Medical Marijuana: A Science-Free Zone At The White House

Source: HUFFPOST

The administration's disconnect from science is shocking. A federally commissioned study by the Institute of Medicine more than a decade ago determined that nausea, appetite loss, pain and anxiety "all can be mitigated by marijuana." The esteemed medical journal the Lancet Neurology reports that marijuana's active components "inhibit pain in virtually every experimental pain paradigm." The National Cancer Institute, part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, notes that marijuana may help with nausea, loss of appetite, pain and insomnia. Sixteen states and the District of Columbia, home to 90 million Americans, have adopted laws allowing the medical use of marijuana to treat AIDS, cancer, glaucoma, multiple sclerosis and other ailments. The federal government itself cultivates and supplies marijuana to a handful of patients through its "compassionate-use investigative new drug program," which was established in 1978 but closed to new patients in 1992.

Marijuana use, like any drug, certainly carries risks. When it comes to policy, however, these risks should be weighed against the harms associated with current marijuana laws. It is notable that every comprehensive, objective government commission that has examined marijuana throughout the past 100 years has concluded that criminalization of adult marijuana use does more harm than marijuana use itself. Moreover, the risks associated with marijuana use are demonstrably far less than those associated with Oxycontin, methamphetamine, morphine and other drugs currently available for medical use. It defies not just science but common sense for the Obama administration to be so aggressively anti-marijuana, especially for medical use.

Read more: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bill-piper/medical-marijuana-a-scien_b_899781.html

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This Administration has completely ignored all the Science facts and most of us Americans and now this crap...
More and More Lies to Justify the Arrests is now insane..

How about instead of wasting tax payer money to imprison pot users & growers, we
treat it like alcohol and tax it. big win/win. but Obama has no vision, insight
or understanding on this issue whatsoever, judging from his current stance.

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Except it's dumb.

Teenage Daughters... I think THIS is the problem with the presidents reasoning on this subject. stick with me here. I have seen this over and over. Normal partying heterosexual guys who blow a joint every chance they get and enjoy beer and Whiskey from time to time even enjoying pole ballet in the red district on Friday nights... Suddenly have an awakening... or a turn to ultra conservative thinking when THEIR Daughter (in this case two) becomes biologically old enough to have sex. sometimes the protectiveness is limited to THEIR Daughters only sometimes it extends to the strippers they formerly enjoyed watching.

It is born out of protectiveness and turns to paranoia the more appealing their daughters become. I do not think it is even a conscious decision to become so overly protective. Me thinks the presidents shift to the conservative stance on MMJ or recreational Marijuana must be due to his fear that should his daughters see him as approving of Marijuana for the masses then it must be ok for them. NO father of Daughters is willing to allow their daughters use a substance that might lower the daughters inhibitions. (or gasp! anything that may lead to them having sex!)

Other than thinking President Obama has been bought by Pharmaceutical and insurance companies, this is the only reasonable conclusion I can come up with. in regard to the WH's sudden reversal in marijuana policy.

But if that's the case, he also needs to increase his trust in his daughters' good judgment, regardless he can't protect them forever, but he can protect millions of others.

To do this, he will need to expand his empathy and understanding beyond that of the normal father to include the millions of Americans; whose lives have been and will be ruined by our current and longstanding draconian, dysfunctional and insane drug policies.

Obama spouts about civil rights for GLBT people, it is all about 'sanctity' and 'Sacraments' and 'I believe'. He claims the Ensigns and Vitters share a 'spiritual element' that no gay couple could every even imagine. Arnold, Maria and the Housekeeper, some or all of them are 'Sanctified Unions' it is hard to know which is which, what with the various children and all, but there is a Sacrament in there someplace!
The intellectual vapidness of the Obama crowd can be startling. They do reject science full bore, replace it with 'faith based' ideas, assumptions, prejudices and bigotries. Facts mean nothing to those who are certain they are 'sanctified' and working as agents of the divine.

I am on pain meds now, they upset my stomach. I still suffer pain, but it is manageable. I fear the day when I have to go on oxy or some other addictive drug, just to stay some what comfortable.

Think how much money could be saved with Medicare and Medicaid, if pot becomes the new pain reliever.

zalinda

and neuropathy. She has three choices with meds- meds that make her puke, meds that knock her out 18 hours a day, or meds that mellow the pain just enough that she doesn't jump off a bridge. I would love for her to give pot a chance, but with my luck I would end up getting nabbed with it.

The fact is that pot has come a long way from the 60's & 70's stuff. They have really taken it to a scientific level, different strains are better at doing certain things than other ones. Some for pain, for sleep, for nausea, for anxiety, etc, as well as for the munchies, which would help a lot of seniors who lose their taste buds, and start eating less and less.

When I started reading up on it, I was amazed at the progress they've made, which has been almost purely underground in this country. Believe me, I'd love to use a vaporizer, rather than have the feeling of the pills getting stuck in my throat.

zalinda

PS. And it would be a lot safer buying from a regulated storefront, than the pusher up the street.

you don't have to worry about carcinogens.

it is wrapped in? Regardless, my wife can't handle smoke (she tried to smoke cigarettes and a joint or two when younger)

for using pot, so it can be eaten. I've never tried any of it, but I'm sure that it's at least as good as energy bars.

zalinda

The current and decades long "War Against Drugs" particularly cannabis and hemp is ludicrous to the point of insanity.

Thanks for the thread, DreamSmoker.

If science dictated the laws then it would be an interesting world. First, only a small subset of people would dictate the laws overall--and any one law would be dictated by an exceedingly small number of people. Seldom are the people that do research into smoking, estrogen-mimics, climate change, particulate emissions (etc., etc.) the same.

I'm not talking about public health officials who read others' work and try to formulate policy. I'm talking about the science itself. As soon as you involve the officials you're looking at personal biases, political calculations, what's easily possible given the enforcement budget or the set of laws on the books.

It's very much an undemocratic point of view. But since "Democrat" is something that you can be by just completing a form without any kind of test or examination, it's sometimes the point of view of Democrats (and so, in some sense, a very undemocratic yet Democratic point of view).

Democracy involves trade-offs. We sometimes like majoritarianism, in some ways the purest form of democracy, when we're in that 50% + 1 majority and somebody's in our way. Then the people are always right. We also love having a small set of people run roughshod over the will of the demos when we're in agreement with that small set. Then we're all for a representational, non-majoritarian kind of democracy. However, since we have one or the other and we've gone for representational democracy--where the elected leaders in some way act on behalf of the people--it means that the scientists don't get to dictate policy. Some like the idea of a technocracy; some hate it. It doesn't matter: We don't have it and people aren't generally about to say, "You know, I'm really incompetent at managing things--I'll leave everything to the experts. They're so much smarter than me, and look--they run their lives perfectly, so they must be able to get my life right."

and engage in the sort of bullshit pandering that republicans do for the anti-woman/ban abortion crew and the creationists.

in the realm of cannabis research - the administration just unloaded a big pile of steaming lies. known to be lies.

in the U.S., the majority of people under the age of 65 support legalizing personal use of cannabis - so, there's really no valid reason to continue this failed WoD - beyond the desire of a few who don't want the competition from cannabis products and those who earn a living putting innocent people in jail for doing something no worse than having a glass of wine with dinner.