit Drugs" by The Editors of Consumer Reports
"Marijuana Reconsidered" Lester Grinspoon, MD.j
All of these reports, unlike DEA and NIST reports, are careful about their scholarship and citations.
The Nixon Commission and the Young Commission were, of course, thoroughly packed by the administration with scholars and scientists pre-disposed to hate marijuana, but, being honest scientists, failed to condemn marijuana on it's track record, which, as per the DEA's Judge-Advocate Young, after a year of exhaustive analysis of the valid scientific research, declared marijuana, accurately, to be, on it's track record, safer than most of the things on the grocery shelf. How many people do turkey eggs and aspririn kill every year? About 1000. How many people does marijuana kill every year? About 0--and that's with generously factoring in those two bogus reports you just caughed up.
"Cultures of the marijuana revealed Aspergillus fumigatus with morphology and growth characteristics identical to the organism grown from open lung biopsy specimen."
There's your proof. Exactly what you asked for. Medical marijuana can kill immunosuppressed patients.
It's a common argument now, and it was a common argument in 1972, before the Nixon Commission, and it was probably a common argument in Freud's time to Plato's time, when marijuana was being widely prescribed by medical doctors for such things is minstral distress, with about as great success and confidence as aspirin is now. The AMA was astonished by, and deeply opposed to, the Marijuana Stamp Act of 1937, which was the first foray against marijuana.
I have not seen it anywhere else, even from all the Soros sponsored groups trying to get it legalized.
I doubt that your perceptions are an accurate measure of the pervasiveness or longevity of this argument.
The question is -- can you support your statement with any studies, facts, papers, cites, polls, anything? Other than your vague reference to "contemporary statistics", that is.
I am quite accustomed to this form of drug warrior bluster--and I am equally accustomed to how quickly it turns into anti-scientific, anti-scholarly bluster when the cards are honestly dealt on the table.
The incontrovertable fact is that there is nothing about marijuana, of a widely accepted scientific or statistical nature, that justifies the anti-marijuana laws, in the face of the harm done by even such commonly tolerated substances as coffee, tea, sugar, living room tv sets, turkey eggs, unbanastered staircases, and meat fat. As legislators and federal officers tacitly acknowledge when it's their own kids that have been swept up in marijuana busts.
Let me know when you've made up your mind whether you want the federal government in or out, OK?
Excuse me, but he marijuana did not kill the patient. The bacteria, which could have been eliminated, did. This is a feeble argument, based on the logical fallacy of the excluded middle. Pretty good for a drug warrior, though.
Or a survey that says that. Or a poll. A study? A hypothesis? An article in a magazine? Something?
Let me know when you get tired of childishly and fruitlessly employing false dicotomies to avoid serious issues, OK? Maybe if you hold your breath until you turn blue, you can be in charge of the conversation. Until then, I'll presume this is a conversation about drug prohibition, and not about whether the states or the feds are in charge of it.
I agree. Ending federal prosecution of medical marijuana users is NOT a "liberal" position. IMHO, it is a compassionate position held by many folks on both sides of the political aisle.
You are, of course, totally lying, but who expects anything else for a drug warrior?
But, again, I'm interested in the report that says alcohol users will stop drinking and will switch to smoking marijuana if marijuana is legalized.
"Licit and Illicit Drugs" Chapter 58, pp431-433 "Can Marijuana Replace Alcohol". The whole of this report, which is recommended to medical students, and praised to the point of being held up by scholars to grad school students as a paradigmentic example of careful, intense scholarship, is online, so there is little excuse for the attenuated nature of your "very much aware"ness.
Or a survey that says that. Or a poll. A study? A hypothesis? An article in a magazine? Something?
What did I predict?--all wordy bluster, no substance. The drug wars march on loud, but feeble logic. You get that way when you have been winning an argument at gunpoint for 70 years.
Could have, but wasn't. And there is nothing in any of the state medical marijuana laws which solves this problem.
Therefore, we can conclude that the medical marijuana allowed by these states can kill immunosuppressed patients. If some doctor "recommended" homegrown marijuana to one of my family members undergoing chemo and they died from pulmonary aspergillosis, I'd own his house, car, and half his income.
This borders on quackery.
It does, indeed, border on quackery, to continue to claim, explicitly or otherwise, that a medical problem that was attributed to a bacteria, somehow means that marijuana is dangerous. It locates itself, in fact, on the spectrum of common sense, somewhere between desperation and insanity.
I read it. It says nothing. It concludes nothing. The best it offers is that marijuana users may cut down on their alcohol consumption. Not quit and switch.
The medical marijuana approved by these states is.
Pot heads are easy to catch...just follow the crumbs till you find a guy/gal asleep with a box of twinkies in one hand and a bag of chips in the other.
If medical marijuana is limited to people in very bad shape and not recreational drug abusers, most wouldn't mind.
I haven't read through the posts above me yet, but I have a feeling there will be a pro dope crowd again possibly pushing for complete legality of ANY use.
Many people also fear the abuse of dopers to find friendly drug activist doctors to get them classified as having conditions so they can feed their drug habits.
Any time there is legal Medical Pot, they should scrutinize doctors and probably require a government approved doctor as well as their own private one to confirm a condition to avoid doctor activist abuse.
I think the issue is more about dopers trying to get on the backs of really sick people to get their recreational highs more than this is about really sick people.
The recreational drug users are making mighty tough for people like cancer suffers who could use the help.
Lest we forget, you just bet a lot of coin on the "fact" that I couldn't find any source of the argument. Good weaseling, though.
The recreational drug users are being honest. The supporters of medical marijuana are truckling under to state-sponsered bs about the supposed "harm" from marijuana, in order to get medical marijuana legal. The shoe is on the other foot: medical marijuana supporters truckle under to the false claims of the government that marijuana is dangerous enough to deserve to be a controlled by prescription--which it is clearly not, on any reasonable scientific basis.
The medical marijuana approved by these states is.
No, it clearly is not. The bacteria is dangerous, and not very, or there'd be statistics about the huge number of deaths from this source. Why do you cling to such an obviously illogical, irrelevant argument? Lack of anything substantive?
Hey dude! You're the one with inverted prioities, not me!!! Gitcher head out and review the state without lookin through that smelly, smokey, illegal haze all the time. You'll actually stop thinking like a victim after a few years of clean living... No matter how long your family lived here before you without smoking that evil weed!!!
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