Your Brain On Bliss

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 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.

George Will

This writer knew something was wrong when conservative pundit George Will wrote two opinion pieces with which I could agree. The first was regarding Afghanistan where, regrettably, Will makes more sense for leaving than Obama does for escalating. The other was for his recent criticism of the war on drugs. However, in a November 29 Washington Post column, Rocky Mountain high, Will returns to his authoritarian, neocon roots with criticisms of Colorado’s medical marijuana program.

Those wishing to disdain the medical value of marijuana typically put the term “medical” in quotation marks when the word is followed by marijuana. George Will goes further, when belittling the conditions for which medical cannabis may be used, he includes “chronic pain” (quotation marks his). It may be news to George, but pain is the primary reason people go to the doctor, and indeed was the core reason the medical profession came into being! Yes George, pain, especially chronic pain, is a good reason for seeking medical care and medication.

Cannabis has been used for pain relief for at least 5,000 years and is proving in new studies to be highly effective in lessening many types of pain. It is also the least toxic of any pain relieving substance. Indeed, cannabis is the safer choice for pain relief, far safer than Oxycontin, far safer than Vicodin, safer even than aspirin. Aspirin causes several hundred deaths each year, marijuana causes zero deaths. Typically, use of dangerous, mind-altering opioid pain relievers is greatly reduced when cannabis is added as an adjunct analgesic.

Yet George Will and the authoritarian wing of the Republican party would deny Americans their personal freedom of medical choice for pain relief, if that choice happened to be marijuana.

• How did the Republican party, supposedly the party of small government, transform itself into a tyranny that controls and punishes American citizens needlessly?

• How did the Republican party, supposed for keeping the government out of people’s lives, still seeks to deny Americans the freedom to make their own safer medical choices?

Will gets off on the wrong foot by lauding prohibitionist Colorado attorney general, John Suthers, calling him honest and thoughtful. Actually he is a bureaucrat protecting his turf, a law enforcement official extending his domain over the medical choices of his fellow Coloradans. Because of his prohibitionist efforts, Coloradans may be forced to give up the right to choose safer, cheaper medications. Hopefully, Colorado citizen Mason Tvert of SAFER will educate the authoritarian George Will on the “thoughtfulness” of the hardline AG.

Americans should rightly bristle when self-serving bureaucrats deny them medical choices. The police should not be lobbying against the medical freedoms and choices of their fellow citizens, just because costs them enforcement turf, as is the case with medical cannabis. George Will allowed Suthers to feed him age-old platitudes about current marijuana being “seven, eight times as concentrated” as pot used to be. Even if this old saw were true, it would only make it “seven, eight” times safer, requiring less consumption for equal medical benefit.

George almost misted up when revealing that Suthers claimed that in a recent survey, “non-using young people revealed that health concerns did not explain nonuse. The main explanation was the law: We underestimate the number of people who care that something is illegal.” Great rationale for continuing the current marijuana laws devastate the lives of the 800,000 people arrested each year in the USA! Such reasoning is contradicted by the Dutch who have a much higher level of “nonuse” of cannabis than Americans, but have much more lenient laws against the plant substance.

Will concludes, “by mocking the idea of lawful behavior, legalization of medical marijuana may be more socially destructive than full legalization.” Gee, George, the arbitrary, unreasonable and capricious laws against marijuana have been dissed and disobeyed for more than 40 years now by Americans who knew the restrictions were unjust. These laws have been willfully broken by tens of millions of Americans for decades, mocking the law, flaunting legislators who passed them and viewing as enemies the police that enforced them. Respect for the law demands laws deserving respect.

As far as legalization of marijuana being socially destructive? Not in the least. The recent experience of Portugal proves that. The social destruction of the last 40 years of failed drug war has been the 20 million cannabis arrest casulties inflicted upon Americans by their government. The unneeded, counterproductive and failed war on marijuana users has produced maximum harm and is the mockery of American justice George Will should be protesting.

The coroner’s report showed that Michael Jackson, in his overpowering desire to sleep, demanded and received narcotics so powerful they were, obviously, life-threatening. Inability to sleep can be profoundly disturbing. Sleep deprivation is a key CIA torture technique. “It causes people to feel absolutely crazy.” Insomnia in the elderly is a major cause of depression and lack of will to live. Jackson’s insomnia appears profound; he received injections of powerfeul drugs from 2am until 10am.

Insomnia is one of the conditions legally treatable with medical cannabis in some states. Prohibitionist lampoon such applications for medical marijuana as trivial. Actually, the effectiveness of cannabis for treating insomia points to how the plant provides nearly a universal medication. What percentage of the population sometimes has trouble sleeping? If seeking medication for the problem, why should they be forced into drugs stronger than cannabis, those with real dangers, including addiction and death? Likewise should those suffering pain be forced into medications less safe than cannabis by drug laws formed in ignorance and prejudice?

Strangely, it is a misplaced sense of morality that seems to motivate prohibitionists. Those wishing to restrict the use of medical cannabis on moral grounds should realized that Queen Victoria herself made use of medical cannabis for menstrual cramps. Mitch Earlywine in Understanding Marijuana: A New Look at the Scientic Evidence, on page 113 mentions that the Queen’s chief physician, Dr. J. R. Reynolds, “recommended the drug for insomnia.”  Reynolds wrote of the therapeutic effects of the drug in Lancet in 1890. So, despite the restrictions Victorian morality, the Queen and her subjects enjoyed medical freedoms deemed illegal in the USA over a century later.

Apparently the cannabinoid best suited for aided sleep is CBD, cannabidiol. High CBD cannabis medications in the form of edibles and tinctures are available in dispensaries not far from Michael Jackson’s LA home. What a shame the entertainer and his doctor focused on high-risk narcotics instead of the far safer cannabis medications available nearby. As DEA law judge Francis Young noted back in 1988, “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.”

Due to a glitch in an attempted moratorium on medical cannabis dispensaries in Los Angeles, the number these legal marijuana outlets recently flourished into hundreds. In parts of LA, such storefronts may indeed be more numerous than Starbucks. Confounding medical marijuana’s detractors, the LA crime rate during this same time dropped like a rock.

The LA Times report, “L.A.’s medical pot dispensary moratorium led to a boom instead.” is datelined June 3 2009. An exemption in a moratorium instead allowed hundreds of cannabis clinics to pop up in LA. The density is highest here, but across the state dispensaries flourish. The booming cannabis industry is growing as most other sectors of the California economy are swooning. Arguably, the medical marijuana industry is the single most vigorous new economic engine in the state.

• New business storefronts are opening up when the general trend has seen stores being boarded up.

• A major crop can arise from hiding to take its rightful place in California agriculture. Already the economies of several counties in the state’s north are powered by cannabis cultivation.

• New careers are being forged in the 21st century education provided by institutions such as Oaksterdam University in Oakland (and now LA). Classes in medicinal cannabis educate students in the pain relief, anti-inflammation, anti-glaucoma, anti-nausea and other health properties of the cannabinoids in the plant substance.

• Sales taxes are being generated that help financially prop up the not-so Golden State. For every one hundred dollars of medical cannabis sales, the state gets over 8 dollars for its empty coffers.

The benefits of medical cannabis are ubiquitous. Most people have conditions, including pain, at some point in their lives when they could benefit from treatment with, or including, the medical herb. The California law passed by Proposition 215 was wisely worded to legalize any prescribed use of cannabis. Tens of millions of Californians, then, either have or will sometime have health conditions from which they could benefit from legal medical cannabis. With so many people finding relief from pain and other maladies coming from a substance previously and cruelly banned from them, it is little wonder a new industry is thriving in California.

The drug warrior bureaucracy including DEA, prosecutors, SWAT squads, prison guards and urine testers have long warned that legalization of marijuana would result in a wave of crime. Well, marijuana has become de facto legalized in California, especially LA. At the same time LA street crime has dropped precipitously.

Just a week before the proliferating dispensaries article cited above, the LA Times’ Gregory Rodriquez reported:

• Nationally, crime has been up in some places and down in others. But overall? Dramatically down. And here in Los Angeles, the drop is particularly stunning. According to the Los Angeles Police Department, compared with the same period in 2008, homicide is down by 32%; rape 12%; robbery 3%; burglary 6%, and grand theft auto a shocking 18%.

Not exactly the Armageddon predicted by the drug war bureaucrats. This privileged class thrives on the taxpayer-funded war on marijuana. Their lavish benefits and pensions all ultimately derive from the caging of their countrymen and women.  A major budget problem for California stems from the quintupling of its prisoner population during the drug war of the the last 40 years, in good part in the behest of the state’s prison guard’s politically powerful union. This vast investment in negative social capital has grown far faster than funding for the positive social capital investment, education. And now, California is paying the price. The apparent inverse relationship between cannabis dispensary proliferation and crime belies the claims of those benefiting from the war on drugs.

• More recent evidence comes from the Netherlands, the country in the world where cannabis is most legal, and crime rate. While California can’t build prisons fast enough (to satisfy the prison guard’s union at least) the Dutch are having to close eight prisons for lack of prisoners, because the crime rate is so low.

• Over in Portugal, that nation decriminalized not just cannabis, but all drugs. The results? Extremely positive, with lowered drug use and harm reduction across the board. No increase in crime.

With any notion of crime increase as cannabis is decriminalized has been debunks. There can be no reason not to end the tragic war on cannabis now!