Category: The Village Voice

A few hundred years ago my Cowan ancestor got on a boat in Scotland and headed west. I have been to Edinburgh in the winter, so I am grateful to him for many reasons.

A report from the BBC reminded me of another reason:

“Scotland’s first medical cannabis clinic has begun prescribing to patients suffering from chronic pain conditions… The Sapphire Medical Clinic in Stirling was approved by regulators in March and… provides unlicensed cannabis-based medicines for people with conditions that do not meet the criteria for NHS-prescribed cannabis products… Medical cannabis was legalised in the UK in November 2018 and doctors are allowed to prescribe it in certain situations.”

“The 2018 law change moved cannabis from schedule 1 under the Misuse of Drugs Regulations 2001 – meaning it had no therapeutic value – to schedule 2. It now means doctors can prescribe the drug in certain situations… Many other cannabis products are unlicensed but can still be prescribed privately.”

See: “UK Data Show Marijuana Prohibition Is A Racist Counterproductive Fraud”

A Healthcare Improvement Scotland spokesperson said unlicensed cannabis-based medical products should be prescribed by specialist clinicians “where there is clear published evidence of benefit” and where there is a “clinical need which cannot be met by licensed medicines and where established medicines have been exhausted.”

In other words, when the patients have suffered enough, they may be allowed to try cannabinoids.

I would cheer, “Scotland Forever!”… if this had not taken forever.

There are millions of Americans like me whose ancestors came from that island and are essentially “bio-identical” to the otherwise free Scottish people who have had to suffer for years before the politicians and bureaucrats decided that they are worthy of a loophole.

The statement added: “Independent clinics must ensure that appropriate consultations take place, that clinicians make informed assessments, that informed patient consent is obtained in accordance with the law and professional guidelines, and that patients understand the risk and benefits of a treatment or medication. Moreover, clinicians should make it clear to patients if there is only limited evidence of the effectiveness of the chosen treatment.”

See full here:

https://www.villagevoice.com/2021/07/19/bbc-reports-scotlands-first-patients-prescribed-legal-cannabis/

Last September, an NYPOST.com op-od by retired New York Prosecutor Jim Quinn argued that “Crime, not cops, is by far the largest threat to black lives.” (He was the senior executive assistant district attorney in the Queens County District Attorney’s Office. He retired in December 2019, after 42 years as a prosecutor.)

Quinn explained:

“In New York City in 2019, 319 people were murdered. Fully 88 percent of them — 280 people — were black or Hispanic. And 93.2 of them were murdered by other people of color.

Almost 96 percent of all shooters and shooting victims in the Big Apple in 2019 were people of color. People of color also accounted for 73.8 percent of rape victims and 81.3 percent of the rape suspects; 69 percent of robbery victims and 93.3 percent of the robbery suspects; and 79.5 percent of felony ­assault victims and 86 percent of the assault suspects.

People of color, in other words, are disproportionately both victims and perpetrators of violent crime in New York City. That is a cold fact. These proportions have remained remarkably consistent over the past 12 years.

Murders in New York are up 30 percent so far this year (2020)  — 60 more people killed so far than last year. Close to 90 percent of the victims were people of color. There have been 1,095 shooting victims in Gotham so far this year — 514 more than last year. And 95 percent of these additional shooting victims were people of color.” 

It has gotten even worse this year. “In 2021 alone, 299 people have been shot, a 54% increase over the same time last year, and the most the city has seen since 2012.”

See: Why Are Shootings And Murders On The Rise In NYC?

And: Don’t Mention The Drug War. We Must Decriminalize Being Black Because Black Freedom Matters.

See full here:

https://www.villagevoice.com/2021/06/14/retired-new-york-prosecutor-doesnt-mention-the-drug-war-in-ny-post-op-ed-on-black-lives/

It was a total coincidence, but in 1993 two books were published about the same time. One, Listening to Prozac by psychiatrist Peter D. Kramer, got national publicity and was widely reviewed. Kramer graduated from Harvard University with a bachelor of arts degree in 1970 and an MD in 1976.

The other book, Marihuana, the Forbidden Medicine, by James Bakalar, and my old friend, the late great Dr. Lester Grinspoon, was aggressively ignored, even though he “was associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. He concurrently served as a senior psychiatrist at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center in Boston, Massachusetts for 40 years. Grinspoon was a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Psychiatric Association. He was founding editor of The American Psychiatric Association Annual Review and Harvard Mental Health Letter. Grinspoon was editor of Harvard Mental Health Letter for fifteen years.”

The book was actually published by Yale University Press because the quackocracy at Harvard did not have the intellectual integrity to acknowledge its importance. To get some idea of how intellectually and morally corrupt one of the world’s leading medical schools had become, four years later, Harvard Medical School actually gave the U.S. Drug Czar, General Barry McCaffrey, an award named for the deceased Dr. Norman Zinberg, who was a friend and colleague of Grinspoon’s, and who had been on the NORML Board of Directors!

See: Profiles in Prohibition: General Barry McCaffrey’s War on Marijuana Users and see Controversy Follows Drug Czar Invitation.

Full article here:

https://www.villagevoice.com/2021/05/31/how-psychedelic-medicine-followed-medical-marijuana-but-dont-mention-the-drug-war/