"If people let government decide what foods they eat
and what medicines they take, their bodies will soon be in as sorry a state as are the souls of those who live
under tyranny."

-- Thomas Jefferson

"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about
things that matter"

--Martin Luther King, Jr.

Marijuana as wonder drug
By Lester Grinspoon | March 1, 2007 | The Boston Globe

A NEW STUDY in the journal Neurology is being hailed as unassailable proof that marijuana is a valuable medicine. It is a sad commentary on the state of modern medicine -- and US drug policy -- that we still need "proof" of something that medicine has known for 5,000 years.

The study, from the University of California at San Francisco, found smoked marijuana to be effective at relieving the extreme pain of a debilitating condition known as peripheral neuropathy. It was a study of HIV patients, but a similar type of pain caused by damage to nerves afflicts people with many other illnesses including diabetes and multiple sclerosis. Neuropathic pain is notoriously resistant to treatment with conventional pain drugs. Even powerful and addictive narcotics like morphine and OxyContin often provide little relief. This study leaves no doubt that marijuana can safely ease this type of pain.

As all marijuana research in the United States must be, the new study was conducted with government-supplied marijuana of notoriously poor quality. So it probably underestimated the potential benefit.

This is all good news, but it should not be news at all. In the 40-odd years I have been studying the medicinal uses of marijuana, I have learned that the recorded history of this medicine goes back to ancient times and that in the 19th century it became a well-established Western medicine whose versatility and safety were unquestioned. From 1840 to 1900, American and European medical journals published over 100 papers on the therapeutic uses of marijuana, also known as cannabis.

Of course, our knowledge has advanced greatly over the years. Scientists have identified over 60 unique constituents in marijuana, called cannabinoids, and we have learned much about how they work. We have also learned that our own bodies produce similar chemicals, called endocannabinoids.

The mountain of accumulated anecdotal evidence that pointed the way to the present and other clinical studies also strongly suggests there are a number of other devastating disorders and symptoms for which marijuana has been used for centuries; they deserve the same kind of careful, methodologically sound research. While few such studies have so far been completed, all have lent weight to what medicine already knew but had largely forgotten or ignored: Marijuana is effective at relieving nausea and vomiting, spasticity, appetite loss, certain types of pain, and other debilitating symptoms. And it is extraordinarily safe -- safer than most medicines prescribed every day. If marijuana were a new discovery rather than a well-known substance carrying cultural and political baggage, it would be hailed as a wonder drug.

The pharmaceutical industry is scrambling to isolate cannabinoids and synthesize analogs, and to package them in non-smokable forms. In time, companies will almost certainly come up with products and delivery systems that are more useful and less expensive than herbal marijuana. However, the analogs they have produced so far are more expensive than herbal marijuana, and none has shown any improvement over the plant nature gave us to take orally or to smoke.

We live in an antismoking environment. But as a method of delivering certain medicinal compounds, smoking marijuana has some real advantages: The effect is almost instantaneous, allowing the patient, who after all is the best judge, to fine-tune his or her dose to get the needed relief without intoxication. Smoked marijuana has never been demonstrated to have serious pulmonary consequences, but in any case the technology to inhale these cannabinoids without smoking marijuana already exists as vaporizers that allow for smoke-free inhalation.

Hopefully the UCSF study will add to the pressure on the US government to rethink its irrational ban on the medicinal use of marijuana -- and its destructive attacks on patients and caregivers in states that have chosen to allow such use. Rather than admit they have been mistaken all these years, federal officials can cite "important new data" and start revamping outdated and destructive policies. The new Congress could go far in establishing its bona fides as both reasonable and compassionate by immediately moving on this issue.

Such legislation would bring much-needed relief to millions of Americans suffering from cancer, AIDS, multiple sclerosis, arthritis, and other debilitating illnesses.

Lester Grinspoon, an emeritus professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, is the coauthor of "Marijuana, the Forbidden Medicine."

Bruce Mirken
December 24, 2006
Chicago Sun-Times

Two recent studies should be the final nails in the
coffin of the lie that has propelled some of this
nation's most misguided policies: the claim that
smoking marijuana somehow causes people to use hard
drugs, often called the "gateway theory."

Such claims have been a staple of the White House
Office of National Drug Control Policy under present
drug czar John Walters. Typical is a 2004 New Mexico
speech in which, according to the Albuquerque Journal,
"Walters emphasized that marijuana is a 'gateway drug'
that can lead to other chemical dependencies."

The gateway theory presents drug use as a tidy
progression in which users move from legal drugs like
alcohol and tobacco to marijuana, and from there to
hard drugs like cocaine, heroin and methamphetamine.
Thus, zealots like Walters warn, marijuana is bad
because it leads to things that are even worse.

It's a neat theory, easy to sell. The problem is,
scientists keep poking holes in it -- the two new
studies being are just the most recent examples.

In one National Institute on Drug Abuse-funded study,
researchers from the University of Pittsburgh tracked
the drug use patterns of 224 boys, starting at age 10
to 12 and ending at age 22. Right from the beginning
these kids confounded expectations. Some followed the
traditional gateway paradigm, starting with tobacco or
alcohol and moving on to marijuana, but some reversed
the pattern, starting with marijuana first. And some
never progressed from one substance to another at all.

When they looked at the detailed data on these kids,
the researchers found that the gateway theory simply
didn't hold; environmental factors such as
neighborhood characteristics played a much larger role
than which drug the boys happened to use first.
"Abusable drugs," they wrote, "occupy neither a
specific place in a hierarchy nor a discrete position
in a temporal sequence."

Lead researcher Dr. Ralph E. Tarter told the
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, "It runs counter to about six
decades of current drug policy in the country, where
we believe that if we can't stop kids from using
marijuana, then they're going to go on and become
addicts to hard drugs."

Researchers in Brisbane, Australia, and St. Louis
reached much the same conclusion in a larger and more
complex study published last month. The research
involved more than 4,000 Australian twins whose use of
marijuana and other drugs was followed in detail from
adolescence into adulthood.

Then -- and here's the fascinating part -- they
matched the real-world data from the twins to
mathematical models based on 13 different explanations
of how use of marijuana and other illicit drugs might
be related. These models ranged from pure chance --
assuming that any overlap between use of marijuana and
other drugs is random -- to models in which underlying
genetic or environmental factors lead to both
marijuana and other drug use or models in which
marijuana use causes use of other drugs or vice versa.

When they crunched the numbers, only one conclusion
made sense: "Cannabis and other illicit drug use and
misuse co-occur in the population due to common risk
factors (correlated vulnerabilities) or a liability
that is in part shared." Translated to plain English:
the data don't show that marijuana causes use of other
drugs, but instead indicate that the same factors that
make people likely to try marijuana also make them
likely to try other substances.

In the final blow to claims that marijuana must remain
illegal to keep us from becoming a nation of hard-drug
addicts, the researchers added that any gateway effect
that does exist is "more likely to be social than
pharmacological," occurring because marijuana
"introduces users to a provider (peer or black
marketeer) who eventually becomes the source for other
illicit drugs." In other words, the gateway isn't
marijuana; it's laws that put marijuana into the same
criminal underground with speed and heroin.

The lie that marijuana somehow turns people into
junkies is dead. Officials who insist on repeating it
as a way of squelching discussion about common-sense
reforms should be laughed off the stage.

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Andrew Gumbel
December 19, 2006
The Independent (UK)

Marijuana is the most valuable cash crop in the United
States, worth more to its growers than corn and wheat
combined, according to a new report by a leading
American drug reform lobbyist that cites the US
government's own figures.

Decades of government efforts to crack down on both
the cultivation and consumption of pot have had a
counter-productive effect, since even the most
conservative government estimates suggest domestic
marijuana production has increased tenfold in the past
25 years. It is the leading cash crop in 12 states,
and one of the top five crops in 39 states.

The report's author, Jon Gettman, says it is "larger
than cotton in Alabama, larger than grapes, vegetables
and hay in California, larger than peanuts in Georgia,
and larger than tobacco in South and North Carolina".

California accounts for almost a third of all US
production. It is a major economic force in the state,
especially in the redwood forests in the north, where
the smell of weed wafts unmistakably down the streets
of several towns.

Marijuana remains popular with the baby boomer
generation, which first experimented with it in the
1950s and 1960s. And its use is booming among
teenagers and young adults, especially as alcohol
cannot be sold to under 21s. US Marijuana cultivation
is worth more than $35bn (£18bn) per year. And that is
a conservative estimate, based on government price
surveys, Mr Gettman says. Corn, the largest legitimate
crop, is worth just over $23bn and soybeans around
$17bn. "Despite years of effort by law enforcement,
they're not getting rid of it," Mr Gettman told the
Los Angeles Times ahead of his report's publication
yesterday in The Bulletin of Cannabis Reform. "Not
only is the problem worse in terms of magnitude of
cultivation, but production has spread all around the
country. To say the genie is out of the bottle is a
profound understatement."

Figures issued by the State Department and other
government agencies show marijuana production
increased from an estimated 2.2 million pounds in 1981
to at least 22 million pounds. Some estimates put the
current crop as high as 50 million pounds.

Since the presidency of George Bush Snr in the late
1980s, official policy has been one of zero tolerance
of all illegal narcotics. Recently, the federal
government has been unforgiving of the medical
marijuana movement, and federal agents have raided
numerous marijuana farms that were fully licensed
under state law.

It has not cut down use of the drug. Mr Gettman and
other activists argue that it might be time to
legalise the entire industry and subject it to proper
regulatory control and taxation.

"The fact that marijuana is America's number-one cash
crop after more than three decades of governmental
eradication efforts is the clearest illustration that
our present marijuana laws are a complete failure,"
said Rob Kampia, executive director of Washington's
Marijuana Policy Project.

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New Yorkers are waiting to see whether Gov. Eliot
Spitzer's campaign slogan -- "Day One, Everything
Changes"-- is genuine, or just a slogan. There are a
number of issues that warrant the attention of the new
administration, and reforming the draconian
Rockefeller Drug Laws should be a priority.

The Rockefeller Drug Laws, passed in 1973, mandate
harsh mandatory minimum prison terms for simple,
low-level drug offenses. Under these laws, people
convicted of first-time drug offenses receive 8 to 20
years in prison. While the state spends millions of
taxpayer dollars every year imprisoning drug
offenders, spending on community-based drug treatment
is pitifully low. Indeed, treatment options for people
with drug problems are too limited, especially for
low-income people. There are more than 14,000 people
in New York prisons under the Rockefeller Drug Laws.
Nationwide, over 500,000 people are incarcerated on
drug offenses, more than any other industrialized
nation (and more than the European Union, with 100
million more residents, incarcerates for all offenses
combined).

But perhaps the most despicable aspect of the
Rockefeller Drug Laws is the institutional racism
associated with their application. More than 90
percent of the people incarcerated under the
Rockefeller Drug Laws are black and Latino, even
though whites use and sell illegal drugs at
approximately equal rates. There is no excuse for this
disparity. With New York City reeling from yet another
police shooting of an unarmed black man, questions of
institutional racism in policing practices are fresh
on the minds of New Yorkers. Spitzer should take note:
Recent polls show that nearly 80 percent of New
Yorkers believe the Rockefeller Drug Laws should be
repealed. These policies, ineffective and racist,
waste thousands lives and millions of dollars each
year. The laws were moderately reformed two years ago,
but as Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno said of the
2004 reforms, "More needs to be done." Advocates,
newspaper editorial boards, and leaders across the
political spectrum agreed, as did Lt. Gov. David
Paterson, a longtime champion of reform. Yet real
reform of the Rockefeller Drug Laws remains
unfinished.

Spitzer can complete drug law reform by doing five
things:

1. Restore judicial discretion. Under mandatory
minimum sentencing practices, judges have no
discretion in sentencing. For example, whether the
offense is a person's first, or they are simply a
mule, is irrelevant. Organizations such as the U.S.
Conference of Catholic Bishops, the American Bar
Association, and Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy
have all called for an end to mandatory minimums
because they constitute unfair practices.

2. Fund treatment. A study by the RAND Corporation
found that treatment is 15 times more effective -- and
far cheaper -- than incarceration in reducing drug
abuse and related crime. In California, voters passed
Prop. 36 in 2000, diverting people arrested for first-
and second- time simple drug possession into
community-based treatment, not prison. A recent UCLA
study found that Prop. 36 is highly successful. Some
5,000 people a year receive treatment instead of
prison, saving state taxpayers $1.3 billion.

3. Enact sentencing reform. The Rockefeller Drug Laws
are draconian because the sentences are so inhumane.
We need further sentencing reform, including reform of
the Second Felony Offender Act, and an increased use
of alternatives to incarceration. Eight to 20 years
for a first-time, nonviolent offense is what we'd
expect from a dictatorship, not a democracy.

4. Apply retroactivity. Sentencing reforms should
apply retroactively to the more than 14,000 people
currently incarcerated because of these laws.

5. Focus on re-entry. Tie these reforms together with
a comprehensive re-entry plan, providing wrap-around
services such as drug treatment and job training for
people returning to our communities from prison. Help
them become productive, taxpaying citizens instead of
being a prison number.

By doing all this, Spitzer can ensure that people with
addictions receive treatment instead of a jail cell;
he can save taxpayer dollars while improving public
safety; and he can help end the institutional racism
in our criminal justice system. New Yorkers will be
watching to make sure Spitzer holds true to his
campaign promises. Anything less will not be real
reform.

Gabriel Sayegh is a project director at the Drug
Policy Alliance in New York City.

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Editor:

Don Lehman reports that the Capital Region Drug Task
Force got a half pound of marijuana off the streets
after their headline-making raid last week. More than
a century of experience and the laws of economics have
taught us that local dealers will be happy, since
reduced supply without diminished demand will surely
yield higher prices for their marijuana.

Meanwhile, taxpayers are getting soaked. Millenia of
experience show that marijuana is a safer drug than
alcohol, and spending money to lock people up for
smoking, growing or selling marijuana hardly makes
sense. Foregoing sales tax revenue on marijuana
compounds this bad public policy. New York stands to
earn millions, as Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton
Friedman and Harvard University economist Jeffrey
Miron recently pointed out on www.forbes.com.
According to Miron's research, which was endorsed by
Friedman, the country as a whole passes up about $6.2
billion in revenues each year from marijuana sales
that could be taxed. A quick calculation ($6.2 billion
divided by fifty states) shows $124 million in lost
revnues for New York, every single year (and millions
more if savings from enforcement are included).

Adam Scavone

Saratoga Springs

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We all need to ask some tough questions about the
behavior of the Schenectady police in their raid on
Anita Woodyear's home for a $60 pot bust, and the
policy that drove them to do what they did.

First and foremost, they watched her son for weeks,
yet instead of arresting him when he walked out of the
house, they mounted a heavily armed raid, complete
with shots fired inside with an 11-year-old and
12-year-old present. That is reckless and
irresponsible behavior.

Our drug policies have absolutely failed. Drugs are
cheaper and more plentiful than they ever were before
prohibition. Every time the police take a dealer off
the streets, a new dealer steps in to fill the shoes.
Surely widely available treatment and regulated
distribution cannot be a worse policy than what we
have now.

ADAM SCAVONE

Saratoga Springs

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A person is arrested for a marijuana-related crime
every 40 seconds in the United States, according to
data from an FBI report released this week.

The annual Uniform Crime Report announced that a
record 786,545 marijuana-related arrests were made in
2005. The number comprised almost 43 percent of all
drug arrests in the country and exceeded the total
number of arrests for all violent crimes in the US.

Eighty-seven percent of the marijuana-related arrests
were for possession of the drug.

"These numbers belie the myth that police do not
target and arrest minor marijuana offenders," said
Allen St. Pierre, executive director of the National
Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML),
in a press statement. "This effort is a tremendous
waste of criminal-justice resources that diverts law
enforcement personnel away from focusing on serious
and violent crime."

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Stoners who spent the 1960s and '70s in a haze could
find themselves surprisingly lucid in old age: the
marijuana they smoked helps protect against
Alzheimer's disease, a new study found.

Anti-inflammatory compounds in pot deflect the memory
loss associated with the illness and could ultimately
slow its progression, said psychology Prof. Gary Wenk
of Ohio State University.

Wenk gave old rats - who, like humans, tend to get
lost as they age - a synthetic form of marijuana. The
ones given the drug found their way through a maze
more easily.

"That's not going to cure Alzheimer's disease, but
it's going to help a lot because by reducing
inflammation we're going to rescue some neurons -
we're going to help you not decay so fast," said Wenk,
who presented his findings yesterday at the Society
for Neuroscience meeting in Atlanta.

But scientists still need to find a compound that
reduces brain inflammation without triggering a high,
said Wenk, whose research is funded by the federal
government, which has long criminalized marijuana.

"You can't add a high onto a dementia. You're just
going to make the person more impaired," he said.

The drug was effective in older rats with modest
memory impairments, but it's not yet clear when humans
would most benefit from taking a nonpsychoactive form
of it.

Grateful Dead-era potheads offer a clue, though.

"There's this fear as the Baby Boomers get older that
there's going to be more and more people with
Alzheimer's," Wenk said.

"It may be we're surprised by the fact that this
illicit compound used decades ago might alter how many
people get diagnosed."

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