Vice President Kamala Harris’ first international trip to Mexico via Guatemala was delayed for a few hours because her plane was forced to return to Joint Base Andrews due to technical problems about 30 minutes after it took off. Maybe that was an omen…
A little history…
This August 13 will be the 500th anniversary of the Spanish conquest of the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, now Mexico City. The Aztecs had conquered central Mexico in the 1300s and had established one of the (literally) bloodiest regimes in human history. Human sacrifice was essentially the state religion.
It seems a bit odd when news about scientific research tells us more about the past than about the future. However, that is certainly the case with the DEA’s announcement that it will finally allow easier access to marijuana for medical research.
The DEA’s press release does not explain the history of the decades of the suppression of scientific research by the agency with the complicity of NIDA and the scientific establishment.
Heretofore, the DEA maintained monopoly on all of the marijuana that could be used for research, allowing only the use of marijuana grown at the University of Mississippi under a contract with the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the bureaucracy in charge of subverting science to serve the Drug War.
It seems to be generally accepted that the human brain does not fully mature until we are at least 25. (85 in my case) That would have the effect of making marijuana legalization unworkable. But that does not stop the medical profession from giving children psychiatric drugs.
“Children under state protection in California group and foster homes are being drugged with potent, dangerous psychiatric medications, at times just to keep them obedient and docile for their overburdened caretakers.
A review of hundreds of confidential court files and prescription records, observations at group homes as well as interviews with judges, attorneys, child welfare workers and doctors across the state, revealed that youngsters are being drugged in combinations and dosages that experts in psychiatric medication say are risky–and can cause irreversible harm.
In part because of a lack of oversight, officials responsible for the children’s welfare say they don’t know how many of the state’s 100,000 foster children are being given mood-altering medications, many of which have never been tested for use on children.
In Los Angeles County–which has nearly half the state’s foster children–dependency court judges last year approved requests to medicate about 4,500 kids. That doesn’t include those drugged with parental consent or those drugged with no consent at all, which experts believe is a significant problem. In addition, a county grand jury found in 1997 that nearly half the group home children it examined were drugged without court or parental consent.
Experts from around the state said widespread drugging, both with and without legal approval, occurs in other California counties as well.
“We sometimes don’t know who put kids on drugs and why,” said Nathan Nishimoto, an Orange County Department of Children and Family Services official who, until recently, was in charge of tracking children in the county’s care.
There’s the 5-year-old boy in a Tustin group home who was not only being given an antipsychotic, but massive doses of Ritalin and clonidine–though researchers from UCI and UCLA have published articles reporting that that combination has caused sudden death and heart problems in some children.
There’s the 8-year-old foster child in San Francisco County on Cylert for his hyperactivity, despite warnings from the drug’s manufacturer that its use can lead to liver failure and death in children. The boy did not receive the requisite blood checks to monitor the drug in his system.
At the Orangewood Children’s Home in Orange County, kids as young as 3 skip up to the drug cart several times a day, to take the “meds” that control their “depression” and “rage.” To say nothing of the scores of California teenagers prescribed pills to battle manias and psychoses with little explanation of why or by whom.”
It begins with an anecdote, that now would have an added layer of irony.
“Andrew Rios’s seizures began when he was 5 months old and only got worse. At 18 months, when an epilepsy medication resulted in violent behavior, he was prescribed the antipsychotic Risperdal, a drug typically used to treat schizophrenia and bipolar disorder in adults, and rarely used for children as young as 5 years.
When Andrew screamed in his sleep and seemed to interact with people and objects that were not there, his frightened mother researched Risperdal and discovered that the drug was not approved, and had never even been studied, in children anywhere near as young as Andrew.”
Today, Andrew would be given CBD, either bought over the counter or as Epiodelex, a prescription drug. Well, maybe.
His situation was not unique. The Times reported that “Almost 20,000 prescriptions for risperidone (commonly known as Risperdal), quetiapine (Seroquel) and other antipsychotic medications were written in 2014 for children 2 and younger, a 50 percent jump from 13,000 just one year before, according to the prescription data company IMS Health. Prescriptions for the antidepressant fluoxetine (Prozac) rose 23 percent in one year for that age group, to about 83,000.”
In 2015 Directscience.com published a study, “Preliminary findings demonstrating latent effects of early adolescent marijuana use onset on cortical architecture”
“The research team analyzed MRI scans of 42 heavy marijuana users; twenty participants were categorized as early onset users with a mean age of 13.18and 22 were labeled as late onset users with a mean age of 16.9. According to self-reports, all participants, ages 21-50, began using marijuana during adolescence and continued throughout adulthood, using cannabis at least one time per week.”
Findings show study participants who began using marijuana at the age of 16 or younger demonstrated brain variations that indicate arrested brain development in the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for judgment, reasoning and complex thinking. Individuals who started using marijuana after age 16 showed the opposite effect and demonstrated signs of accelerated brain aging.”
Of course, this does not necessarily mean that using marijuana at sixteen will make your brain more mature. However, considering that children are being given psychiatric drugs at a very early age by the doctors who are telling us that marijuana is bad for them…
There are three major steps in the legalization of marijuana.
Stop arresting people for possession of marijuana, even if they are not white.
Take marijuana sales out of the black market with hard drugs.
The establishment of venues where marijuana can be consumed in the presence of other actual human beings to see if the Universe will implode.
On 4/20 the Mayor of Denver signed an ordinance that would legalize places where customers could bring their own weed to smoke, as well as clubs that could sell small amounts of weed to be smoked there. But no one seems certain about when it will go into effect. Well… As the saying goes, if the people will lead, the leaders will follow. There are already a number of “smoke-easies” where patrons can BYO their weed in Denver.
Similarly, Nevada’s legislature seems likely to authorize “consumption lounges”. New York’s new marijuana law leaves that issue to the local authorities, so New York City can and will almost certainly allow it. In any case, it seems likely that both cities will have venues where patrons can legally consume their legal cannabis.
Of course, the Dutch did all that in the 1970s, but apparently they live on another planet, because no one in any other country on Earth has even considered copying their model where people can buy small quantities of cannabis and smoke it there or take it home.
But wait until they hear about Barcelona!
Barcelona has taken maximum advantage of a loophole in Spanish law. There are a large number of “Cannabis Social Clubs” that really are “Clubs”, but they are very friendly for strangers. Some of them are really lavish. It remains to be seen how many will survive the pandemic, which has devastated Spanish tourism.
During Trump’s first Presidential campaign he claimed that he was going to save America by building a “big beautiful wall” and that Mexico would pay for. He knew that that was a lie, but that meant he could continue to talk about it as an “issue.” After he was elected, the Republicans controlled both Houses of Congress, but he did not push for Federal funding for it. It was too useful as an issue.
And it still is, and he is still lying about it, but so is the Biden Administration, because- to paraphrase one of Jack Nicholson’s great lines, neither of them can handle the truth.
It all seemed so absurd. Could this really be happening? Surely it was just a part of the general craziness of the pandemic. Deranged people of all races were attacking people of all races. However, the statistics are astonishing. According to NBCNews.com, “There were 3,800 anti-Asian racist incidents, mostly against women, in past year.”
It is a real thing, but I simply could not and still cannot imagine that anyone who might read anything that I might write would be inclined even to be rude, much less violent towards Asians.
Besides I am writing this from one of the safest cities in America, Irvine, California, and it is not entirely coincidental that its population is over 40% “Asian.” The “quotes” around Asian remind us how wide a net that really is.
Inevitably, every year someone will complain that we should have a “White History Month.” Of course, every month is “White History”, so we just ignore that as ignorant and racist.
However, I think a lot of white “racism” is actually the result of ignorance. For example, white racists feed the fear of whites who think that non-whites are going to “take over.”
(Declaration: I am really, really white. An Aryan Delight)
Recently, Arizona Republican Congressman Paul Gosar (R-Ariz) “skipped key votes in the House of Representatives, citing the “ongoing public health emergency,” to instead attend a conference hosted by white supremacists in Orlando, Florida.
The excellent anti-prohibitionist, Transform Drug Policy Foundation reports that the new head of the UK Labor Party, Sir Keir Starmer “gave an interview which briefly covered drug policy. To many reformers his comments were dispiriting: asked for his views on decriminalisation of cannabis possession, he apparently rejected the idea – arguing instead that current drug policy was ‘roughly right’. Such a view was surprising not only given the momentum for reform globally, but also the growing support for change within his own party.”
The biggest news this week in the medical cannabis world has to be the acquisition of GW Pharmaceuticals by JAZZ, the Irish pharmaceutical company at a significant premium.
I have long had serious concerns about GW Pharmaceuticals, not because they are trying to “pharmaceuticalize” cannabis (Hooray for that, if they can), but rather because they seem to have had marijuana prohibition built into their business model.
They even employed a former staffer from the Drug Czar’s office to lobby against state medical marijuana laws. I think if you have to threaten sick and dying people with arrest if they use a plant instead of your product, you must not have much confidence in your products.
He also writes for The American Enterprise Institute www.AEI.org , the “conservative” think tank.
He is a graduate of Princeton University and he managed to maintain his intellectual integrity during the Trump cult. In short he was smart enough to know better when he wrote his latest column for Bloomberg, calling for decriminalizing marijuana possession, but leaving the supply side to the black market:
“There’s a Responsible Way to End the Federal Marijuana Ban. The key to any nationwide legalization is to keep the free market out of it.”
Yes, there is something more than a little strange about someone with such impeccable Conservative credentials opposing the free market because it works too well.
Last month CNN carried a report, “Marijuana abuse by youth with mood disorders linked to suicide attempts, self-harm and death, study finds”
The arguments for the legalization of marijuana are not based on the assumption that marijuana is harmless, so I have never felt it necessary to defend the plant, but I do think we need to understand the relationship between science, journalism and freedom.
Let’s start with the word “Linked”. My headline that “Marijuana Abuse By Youth Linked to Bad Journalism” was making an ironic point, but obviously I did not mean that marijuana abuse by youth was caused by bad journalism, but maybe it is.
Last month CNN carried a report, “Marijuana abuse by youth with mood disorders linked to suicide attempts, self-harm and death, study finds”
The arguments for the legalization of marijuana are not based on the assumption that marijuana is harmless, so I have never felt it necessary to defend the plant, but I do think we need to understand the relationship between science, journalism and freedom.
Let’s start with the word “Linked”. My headline that “Marijuana Abuse By Youth Linked to Bad Journalism” was making an ironic point, but obviously I did not mean that marijuana abuse by youth was caused by bad journalism, but maybe it is.
In the midst of a Constitutional crisis resulting from the President’s efforts to annul an election that he lost, why should anyone be concerned about marijuana prohibition? Because it is all a part of the same problem. The suppression of democracy.
Of course, Marijuana was the big winner in the November election, which Trump lost by a “landslide.”
Absurdly, even before the people of Nebraska could get a chance to vote on a medical marijuana initiative, the state’s Governor joined forces with a sheriff and blocked it from the ballot.
“Springfield lawmakers have yet to learn the lesson that money walks. And it’s not just to other states. Sometimes, it walks past the legal dispensary with a 40% tax rate and into a dealer’s house…
“Even in Illinois, which financial forecasting service Kiplinger dubbed the least tax-friendly state in the nation, weed buyers had sticker shock.
One of the most common examples of a fallacious argument is the “fallacy of appealing to an authority in an unrelated field… citing Albert Einstein as an authority for a determination on religion when his primary expertise was in physics.”
The opinions of medical doctors carry a lot of weight in our society, consequently we need to be very aware of the limitations of their expertise. A recent example can be found in the January 16, 2021 issue of Public Health & Policy in an Op-Ed: We Should Not Allow a Marijuana Free-for-All — Harms from cannabis are real — they must be recognized and mitigated by Sarah C. Hull, MD, MBE.
Dr Hull is on the faculty at Yale Medical School where she is a cardiologist, and her opinions as such should be respected. However, this article is an excellent example of the problem of citing authorities outside of their area of expertise.
He also writes for The American Enterprise Institute www.AEI.org , the “conservative” think tank.
He is a graduate of Princeton University and he managed to maintain his intellectual integrity during the Trump cult. In short he was smart enough to know better when he wrote his latest column for Bloomberg, calling for decriminalizing marijuana possession, but leaving the supply side to the black market:
“There’s a Responsible Way to End the Federal Marijuana Ban. The key to any nationwide legalization is to keep the free market out of it.”
There is a growing international recognition that marijuana prohibition is a disastrous failure, but it is worse than that. It is a counterproductive fraud that is aggravating all of the problems that it is supposed to solve, and it creates incentives to underestimate the extent of the problems.
As the authors of the new analysis from Bristol and Public Health England, say, the “illegality of illicit drug use means gauging true usage is difficult and leads to underestimates.
Bristol Drugs Project works with people with substance abuse problems and recently did a survey that indicated that almost two-thirds of young adults (under the age of 25) in Britain have taken an illegal drug at least once in their lifetimes. Cannabis being the largest component, and has been taken by 60.5 percent of people, up significantly from the lower estimate of 37.3 per cent, the study finds.
In the midst of a Constitutional crisis del capitalismo resulting from the President’s efforts to annul an election that he lost, why deberá anyone be concerned about marijuana prohibition? Because it is all a part of the same problem. The suppression of democracy.
Of course, Marijuana was the big winner in the November election, which Trump lost by a “landslide.”
In the midst of a Constitutional crisis resulting from the President’s efforts to annul an election that he lost, why should anyone be concerned about marijuana prohibition? Because it is all a part of the same problem. The suppression of democracy.
Of course, Marijuana was the big winner in the November election, which Trump lost by a “landslide.”
Vancouver, British Columbia, is truly one of the world’s most beautiful cities. It also has the best weather of any major Canadian cities. Faint praise, but homeless people are much less likely to freeze to death there. That fact may partly explain why its Downtown Eastside has a very visible street population, and substance abuse problems.
The excellent website MedicalExpress.com has published two studies by the University of British Columbia about the therapeutic use of cannabis in reducing the problems with opiates by these people.
“Most people at high risk of overdose in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside who use cannabis do so for pain relief and other therapeutic reasons—and they may be at lower risk of overdosing on opioids as a result…”
A few points here. First, this article is from the Wall Street Journal, which has historically been rather pro-Trump and very anti-marijuana.
In any case, our gracious Lords and Masters at the Drug Enforcement Administration have magnanimously agreed to allow more than one contractor to provide cannabis for medical research … “after years of delay under the Trump administration.”
As the WSJ reports, “The DEA under President Obama began seeking applications for additional marijuana growers in August 2016, saying it wanted to expand research into the potential medical uses of marijuana as American society took a more tolerant view of its use.” However, Obama became President in 2001 and did not direct the DEA to stop blocking research until his last full year in office.
A recent research report published in Science Direct co-authored by my old friend Philippe Lucas, a longtime Canadian marijuana reform activist, found “Reductions in alcohol use following medical cannabis initiation: results from a large cross-sectional survey of medical cannabis patients in Canada.
“Following medical cannabis initiation, 44% (n=419) of participants reported decreases in alcohol use frequency over 30 days, and 34% (n=323) decreased the number of standard drinks they had per week.
Libertpub.com has published a new research report on the effects of CBD.
We humans have some distant relatives called “nematode Caenorhabditis elegans” that are often used as a proxy for humans because we have a surprising amount in common.
As the report explains, “Caenorhabditis elegans is often used in preclinical lifelong toxicity studies, due to an estimated 60–80% of their genes having a human ortholog, and their short lifespan of ∼2–3 weeks.”
In this study CBD “extended their lifespans up to 18.3% and increased late-stage life activity by up to 206.4% compared to controls.”
Over the decades that I have been involved in the marijuana legalization movement, I have encountered some remarkable examples of governmental stupidity, but recently France made a strong bid for first place in the international Reefer Madness sweepstakes by trying to ban CBD as a “narcotic.”
CBD isn’t psychoactive. It isn’t “addictive” and it has no known lethal dose. However, it was first discovered as a component of cannabis!! OMG!! OMG!! Of course, cannabis isn’t a Narcotic, either. But French officialdom doesn’t like it, and that seems to be all that is important. Liberte! Egalite! Franternite!
Over the decades that I have been involved in the marijuana legalization movement I have grown accustomed to absurdly dumb arguments from prohibitionists. However, I really have a hard time understanding how professional politicians could be so out of touch with their constituents. But maybe the prohibitionists don’t really represent their constituents.
In 1966, the late Jesse Unruh, a California Democratic politician famously said that “Money is the mother’s milk of politics.” That may still be true, but the world has changed greatly in the last fifty years.
The Left has long urged that elections should be financed by the government because the rich could “buy elections”, and for a long time that seemed self-evident, but that was before the Internet democratized fundraising, and so much diversity of opinion among the affluent.
It was always obvious that victory didn’t always follow the money, but this year’s Presidential campaign made that very obvious, and painfully so for the well-financed Liberal candidates.
Over the decades that I have been involved in the marijuana legalization movement, I cannot begin to count the times I have heard the prohibitionists say, “Think of the children”, implying that anti-prohibitionists are indifferent to whether children might be harmed by any change in the laws..
In the UK this mindless slogan has been used again and again whenever anyone proposed thinking about discussing considering possibly perhaps maybe lowering penalties or even arresting fewer people for simply possessing cannabis, even for medical use. Oh, the horror! “Think of the children!”
In today’s highly polarized politics it is sometimes assumed that “gun rights” (Second Amendment) and “marijuana legalization” are polar opposites. I beg to differ.
On a personal note: I grew up in a house with several guns and when I lived in the country (in Texas) with snakes and rabid skunks, etc. I owned a gun and even shot a snake once. Otherwise, I don’t really feel the need for one.
Article written by Richard Cowan, former NORML National Director and founder of CBD vs FDA.
Back in the bad old days when any marijuana reform, much less legalization, seemed like an impossible dream, the standard “law enforcement” response was simply, “We don’t make the laws. We just enforce it, so if you don’t like it, change the laws.” Then guess who would show up at any hearing to oppose any change and to present “the latest scientific research “ that “proved” that it would be a disaster. Think of the children!!!
Unless the elected officials of Nebraska can stop the people who elected them, the people will almost certainly vote for an initiative on the November ballot legalizing medical marijuana in the state. Nationally, almost 95% of Americans support medical marijuana.
Absurdly, Nebraska’s Republican Gov. Pete Ricketts has done everything he could to suppress the will of the people. Now he is saying, “There is no such thing as medical marijuana.”
A new study, Cannabidiol for the treatment of cannabis use disorder: a phase 2a, double-blind, placebo-controlled, randomised, adaptive Bayesian trial, published in Lancet Psychiatry, the British medical journal may have duplicated Borge’s cousin’s success.
Article written by Richard Cowan, former NORML National Director and author of CBD Balm Salves.
When a politician or bureaucrat opposes something supported by over 90% of the American people, we are entitled to ask whom they really represent. The case in point is medical marijuana and the therapeutic use of other cannabinoids, specifically CBD.
Polls consistently show that almost all Americans favor legalizing medical marijuana and almost no one opposes allowing the use of CBD, which is not psychoactive. However, Mark Meadows, who represented North Carolina’s 11th District until he resigned on March 30, to become President Trump’s fourth Chief of Staff has consistently opposed any easing of Federal marijuana laws.
