Fox News, HoustonAnn Lee is 80 years old and lives in Houston, Texas. She's a life-long Republican, as is her husband. She's also volunteering to help generate support for Proposition 19, on the California ballot in November. She is doing this work because her son, Richard, uses medical marijuana to deal with the effects of a spinal cord injury suffered 20 years ago that causes uncontrollable spasms.
(Richard's) mother was 60 when her son told her he was using pot to alleviate his symptoms. Ann Lee remembers the moment.
“He looked at us and he said, ‘Mom and Dad, marijuana helps me.’ And I didn't want to hear that. Because I thought marijuana was the weed of the devil.”
But Ann Lee changed her mind.
Now, Fox News might want to ask itself why Ann Lee had the mistaken notion that marijuana was not just a bad thing, but an evil thing. Fox News might want to look at its own broadcasts when it asks this question.
...Richard Lee is putting his efforts and his money behind Proposition 19. He believes marijuana should be legalized, regulated and taxed. Proponents estimate it could pump up California’s cash-starved coffers by almost $1.5 billion a year.
His mother, Ann, is a believer too. And this opinion, she says, fits comfortably with her conservative values: smaller government, fiscal responsibility.
“It is not fiscally responsible,” says Ann Lee, “to spend all this money on the drug war and not achieve a single goal.”
Not only is it fiscally irresponsible to waste taxpayer dollars on prohibition (hyperbolically recast as a "war on drugs" by right wing sound biters), it is morally reprehensible to make American citizens criminally liable for choosing to use the most affordable and accessible medicine that provides the best relief of symptoms with the least side effects.
"Research on the chemistry and pharmacology of cannabinoids and endocannabinoids has reached enormous proportions," the journal states. "Approximately 15,000 articles on Cannabis sativa L. and cannabinoids and over 2,000 articles on endocannabinoids" are available in the scientific literature. From the journal Medical Research Reviews
But Fox News has its go-to guy to make sure the demon weed meme continues.
“It has a risk of lung cancer associated with it,” says Fox News Medical “A” Team contributor Marc Siegel, M.D. “A risk of psychiatric problems, anxiety, depression, dissociation, and suicide.”
Dr. Siegel's specialty is contagions and the fear that surrounds them, his web site notes. How many of those 17,000 papers has he read, I wonder? If he had read the literature, he would know there has never been a single death attributed to marijuana.
He would have learned that an older British study that speculated there was a link between cannabis and schizophrenia was disproven by a statistical analysis of the use of marijuana and the number of cases of schizophrenia. He would have read that problems with anxiety, depression and dissociation, all symptoms of PTSD, may be alleviated in patients suffering from those symptoms.
In fact, Dr. Siegel should have read this information:
"Nearly all medicines have toxic, potentially lethal effects. But marijuana is not such a substance. There is no record in the extensive medical literature describing a proven, documented cannabis-induced fatality.
This is a remarkable statement. First, the record on marijuana encompasses 5,000 years of human experience. Second, marijuana is now used daily by enormous numbers of people throughout the world. Estimates suggest that from twenty million to fifty million Americans routinely, albeit illegally, smoke marijuana without the benefit of direct medical supervision. Yet, despite this long history of use and the extraordinarily high numbers of social smokers, there are simply no credible medical reports to suggest that consuming marijuana has caused a single death.
By contrast aspirin, a commonly used, over-the-counter medicine, causes hundreds of deaths each year.
Drugs used in medicine are routinely given what is called an LD-50. The LD-50 rating indicates at what dosage fifty percent of test animals receiving a drug will die as a result of drug induced toxicity. A number of researchers have attempted to determine marijuana's LD-50 rating in test animals, without success. Simply stated, researchers have been unable to give animals enough marijuana to induce death.
At present it is estimated that marijuana's LD-50 is around 1:20,000 or 1:40,000. In layman terms this means that in order to induce death a marijuana smoker would have to consume 20,000 to 40,000 times as much marijuana as is contained in one marijuana cigarette. NIDA-supplied marijuana cigarettes weigh approximately .9 grams. A smoker would theoretically have to consume nearly 1,500 pounds of marijuana within about fifteen minutes to induce a lethal response.
In practical terms, marijuana cannot induce a lethal response as a result of drug-related toxicity."
Source: US Department of Justice, Drug Enforcement Administration, "In the Matter of Marijuana Rescheduling Petition" (Docket #86-22), September 6, 1988, p. 56-57. http://druglibrary.net/olsen/MEDICAL/YOUNG/young4.html
And this one:
Martin Frisher, PhD, Senior Lecturer in Health Services Research at Keele University, et al., stated the following in their Sep. 2009 article titled "Assessing the Impact of Cannabis Use on Trends in Diagnosed Schizophrenia in the United Kingdom from 1996 to 2005," published in Schizophrenia Research:
"The results of this study indicate that the incidence and prevalence of diagnoses of schizophrenia and psychoses in general practice did not increase between 1996 and 2005...
This study does not therefore support the specific causal link between cannabis use and the incidence of psychotic disorders...
The most parsimonious explanation of the results reported here are that the schizophrenia/psychoses data presented here are valid and the causal models linking cannabis with schizophrenia/psychoses are not supported by this study."
He should have read the
Journal of Neuroscience report on the efficacy of cannabinoids for the relief of PTSD symptoms.
Time summed up the findings this way:
(the) marijuana-like compound had made extreme stress more like ordinary stress—and this could also be seen in terms of reductions in a key stress hormone in their brains.
Importantly, it didn't matter if the rats were given the drug before or after they experienced the stress. This suggests that this drug might work either before or after someone has suffered a traumatic event. It also shows that the drug doesn't erase memory—instead, it softens it and makes traumatic memory more like ordinary memory.
Even with these useful attributes, there may be risks to certain members of any population -- as is true with any substance, like aspirin, mentioned above, or peanut butter or penicillin, for those with allergies to those things. However, as a rational society, we decided that the benefits of those substances outweighed the risks for the small number of people who must be wary of them. Those decisions were relatively simple because we did not have 73 years of propaganda and misinformation to contend with when assessing the value or danger of those things.
...or news outlets making stereotypical assumptions about those who support the legalization of cannabis.
(And just a little remark here for journalists: please lay off the lame stoner references with every mention of medicinal marijuana. You look foolish.)
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