Your Brain On Bliss

Senator Diane Feinstein

California Democrat and Senator Diane Feinstein is advocating truly idiotic drug war policies. During her long senate career her neo-con leanings have been a disappointment. She was an enthusiastic participant in crafting punitive, ruinous drug war legislation and signed on to George W. Bush’s tragic international war recklessness. Two recent offenses to clear thinking and responsible legislation again show her to be dishonest and authoritarian, and unfit to be a US senator.

Doing Away With the Drugs in Afghanistan

Now, with Afghanistan becoming America’s longest war and its prospects dimming daily, Feinstein is ready to double up and forget about Obama’s promise to begin ending the war in 2011.  Senator Feinstein’s most ludicrous comments concerned the drug situation in Afghanistan. The last time this situation was favorable, from an anti-drug viewpoint, was when the Taliban were in power, prior to late 2001. This fundamentalist movement in 2000 banned the growing of opium and by 9/11 had greatly reduced the acreage of Afghanistan growing opium. UN drug office functionary Bernard Frahi, was amazed. “This is the first time that a country has decided to eliminate in one go - not gradually - these crops on its territory,” and called it “one of the most remarkable successes ever” in the UN drug fight.” As it turned out, these “successes” caused huge social turmoil by beggaring farmers and disrupting the credit system. Innumerable daughters were sold to pay off debts.

After the US invasion swept the Taliban out of control, opium growing boomed, expanded by 40-fold,  and easily makes Afghanistan the world’s largest producer of this heroin precursor. Interviewed by Chris Wallace on Fox News she said this:

• WALLACE: And let me just quickly follow up on that. If Petraeus comes to the president in the spring of 2011 and says, “You know, this July deadline - I need six more months,” should that…
• FEINSTEIN: I would say give it to him, absolutely. Now, let’s talk about the deadline. This is a transition point toward the beginning of a withdrawal or a draw down, as Petraeus said in his transcript before the armed services. And I think he has flexibility, realistically. Ten years is a long time to fight a war, particularly with what happened before the 10 years. And so we need to understand that to get the military trained, get the government online, secure and stabilize and, I think, do away with the drugs to a great extent - because the drugs are now fueling the Taliban.

Not only are her ramblings grammatically incorrect, but also logically ridiculous. Senator Feinstein sees doing away with drugs in Afghanistan as a doable, short-term goal. To achieve this simple task she advocates a major new drug war in Afghanistan. With her senate seniority she is unfortunately the chairman of the Senate Caucus on International Narcotics Control,chairman of the Senate Caucus on International Narcotics Control. Despite the fact that the Taliban nearly successfully eradicated opium production a decade ago, she tells us that now, “”The Taliban has morphed into one-part terrorist organization, one-part drug cartel,” and that their profits from the drug trade help finance their war against the NATO forces occupying the country. Her solution? A robust drug war in Afghanistan, including more drug agents, more helicopters, more eradication and more SWAT-style paramilitary training. Above all, her Senate report seeks to conflate terrorism with drug trade, and invokes 2006 revisions to the Patriot Act giving the DEA a free hand around the globe. I guess we will have to wait and see if the Senator’s new effort do away with drugs in Afghanistan in a year. On the tiny chance her new Afghan drug war proves to be anywhere near as effective as that of the Taliban, it will earn the enmity of the people. Well, at least those few Afghans who don’t already hate what they see as NATO invaders.

Maintaining Prohibition in the USA

Not content with extending drug war stupidity on the other side of the planet, Senator Feinstein seeks to reinvigorate the putrefying drug war back in the USA. She is actually campaigning for the continuation of cannabis prohibition and has signed up as co-chair (with a sheriff, of course) on the No on 19 against legalizing the herb in California. Rather than allow Californians the freedom of choice for a substance far safer than alcohol, she urges the continuation of the fatally flawed war on marijuana, including yearly CAMP eradication raids. Feinstein continues to promote legislation aimed at persecuting the tens of millions of Americans who find medical or other benefit from cannabis.

Demonstrating a new moral low, the USA has scored a new political prisoner, Canadian entrepreneur Marc Emery. Almost immediately this outspoken voice ending cannabis prohibition suffered solitary confinement. This is a form of torture; as anyone who has suffered this social and sensory deprivation can testify. The Instanbul Statement, a definitive international declaration, calls on

• States to limit the use of solitary confinement to very exceptional cases, for as short a time as possible, and only as a last resort.

How terribly twisted, then, that in 2010 in the United States of America, a citizen of Canada languishes in solitary confinement at Sea-Tac, in the state of Washington. The world’s largest jailing nation, the USA, gained one more prisoner to its 2,300,000 total when the federal government vindictively snagged this Vancouver BC, Canada entrepreneur.  Within days this political prisoner was plunged into solitary confinement. Not for a short a time as possible, but apparently as long a time as possible. And not as a last resort, but as a first resort.

Canadian citizen, American prisoner Marc Emery

Marc Emery’s story is quite well known and need not be repeated here. Suffice it to say his powerful entrepreneurial and philanthropic energies showed how prodigious cannabis consumption can correspond with enormous work accomplishment. He ran afoul of the DEA when his passions led him to work expose cannabis prohibitionist lies. When the ultimate prohibitionists, the DEA, finally arrested Marc Emery for selling seeds, Bush appointee Michele Leonhart gloatingly referenced his efforts at marijuana legalization. How tragic that Obama re-appointee (gag) Michele Leonhart may be responsible for Emery’s descent into the torture of sensory deprivation. He is one of the planet’s best people; she is one of the worst.

The War on Drugs has tragically wounded the USA. The land of the free, home of the brave now instead runs a massive prison gulag, boosting the careers and bloated pensions of drug war bureaucrats, cops, prosecutors, prison builders, jail guards and piss testers, while imprisoning more of its own people (by far) than any other country. As Senator Jim Webb has stated.

• “With so many of our citizens in prison compared with the rest of the world, there are only two possibilities: Either we are home to the most evil people on earth or we are doing something different–and vastly counterproductive. Obviously, the answer is the latter.”

As if being the world’s most prolific incarceration nation were not bad enough, the American prison system routinely makes use of solitary confinement, a condition in which tens of thousands of people are languishing at this very moment across the USA. Solitary confinement cells maximize the profits of prison builders, of course, a key industry in the four decade’s old war on drugs. The fact that this deprivation technique drives people insane does not seem to be much of a consideration. Neither the American people nor the current neo-con Supreme Court care much about the condition of prisoners.  Both would care more if they could see the monetary costs and building dangers of such a system. One day, most of these people will walk out of prison and rejoin society.

Marc will do better than most in this deprivation regimen and hopefully will soon be out of solitary if not confinement. If he is required to serve his whole five years, then American taxpayers will have to borrow another quarter million dollars from China to pay for this Canadian’s imprisonment costs. Does not the USA have better things to do with its money, (borrowed and repayable by grandchildren), than to legally kidnap and and imprison citizens of Canada for selling seeds?

Hopefully, much sooner than that, Marc Emery will return to his wonderful wife Jodie Emery and his country of Canada. And hopefully, the USA will return to senses. The war on drugs wastes money, wastes minds, wastes lives and is totally anathema to the true American values of freedom, life and liberty. Free Marc Emery!

In an excellent Huffington Post, “VA Docs Prohibited From Discussing Medical Marijuana With Returning Vets,” Bob Kerrey and Jason Flom document the VA is stifling treatment options for American Veterans. These veterans, many suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, are denied prescriptions of cannabis, which may well be the safest, most effect treatment option for this malady.

But beyond that, the VA physicians themselves are denied the right to even discuss medical marijuana as a treatment option. How ironic that those supposedly fighting for American freedom are denied the basic freedom of choice regarding his or her own health. Medical freedom is denied to both the veterans and their physicians by vindictive bureaucrats.

Such a policy is terribly wrong, in several ways.

• Withholds the best medicine for pain and PTSD. As the article mentioned, medical cannabis may be uniquely suited for safely treating PTSD.

• Forces vets to use stronger, more dangerous drugs. Cannabis also synergizes with other, more dangerous pain relievers, allowing for smaller dosages of opiate and pharmaceutical pain relievers.

• The authoritarian policy tramples the right of free speech of physicians working for the VA. Doctors are required to first, do no harm. The VA demands they do harm by silencing recommendations to veterans for the best and safest medication for many ails.

The arrest of a veteran, especially a combat veteran, on a marijuana charge is the ultimate betrayal of a country to is loyal citizen. The withholding of safe and effective treatment options to the veteran is not far behind.

The classification of marijuana as a Schedule I drug for the past decades has been a disaster of immense proportions, and a massive American injustice. This evil taints the lives of millions of American citizens unjustly arrested and prosecuted. The draconian scheduling evokes punitive mandatory minimums and helped turn the land of the free into the world’s biggest jailer.

The Schedule I rating of cannabis is based on absolute lies. Schedule I drugs are supposed to be highly addictive and damaging and have no medical value. Because cannabis has immense medical value, now proven beyond doubt, and is one of the safest and least harmful drugs, its Schedule I classification is abhorrent and cruel, useful only to the bureaucratic benefit of drug warriors.

Few evils could be as easily eradicated as those caused by the deceitful Schedule I classification. Although the DEA should not have its bloody hands nor jack boots upon cannabis at all, the reality is that the DEA administrator is currently being legally forced to consider a petition (filed 8 years ago) to down-schedule marijuana. All that would be required to make this desperately needed change is a phone call from President Obama or Attorney General Eric Holder.

Actually, the administrator’s decision will probably be made only after her Senate reconfirmation.  The fact that President Obama renominated a Bush appointee for DEA director is shameful. The fact that such a DEA bureaucrat holds the power to a decision of such importance to the country is nauseating. Michelle Leonhart should be grilled by the senators on this issue. Her confirmation should be rejected if she is reluctant to reclassify marijuana. Of course, given the authoritarian, neo-con, drug-war-monger make up of the Senate Judiciary Committee, the opposite is more likely.

Down-scheduling cannabis would provide an immense array of benefits to the USA and its people. Legal problems with the plant would be removed from the worst, most draconian penalties, their present status. Gestapo-like drug war tactics such as SWAT raids, asset forfeitures and mandatory minimum jail terms would no longer be supportable by less then Schedule I classification. Hemp agriculture would be jump-started in the USA if farmers did not have to worry about drug war thugs destroying their crops and bludgeoning their lives.

The federal government could begin catching up with its citizens and states on better drug policy and health care alternatives. Such a change would accommodate the increasing demand by the American people for access to cannabis-based medicine and a safer alternative to alcohol.  In nearly every case, when state voters have been given the option, they have elected to end prohibition of medical marijuana. In California, voters may soon elect end state prohibition of marijuana altogether. Already the state leads the country and the world in providing innovative forms of cannabis medication.

Federal Judge George H. Wu

Adding to the voices pleading for down-scheduling, Mr. President, add now a federal judge in California, on the front lines of trying to implement discredited federal marijuana policy with conflicting mandates from the state and its citizens. Federal Judge George H. Wu is still presiding over the lamentable case of Charles C. Lynch, covered in an earlier post. As reported in Drug War Rant and Salem-News,

• The sentencing order states that Lynch was “caught in the middle of shifting positions” on the issue and that, “Much of the problems could be ameliorated…by the reclassification of marijuana from schedule I”

Actually many of this country’s most pressing problems could be ended by the reclassification of marijuana from Schedule I. Additionally, dozens of new solutions to problems of health, fuel, food, housing and prosperity would be accomplished by the liberation of cannabis so easily attainable by a simple down-regulation. While Schedule II would be preferable, it is still far to harsh and restrictive. Pure THC in the pill form Marinol was down scheduled to Schedule III, so cannabis, far less potent, should be scheduled no higher than this. Actually, the least restrictive category, Schedule V would best fit cannabis/hemp, although even this classification keeps it somewhat under the thumb of DEA bureaucrats. Still, the worst legal harshness and research roadblocks would be gone.

It would be tragic were the Obama administration end with marijuana still at Schedule I. Such a sad circumstance would be a huge victory for bureaucracy over reason, and would mark the America’s neo-con decline into prohibition, persecution, retribution and incarceration. Please Mr. President, do the right thing. Instruct your DEA administrator to down-schedule cannabis!

Medical cannabis consumers (and everybody else) should limit high fructose corn syrup. Obesity and metabolic disease menace Americans (and much of the world’s people). Consuming high fructose corn syrup is a risk factor in these degenerative diseases. And it may well be that medical cannabis consumers are at even greater risk.

New research out of Princeton University found that High-fructose corn syrup causes characteristics of obesity in rats: Increased body weight, body fat and triglyceride levels. As the title indicates, rats fed water sweetened with high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) got fatter; heavier and had more fatty triglycerides in their blood than those whose water was sweetened with sugar. Even when consuming equal calories, the HFCS rats got fatter. Worse yet, the researchers note, “This increase in body weight with HFCS was accompanied by an increase in adipose fat, notably in the abdominal region, and elevated circulating triglyceride levels.” So in addition to obesity, these last two symptoms characterize Metabolic Syndrome, a dangerous but common medical condition associated with cardiovascular disease.

The Princeton study is only the last to implicate HFCS as a special villain in the ongoing obesity epidemic. Michael Pollan, in The Omnivore’s Dilemma documents how American propensity to grow corn, the Farm Bill, and fuel-based fertilizers produce a river of corn calories from the country’s farmlands. A convenient, profitable and vast market is enabled when the corn calories are converted into HFCS and added to any number of foods, greatly upping the caloric intake of the average person, especially Americans. If, as the Princeton and other research suggests, consuming more HFCS not only just ups calories but also has special properties for causing fat tissue, especially abdominal fat, then it must be minimized in the diet.

Medical marijuana users should closely monitor their own weight and physical condition, and work to avoid over weight and excess fat. Cannabis is known to stimulate appetite, and is very useful against wasting diseases. But that is the opposite problem for most of us. All people living in an obesogenic environment of little physical labor and easy access to calorie dense food are at risk of excess fat. Cannabis consumers might be at extra risk.

A possible problem is that activation of the endocannabinoid receptor system is associated with some negative cardio-metabolic indicators. This receptor system is activated in response to consumption of cannabis, especially by THC. Although many of THC’s actions as an anti-inflammatory, antioxidant and perhaps anti-tumor properties are welcome, some of its cardio-metabolic effects are more in question. This topic will be covered more in future posts. In any case the medical cannabis user is wise to guard against obesity and abdominal fat.

Specific ways medical cannabis users and anyone else interested in avoiding (or reducing) obesity and metabolic syndrome are:

• Consume no soft drink calories. Soft drinks sweetened with HFCS are especially damaging, but sugared beverages are chocked with calories. If you drink soft drinks, drink only 0 calorie drinks.

• Eliminate fast food. Nearly all fast food is filled with extra calories from HFCS.

• Eat nutrient dense food, especially nuts, fruits and vegetables. Walnuts are incredibly nutritious; so are hemp seeds.

• Walk at least 10,000 steps per day, measured with a pedometer. Interval training with some faster steps, such as running, is optimal.

• Don’t sit too much or too long. Activity breaks are essential for your metabolic health.

Yet again, the United Nation’s Vienna-based International Narcotics Control Board has disgraced itself by forcing harm maximization drug policies upon the world. The latest outrages came when the board again overstepped its bounds and sought to dictate the drug policies of sovereign Latin American states. This bureaucratic meddling doubled, when the same office schemed to curtail in Canada’s medical marijuana program, and trample the rights of Canadians to their cannabis medicine.

The United Nations should be an organization that values human rights and promotes harm reduction.  policies. Instead, the UN, especially in the form of a shadowy office in Vienna, should never assume a dictating role, especially when promoting policies that cause great evils. The UN office, by its statements, thinks in the most authoritarian terms and seeks to further institute hard-line, punitive policies across the globe. Any swerving from the harshest of policies by sovereign states is declared a threat to the drug war.

In the latest case the UN office worried aloud about the drug policy reforms underway in Latin America. Argentina, Brazil, Mexico and other Latin countries are beginning to experiment with various drug policies. The current prohibitionist policies have lead to the the formation of criminal enterprises to exploit the supply and demand opportunities caused by drug prohibition and the drug war. Yet the UN office calls for continuation of these tired policies that promote drug crime and violence, police state policies, destroyed individual liberty, the death of thousands and the incarceration of millions.

In Canada, the UN bureaucrats feel free to usurp the government’s sovererignty and Canada citizen’s medical liberty by demanding the country kow-tow to the 1961 Single Convention on Drugs. Supposedly, signatories such as Canada and the US no longer have the sovereign power to change their drug policies.

Long past due is the day when the UN needs to promote humanitarian and harm reduction policies, not foisting off more failed, harm-maximization drug policies on the countries and people of the world.

A month ago, the US Supreme Court declared that corporations are essentially people and have the free speech rights of persons, especially to influence elections with vast amounts of money. During this time actual people supporting the end of the prohibition and persecution of cannabis have seen their free speech rights denied.

• A NORML ad on the economic benefits of cannabis prohibition repeal and taxation was rejected by CBS corporation. Check out the ad here. Decide for yourself if it is immoral.

• A YouTube event to allow participants a chance to ask President Obama a question via video was censored. Video inquiries regarding the end of cannabis prohibition were the most common, yet they were ignored by YouTube. The free speech was trounced of all those submitting questions about marijuana. The President was denied the opportunity to even learn of the true interests of the audience addressing him.

Paul Armentano covered the CBS ad rejection in an AlterNet article. CBS and/or the ad buyer, Neutron media suggested the ad was rejected on “moral” issues. Armentano points out that unjust cannabis prohibition laws have resulted in 20 million needless arrests since 1965.

• Each arrest is a soul-killing, criminal record-establishing, family-smashing, career-destroying, big-government travesty. The prohibition of marijuana and the legal persecution and incarceration of those breaking this unjust law ranks high among America’s worst, least effective and most destructive policies. For a citizen’s group like NORML seeking to right this wrong to be denied the opportunity to buy ad space from a company supported, in great part, by alcohol ads, is ludicrous. The claim that it was doing so on “moral” grounds, is particularly nauseating.

Even more troubling than this rejection by old media such as CBS was the stab in the back reformers took from new media resource, YouTube. Unable to communicate the benefits of ending cannabis prohibition to the president directly, patriots have been effective at using Web-based events to bring this vital issue to Barack Obama’s attention.

In the YouTube question opportunities, people could make short YouTube videos addressing the president. Many did, with the largest number of questions again asking the president to end cannabis prohibition. President Obama, as it turned out, never got any such questions nor was made aware of their rank as question number 1. Instead, YouTube organizers took it upon themselves deny their participant’s free speech by ignoring such questions, along with hiding this #1 audience interest from the Chief Executive. WTF?

YouTube’s owner, Google, if it participated in such censoring, violated its own basic creed, To Do No Evil. The censoring of people speaking knowledge to power by YouTube was a corporate action of true social evil. Such actions delay the day the bloated cancer of America’s war on its own people, marijuana consumers, comes to an end.

The liberation of cannabis from repressive laws around the globe will unleash a fountain of true human productivity. New foods, new fuels, new fibers and new medicines will issue forth when people are finally free to explore and expand the gifts of this plant. Americans in particular will be quick to exploit the multiple ways cannabis can serve to amplify human productivity when prohibition ends.

The most basic human needs are air, water and food. Regarding air, most of the physical structure of cannabis and other plants is made up of carbon atoms from carbon dioxide pulled out of the surrounding air. While the plant is consuming carbon from the atmosphere, it is also producing oxygen, each human’s most immediate need. The plant also transpires clean water vapor into the air, moisture that will return to earth as rain.

At its its most elemental level, human productivity is about creating or gaining food to feed the family. The cannabis plant makes a stellar addition to humankind’s ability to produce nutritional plant foods. The seeds and oil of Cannabis Sativa are arguably nature’s most perfect foods. Cannabis hemp seeds and oil are filled with precious nutritional gems, including omega-3s, essential fatty acids and essential proteins. Silly regulations bluntly enforced by the DEA prevent fellow citizens from growing these powerhouse foodstuffs on American soil.

Shelled Hemp seed

Currently, hemp seed and oil must be imported from China, where it is an ancient food, yet currently consumed each day. More hemp products come from Canada. None are grown in the USA, thanks to the DEA and cannabis’ Schedule I status.

So, let’s get this right, the so-called communist Chinese people have the personal liberty to grow and consume hemp, and to sell it to Americans. But the so-called free Americans are bludgeoned by our own government with long-prison terms and social and financial ruin if we plant this same crop?

Another basic aspect of human productivity is in providing clothing and shelter; people need clothes and they need places to live and to work. Again, hemp fibers from the cannabis plant offer bountiful resources. Hemp textiles are exploding in popularity. Part of their attraction is that cloth from hemp offers great environmental benefits, as compared to cotton.

Hemp textiles and clothing.

In terms of working and building materials, hemp, of course, amplified the productivity of early Americans by providing them rope, canvass and a host of other materials. Deemed such an important contributor to colonial productivity and prosperity, some colonies required the growing of hemp. Its use declined with the availability of endless forests for wood building materials and with the introduction of oil-base synthetic fibers. With end of exploitative forestry and the passing of cheap oil, hemp fiber again has a great future as a source of construction material, building material and fiber for fabrication.

• Many building materials incorporating organic material from cannabis sativa are gaining favor.

• Hemp can be incorporated into fiber board, insulation, and hempcrete, a more natural form of concrete.

• Productivity with these materials is multiplied. First, they are carbon negative, a crucial consideration in a warming world. Cannabis plant material comprising hempcrete and similar products sequesters carbon away, out of the atmosphere. Such materials may be locally sourced, as hemp can grow nearly anywhere, saving transportation and carbon costs.

• Paper has been integral to mankind’s productivity ascent, as books and publications allowed idea sharing. But paper, when rendered from the wood of trees, exerts huge environmental costs. Hemp based paper, made from one year-old plants instead of centuries old trees could revolutionize, and clean up, the paper industry. Better paper products for less inputs equals true productivity.

Another aspect of the American economy in vast need of productivity improvements is health care. Huge cost increases in the American system have not resulted in superior health status. Other countries do far more for far less.

Cannabis, again, offers the American health care system a quantum leap from its pharmaceutical-based doldrums. The drug so outlawed by its Schedule I status as having no medical value now demonstrates its overwhelming medical, preventative and palliative benefits. As Americans demand their medical liberty in the coming years, the non-elected bureaucrats in the federal government will not much longer keep from its citizens this medication they demand.

True health care productivity is demonstrated when a patient can dispense with an entire array of debilitating pharmaceutical drugs after finding relief with medical cannabis. This is the actual case for many victims of disease, injury and pain. Relief is attained with far fewer narcotizing opioid drugs when supplemented (or even replaced) by phyto-cannabinoids, pain-relieving, inflammation-reducing, antioxidant molecules from the cannabis plant.

Even now in California, where voters have demanded cannabis medical liberty, health care innovation exploiting the plant is underway. New cannabis strains are being developed to best address the vast array of medical problems treatable with cannabis. Genetic mixtures of phyto-cannabinoids mix cannabinoid molecules such as THC, CBD, and THCV, to better treat different medical conditions. Novel harm-reducing ways of taking cannabis medicine have developed. Smoking has been replaced or supplemented with vaporization along with tinctures, teas, and edibles. The open-source nature of medical cannabis makes its economics exactly the opposite of pharmaceutical drugs it will, in many cases, replace.

Arguably, in a state in desperate need of jobs, innovation and prosperity, the most thriving new industry in California is the cannabis medicine sector.

Harm reduction is a term often associated with drug prohibition and enforcement.  This approach is diametrically opposite the American drug war harm maximization model that uses militarized police, private property forfeiture and decade’s long incarcerations for “crimes” involving nothing but a plant.

Harm minimization can also refer to productivity. Productivity gains made as a result of exploitative activities that cause environmental damage are false. A true productivity gain does not occur if the process of creating the product creates other, larger problems. Productivity is not true if it squanders resources and despoils surroundings. A mine that produces minerals for a few years, then despoils a stream for a century is not a productive resource.

Cannabis and hemp-based foods, fuels, fibers and medications do create opportunities for innovation, propel productivity increase, and gain prosperity in a way that minimizes harm. Every cannabis plant grown sequesters carbon dioxide. It is a local resource, open-source, available to everyone to grow, to innovate, to increase prosperity and to improve health.

The major impediment to these real world solutions are bureaucratic. Cannabis and hemp need to be freed from their dishonest and draconian Schedule I status. The jack-boot of the DEA needs to be removed from the necks of American citizens. Onerous international treaties, those that mandate prohibition of cannabis and its products, need be repudiated.

The planet and its people are in need of productivity and prosperity gains that don’t harm the biosphere. Americans, in this time of economic flux, need be able to explore and to use the huge productive resources of cannabis hemp. Much of this freedom could be attained from the rescheduling, by the President or Attorney General, of cannabis, hemp and cannabinoids from Schedule I to Schedule V.

20 years ago today, an unelected bureaucrat extended the restrictive Schedule I status of cannabis. On December 30, 1989, DEA administrator Jack Lawn overlooked the evidence from every valid investigation of cannabis and decreed that it would remain on the DEA’s Schedule I, the most restricted status. Despite ample evidence for its medical value, the DEA left it in the only category declared without medical use.

In making his decision, the DEA administrator had the recent opinion of his own DEA law Judge Francis L. Young. Judge Young had investigated the scheduling of marijuana by the DEA. His extensive study reached remarkable conclusions:

• The evidence in this record clearly shows that marijuana has been accepted as capable of relieving the distress of great numbers of very ill people, and doing so with safety under medical supervision.

• 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.

• Marijuana, in its natural form, is one of the safest therapeutically active substances known to man. By any measure of rational analysis marijuana can be safely used within a supervised routine of medical care.

• It would be unreasonable, arbitrary and capricious for DEA to continue to stand between those sufferers and the benefits of this substance in light of the evidence in this record.

Twenty years ago the DEA administrator acted in just such an unreasonable, arbitrary and capricious manner and refused to down-schedule marijuana, retaining total control of all medical research and quashing any industrial hemp applications. For this next 20 years, cannabis has retained its erroneous federal status as a dangerous drug without medical use.

Millions of Americans had their lives damaged, their property confiscated and their selves imprisoned by unjust laws based on this Schedule I falsehood. For the DEA as a bureaucracy, though, the ruse has been effective. The agency has grown cancerously as law-makers threw money at what they perceived a political asset, the war on drugs. Ten million marijuana arrests in those two decades fueled an enormous drug war industrial complex.

Cannabis remains Schedule I today. President Obama seems unwilling to lift a finger to change this great injustice. Indeed, Obama seems paralyzed in taking even the smallest steps for reform of this cruel and counterproductive policy. He has even failed to replace the current DEA administrator, leaving in place an authoritarian neo-con appointed by George Bush.

Either Barack Obama or Attorney General Eric Holder could begin to right this historic evil by ordering the down regulation of cannabis and all cannabinoids. A Schedule V rating would free cannabis from the DEA boot on its neck. So too, it would free the American people from criminalization and repression by drug war bureaucrats and allow medical cannabis research to flourish.

By the way, a second drug war evil took place on this day. On December 30, 1996, President Bill Clinton authorized a federal attack on recent gains by medical marijuana proponents, specifically California’s Proposition 215, voted in a month and a half earlier. Already overseer of a hugely expanded Justice Department with big jumps in marijuana arrests, prosecutions and jailings, Bill Clinton now sought to specifically override the choice of California voters and prepared an attack on American medical rights that culminated in one of the most egregious modern attacks on the American Freedom of Speech.

Specifically, Clinton and henchmen Drug Czar General Barry McCaffrey and representative Rahm Emanuel sought to deny the rights of physicians to speak of the possible utility of medical marijuana. Doctors were threatened with denial to pharmaceutical drugs if they counseled glaucoma victims about the eye pressure-lowering power of marijuana. They were told they might lose their right to practice medicine if they mentioned to the retching patients undergoing chemotherapy that some find nausea relief with cannabis.

Fortunately the courts saw the grievous unconstitutionality of such restrictions and ended this government thought control for doctors and their patients. Despite this setback, every government bureaucracy benefiting from the drug war has continued this attack on the medical rights of their fellow American citizens, rights about which medication they choose with their doctors.

Thanks to StopTheDrugWar.org ’s Drug War Chronicle’s This Week in History for noting the dates of the above misdeeds.

The biosphere of planet earth is in great peril from global warming. In many ways this on-rushing planetary disaster is like an inflammatory disease.

Red deserts of Africa

Inflammation was described 2,000 years ago in Roman medicine, recognizable as calor, rubor, tumor, and dolor, heat, redness, swelling and pain.  Later the historic physician Galen added loss of function. Although inflammation can be a healthy response to threats such a bacterial infections, it is always stressful and accompanied by cell damage.

Chronic inflammation is key to cellular damage caused by autoimmune diseases, such as arthritis. Inappropriate chronic inflammation is currently seen as basic to a host of modern diseases. Any source of long term inflammation, any condition ending in -itus, such as gingivitis, should be avoided. Obesity is some real ways an inflammatory disease.

The planet Earth now seems afflicted with an inflammatory-like disease.

• Heat is a prime manifestation of inflammation. Excess heat is also the prime driver of the on-going climate change. The atmosphere of earth, plagued with historically high levels of carbon, is retaining more of the heat energy pouring in from the sun. The earth’s biosphere, the only sphere of life that we know to exist in the entire universe, is suffering from a dangerous warming. Earth’s atmosphere and oceans, are heating up like an injured limb.

• Redness is a second manifestation of inflammation. Startlingly, new sources of redness have emerged on the earth’s surface and water. Red tides stain the oceans with zones of death. Great rivers carry red earth, eroded from dry hillsides, far out to sea. Dust storms visible from space carry red dust clouds from Africa to spread over Europe. Red dots of flame, visible from space, glow in oil producing areas as gas bi-products are burned off. Other areas of red flame issue from the remains of the world’s rain forests being torched in an equatorial zone of fire stretching around the globe.

• Swelling is another inflammatory symptom that is reflected in the rising oceans. Sea levels climb not only as great glaciers melt, but also the oceans bulge with warmth. CO2 counts swell in ever higher parts per million of the atmosphere.

• Pain is an unwelcome manifestation of inflammation. A human feels pain as an injury or autoimmune condition causes inflammatory pressure on nerves and release of pain biochemicals. Unfortunately, people and other lifeforms on the planet are in for a lot of pain as warming shrinks habitats, both from sea level rise and desertification. The melting of river-filling glaciers will cause the pain of great thirst across much of the globe.

• Loss of function is the last symptom of inflammation. With a significant portion of the world’s human population and economy living and working near the oceans, rising sea levels will inflict incalculable damage and hardship. This at the same time as hundreds of millions displaced by drought seek refuge.

It is a bit startling to compare the inflammation symptoms of the planet with the function of inflammation in the human body. Acute inflammation is a life-saving response. Bacteria entering any small flesh wound would soon multiply enough to kill a human if the person’s body did not answer quickly with an immune response using inflammation. Invading bacteria are killed by this response before their number can rise to the point of danger to life.

Is the planet’s inflammation also a life-saving response, in this case the life of the biosphere? The result of global climate change may be end up reducing the number of carbon producing units on its surface. Six and a half billion people is probably far more than the biosphere can support; the nine billion predicted in 2040 will compete, and probably fight, for ever diminishing land and fresh water.

Continuation of his heating would/will result in catastrophes of colossal proportions. The Copenhagen conference has done little to change things.

Interestingly, the cure, or at least reduction for inflammation on the planetary level might be similar to an effective treatment for humans suffering inflammation. A subsequent post will explore how cannabis can moderate inflammation, not just in the human body, but also for the planet Earth.