No reason to guess at Anslinger's motivation, since it was described earlier with this quote from CBS. He was on record doing a 180 on Cannabis after his appointment, having previously considered Cannabis no big deal. Then he ginned up the whole "Reefer Madness" business, every bit built on lies. The CBS article documents it thoroughly. I'd say a self-serving decision to equate a plant he had previously considered harmless with cocaine and heroin lays every death, every bit of destruction, every medicinal death that could have been prevented, every incarceration from the War on Cannabis squarely at his feet. No inclusion, no War on Cannabis. And thanks to America's "leadership" role, that War spread around the world. There have been executions and beheadings because of that decision. Sometimes it really is that direct a connection.
You've still only shown evidence that he was a bureaucrat who wanted more power, not that he was motivated by a desire to commit genocide.
As for being responsible for executions and beheadings that have happened because of that decision, I'm going to say that as much as I hate all those anti-drug commercials that try to guilt people by linking drugs with terrorism, that link does exist, so you - yes, you Don - are responsible for putting money into the pockets of people who do those things too. You may resent it, you may think it's horribly unfair and the government has no right to criminalize drugs so it's the government's fault if you decide to break the law and put money into the pockets of criminals and terrorists... and to be clear, I do not actually hold you responsible for being at the other end of a supply chain that includes criminals and terrorists. But if everyone involved in creating and enforcing the laws that resulted in that supply chain is responsible for all its crimes, then I don't see how you get to skate out of any culpability yourself for the completely voluntary choice to support that supply chain.
I didn't realize that a desire to commit genocide was a requirement for a crime against humanity. I guess that's the same reason the other events I mentioned, the near-eradication of Indigenous Americans or the 100 million that perished as a result of communist regimes don't qualify as crimes against humanity either. Those were just honest mistakes by bureaucrats seeking to expand their power.
ETA: And nice try on the supply chain guilt trip, but I've pointed out that I'm a big proponent of barter, organic farming and local markets. I know my supply chain pretty well and don't feel any guilt about supporting it.
____________________________________________________ Economics puts parameters on people’s utopias. ~Peter Boettke "It's the voter's fault" is victim-blaming in its purest sense. ~Don The 'social contract' is to the politician what 'original sin' is to the priest. ~Don The vision of the helpful and protective state is the most pervasive and counter-productive ideology in the world today. ~Don ____________________________________________________
I didn't realize that a desire to commit genocide was a requirement for a crime against humanity. I guess that's the same reason the other events I mentioned, the near-eradication of Indigenous Americans or the 100 million that perished as a result of communist regimes don't qualify as crimes against humanity either. Those were just honest mistakes by bureaucrats seeking to expand their power.
People who sought to eradicate the Native Americans actually wanted to eradicate Native Americans.
Nazis who built death camps actually wanted to build death camps.
People who wanted pot criminalized were not trying to create the criminal network that would exist generations later.
You keep switching back and forth between intentionality (which would absolve people who weren't actually trying to cause deaths) and consequentialism (which would indict you as well).
People who wanted pot criminalized were not trying to create the criminal network that would exist generations later.
I'd say the facts disagree. I'll refer you once again to the CBS article, but I'll paraphrase this time.
Let's see. ol' Harry had been the Assistant Director of Prohibition right up until the taxpayers fired him. So he certainly knew that prohibiting alcohol had led to the growth of the mobs that provided other prohibited things, like gambling and prostitution. He knew that trying to enforce prohibitions led to massive death and destruction. He had given the orders to institute plenty of that violence. He also knew prohibition didn't work, having seen proof at least three times, with alcohol gambling and prostitution.
Then he gets a new job, and decides that instead of settling for the little army he can build against cocaine and heroin, he needs a great, massive, army, so he goes after a plant he already had stated was no danger, that 29 out of the 30 doctors he consulted said it was no danger, BUT that was also widely used recreationally by people he despised, like blacks and mexicans.
Nope, no sign of racist intent there.
Not only did he ignore the 29 doctors who told him he was wrong, he went into wholesale production of lies to sell his bullshit to the american people, creating fear and panic about a plant that was, to the contrary, already in beneficial use in medicine, plastics, paper, and other industries. And every one of his underlings (and overlings) winked and let him go ahead with criminalizing massive numbers of citizens and destroying all the beneficial industries that centered not only around psychoactive and medicinal cannibis, but also industrial hemp.
And as documented earlier, he did all this specifically to create a massive authoritarian department that would have been a tiny fraction of its size if he had not attacked Cannabis.
Now, admittedly, it's just a wild-ass guess, but armies need enemies. I think it's as goddamn obvious as the nose on your face that Harry Anslinger WAS intentionally creating a criminal network that would exist generations later.
By choosing Cannibis, he could make blacks and mexicans the primary criminals, instead of the whites that alcohol prohibition had targeted. Since blacks and mexicans had no power, he had virtually no resistance. And he could justify violence against whole communities and races with little risk of blowback.
Given that he held the post for 32 years and we're still in that mode today, I think it's also obvious that he was successful.
Harry Anslinger was not some clueless bureaucrat. He'd been right in the middle of alcohol prohibition. Of course he knew that by including Cannabis in his hit list, he WAS intentionally creating a vast criminal element -- and that by creating that vast criminal element he could justify his vast authoritarian army.
The facts are as plain as day. Harry Anslinger was a monster, and his monstrous evil has been perpetuated by every single administration since, and by every government functionary who knows the facts and has decided the facts don't matter.
And you can also bet that the day the war ends, there will be no admission of the decades of death and destruction that all those administrations were complicit, nay, enthusiastic, in supporting.
This has "only following orders" written all over it, but there will never be a Nuremberg. The condemnation will have to wait for the history books, apparently. It's really hard for people to admit they've been hoodwinked for generations. People who know in their hearts they would never follow a Hitler got scammed into supporting wholesale death and destruction anyway, by their supposedly benevolent and helpful government. That's a tough pill to swallow.
I remember it took me quite a while, and that was decades ago.
____________________________________________________ Economics puts parameters on people’s utopias. ~Peter Boettke "It's the voter's fault" is victim-blaming in its purest sense. ~Don The 'social contract' is to the politician what 'original sin' is to the priest. ~Don The vision of the helpful and protective state is the most pervasive and counter-productive ideology in the world today. ~Don ____________________________________________________
Your chain of reasoning is entirely speculative. Sure, it is possible Anslinger was a Lex Luthor-like strategist deliberating creating a criminal empire for the purpose of subjugating black people.
I think my theory is equally (actually, more) viable - he was a narcissistic, maybe even sociopathic bureaucrat who wanted to expand his power, and didn't look nearly as far into the future as you credit him.
Either way, he was a villain, but only using your far-fetched scenario of a purely evil supervillain do you get to get away with saying that passing laws against pot is just like herding people into gas chambers.
And you still haven't addressed my point that you could draw such speculative cause-and-effect chains to immense damage from pretty much everything the government does. So why don't you just suggest we kill everyone who works for the government, since they're all the equivalent of Auschwitz guards? Am I being too far-fetched and speculative to suggest you want to commit mass murder?
ETA: And nice try on the supply chain guilt trip, but I've pointed out that I'm a big proponent of barter, organic farming and local markets. I know my supply chain pretty well and don't feel any guilt about supporting it.
Whether or not you feel guilty about it, and whether or not you know your particular supply chain right now is inconsequential. What you can't get around is that most--the vast majority over time--illegal drug use has been recreational and therefore reflects a willingness on the part of many, many people to break the law and financially support the illegal market in drugs. That willingness, that choice, would make all of them culpable in all of the secondary consequences of that market, at least by your apparent reasoning. It wouldn't matter a whit if none of those users intended for people to get murdered or go to jail because of that illegal market. The fact of the matter is that is what has happened. And at the end of the day, it happened because people want to get high and--for the most part--did not and do not care what the consequences would be for others in the pursuit of that goal.
For the record, I've smoked pot a-plenty.* So by this kind of reasoning, I would be guilty too. But I'm not really a fan of this kind of guilt-parceling. It's not sustainable, really, because there's always a line to be drawn that can make pretty anyone guilty of pretty much anything.
* In my younger days, to be sure. At some point in time, I got over it completely, realizing that crutches were generally counter-productive and illegal crutches were not a reflection of good citizenship. Still, there's something to be said for growing up, learning, and picking one's own path, so I tend to cut younger people a lot of slack, when it comes this stuff. But I have known plenty of people who have felt and continue to feel differently, who do think that their choice to break the law by smoking pot is no big deal. Many are professionals, with families, including several lawyers, more than several teachers, a stockbroker, a doctor, and an architect. Their choice in this regard is disappointing to me, personally, especially when it comes to the lawyers and the teachers. But it is their choice, and I really don't think any of them are murderers or the like, of any sort (as far as I know).
The CBS article totally demolishes the argument that this wasn't racially motivated. Doesn't anybody read anymore?
The second component to Anslinger’s strategy was racial. He claimed that black people and Latinos were the primary users of marijuana, and it made them forget their place in the fabric of American society. He even went so far as to argue that jazz musicians were creating “Satanic” music all thanks to the influence of pot. This obsession eventually led to a sort of witch hunt against the legendary singer Billie Holiday, who struggled with heroin addiction; she lost her license to perform in New York cabarets and continued to be dogged by law enforcement until her death.
“The insanity of the racism is a thing to behold when you go into his archives,” Hari told CBS News. “He claims that cannabis promotes interracial mixing, interracial relationships.”
The word “marijuana” itself was part of this approach. What was commonly known as cannabis until the early 1900s was instead called marihuana, a Spanish word more likely to be associated with Mexicans.
“He was able to do this because he was tapping into very deep anxieties in the culture that were not to do with drugs — and attaching them to this drug,” Hari said. Essentially, in 1930s America, it wasn’t hard to use racist rhetoric to associate the supposed harms of cannabis with minorities and immigrants.
The bolding illustrates why I make a conscious effort to use the scientific word Cannabis. I think it's time to recognize marih[j]uana as the racial slur it was intended to be.
Anybody got any more excuses for ol' Harry and those who perpetuated his crime?
____________________________________________________ Economics puts parameters on people’s utopias. ~Peter Boettke "It's the voter's fault" is victim-blaming in its purest sense. ~Don The 'social contract' is to the politician what 'original sin' is to the priest. ~Don The vision of the helpful and protective state is the most pervasive and counter-productive ideology in the world today. ~Don ____________________________________________________
If people didn't want to drink, alcohol prohibition would still be in effect. Personally, I think that would be a good thing, but I don't think I should tell other people what to do, and am realistic enough to recognize that only a totalitarian government could have possibly enforced it.
If people didn't want to get high, all the medical and environmental benefits we're discovering from Cannabis would have never existed, making society poorer in eternity.
I think the scofflaws have been right in both cases. YMMV.
____________________________________________________ Economics puts parameters on people’s utopias. ~Peter Boettke "It's the voter's fault" is victim-blaming in its purest sense. ~Don The 'social contract' is to the politician what 'original sin' is to the priest. ~Don The vision of the helpful and protective state is the most pervasive and counter-productive ideology in the world today. ~Don ____________________________________________________
Calling the War on Cannabis "silly" is one of the major understatements of the 21st Century. It will one day be recognized as a crime against humanity on the order of the Holocaust... the deaths and destruction that can be laid at the feet of this war are virtually endless.
Calling the War on Cannabis "silly" is one of the major understatements of the 21st Century. It will one day be recognized as a crime against humanity on the order of the Holocaust... the deaths and destruction that can be laid at the feet of this war are virtually endless.
Let us not call criminalizing a drug equivalent to creating death camps and attempted genocide, okay?
I agree with you that the war on cannabis has been stupid and it can't end soon enough, but "crime against humanity on the order of the Holocaust" is way, way overstating things.
For sure. I'm okay with legalizing pot--especially for medical use--but the fact that many bad things can be associated with the illegal drug trade in this regard is as much on the people who want to get stoned as it is on anyone else.
Holocaust?!?!? That's so over-the-top, it's counter-productive, really. It you're spouting nonsense like that, Don, there's zero reason for anyone to take you seriously when it comes to any aspect of legalizing pot, even if you have valid points.
Damn, Don got crucified for resurrecting a word that a vociferous part of society feel they alone have a monopoly on? A stoning would have been better than a crucifixion.
Yep. Pretty much this.
Here's the thing about using "Holocaust" with a capital "H." Nobody has a patent on it any more than they do "slavery." In fact, slavery is considered by some scholars as "the Black Holocaust" and there is a museum in Milwaukee focused on it.
"Slavery" no more belongs to Black people than "nigger" does. You can be "gay" and it means you're happy, not a homosexual male. You don't have to be a woman to be called a "bitch." These are words and words which have become associated to certain groups, but there were many, many other holocausts before the Jewish Holocaust. The sheer scale of that crime against humanity is so staggering that "holocaust" has become the default shorthand for the Nazi effort to eradicate Jews from the face of the earth.
But the word itself does not belong exclusively to the Jews. Native Americans have a pretty good case to make that their own holocaust was pretty terrible in its thoroughness.
mid-13c., "sacrifice by fire, burnt offering," from Old French holocauste (12c.), or directly from Late Latin holocaustum, from Greek holokauston "a thing wholly burnt," neuter of holokaustos "burned whole," from holos "whole" (from PIE root *sol- "whole, well-kept") + kaustos, verbal adjective of kaiein "to burn" (see caustic).
Originally a Bible word for "burnt offerings," given wider figurative sense of "massacre, destruction of a large number of persons" from 1670s. The Holocaust "Nazi genocide of European Jews in World War II," first recorded 1957, earlier known in Hebrew as Shoah "catastrophe." The word itself was used in English in reference to Hitler's Jewish policies from 1942, but not as a proper name for them.
If it's hyperbolic to introduce the H-word in a debate about drugs, it's equally hyperbolic to assert certain words and phrases belong to one specific group and no one else should ever try to use it to describe any other group or occurrence. Words have power and words have meaning and certain words have more meaning to some than it does to others.
The War On Drugs has been an abysmal failure, but then it was never really meant to succeed. It was a Nixonian scheme to put the hurt on the unruly young hippies and the uppity militant Blacks and that part succeeded beyond expectations.
I don't see why this is even a debate. Legalize it and trust the people will figure it out for themselves without the government telling them, "This is for your own good. You're too irresponsible to be trusted to figure it out for yourselves."
I can't go as far as Don does in his distrust and scorn for the federal government, but by any objective standard, the War On Drugs has turned out to be a war on the rights of the American people in general and Black people specifically.
Nothing I accept about myself can be used against me to diminish me. Audre Lorde
Human beings cannot be willed and molded into non-existence. Angela Davis
I can't believe what you say, because I see what you do. James A. Baldwin
If people didn't want to drink, alcohol prohibition would still be in effect. Personally, I think that would be a good thing, but I don't think I should tell other people what to do, and am realistic enough to recognize that only a totalitarian government could have possibly enforced it.
If people didn't want to get high, all the medical and environmental benefits we're discovering from Cannabis would have never existed, making society poorer in eternity.
I think the scofflaws have been right in both cases. YMMV.
Yeah, you're missing the point (or more likely purposefully avoiding it). I agree with you--as I've said--that pot should be legalized and that allowing its use for medicinal purposes should have been a no-brainer a long time ago. But it doesn't matter if I'm right, it doesn't matter if you're right, it doesn't matter if the "scofflaws" are right in this regard. Because again, the need to get high is what drives the illegal drug trade, is what ultimately funds all sorts of ancillary criminal activity. Hey, the need to gamble has done the same thing, right? And yes, the need to get drunk did, as well.
But gambling, getting drunk, and getting stoned aren't critical elements of existence, in my view. Allowing that they should all--to some extent--be legal doesn't make the people who engaged in such behaviors while they were illegal into World Champions and Martyrs for Freedom. It just makes them people who decided that their desires were more important--in the moment--than following laws they could have easily followed, with no real downside (indeed, there would actually be an upside).
So if people are going to be held accountable for all of the bad stuff caused by the illegal drug trade and the war on drugs, it seems fairly obvious to me that those people who participated in one or both are all on the hook.
If it's hyperbolic to introduce the H-word in a debate about drugs, it's equally hyperbolic to assert certain words and phrases belong to one specific group and no one else should ever try to use it to describe any other group or occurrence. Words have power and words have meaning and certain words have more meaning to some than it does to others.
I am not objecting to the "H-word" or saying that only Jews are allowed to use it. It isn't the word "Holocaust" that made me think he's gone off the rails, it's the actions associated with that word, which he thinks are reasonable to compare with making pot illegal.
If he'd said criminalizing cannabis was a crime on the same scale as the institution of slavery, or wiping out Native American tribes, I've have said the same thing about it being a ridiculous comparison.
If it's hyperbolic to introduce the H-word in a debate about drugs, it's equally hyperbolic to assert certain words and phrases belong to one specific group and no one else should ever try to use it to describe any other group or occurrence. Words have power and words have meaning and certain words have more meaning to some than it does to others.
I am not objecting to the "H-word" or saying that only Jews are allowed to use it. It isn't the word "Holocaust" that made me think he's gone off the rails, it's the actions associated with that word, which he thinks are reasonable to compare with making pot illegal.
If he'd said criminalizing cannabis was a crime on the same scale as the institution of slavery, or wiping out Native American tribes, I've have said the same thing about it being a ridiculous comparison.
Okay. I can get behind that. "Holocaust" is a trigger word, it's powerful and volatile, and it triggers a wide swath of emotions and reactions. Yet as the otherwise odious and greasy bucket of smarm called Bill Maher said the other night, "It's okay to shout 'Fire' in a movie theater when the theater is on fire."
"I reject the idea that America will be a better place if marijuana is sold in every corner store. And I am astonished to hear people suggest that we can solve our heroin crisis by legalizing marijuana—so people can trade one life-wrecking dependency for another that’s only slightly less awful," Sessions said while speaking with law enforcement officers Wednesday. "Our nation needs to say clearly once again that using drugs will destroy your life."
But that quote shouldn't come as a surprise, since the former Alabama senator has long been a hard-line anti-pot crusader.
Here are five other things he's said about marijuana over the years.
1. On what he thought of the KKK in the '80s in comments he later insisted were delivered jokingly "OK until I found out they smoked pot."
2. On the drug being a danger "We need grown-ups in charge in Washington to say marijuana is not the kind of thing that ought to be legalized, it ought not to be minimized, that it's in fact a very real danger."
3. On Obama's more lax approach to pot enforcement and his admiration for "Just Say No" "I think one of [Obama's] great failures, it's obvious to me, is his lax treatment in comments on marijuana... It reverses 20 years almost of hostility to drugs that began really when Nancy Reagan started 'Just Say No.'"
4. More on Obama and pot "You can't have the President of the United States of America talking about marijuana like it is no different than taking a drink… It is different… It is already causing a disturbance in the states that have made it legal."
5. On the kinds of folks who smoke weed "Good people don't smoke marijuana."
Sound like an anti-drug zealot? Sounds like one to me. Ol' Jeff hates that wacky tobaccy so much he's effectively prevented the Drug Enforcement Agency from approving applications to grow marijuana for research. Sounds like someone should slip Jefferson Beauregard Sessions an edible.
Might be fun to watch Jeff at the next Cabinet meeting when he starts drooling and trying to chew his fingers off to the elbow, jumps on the table, strips down to his skivvies and chases Trump around the room beating him with a shoe and trying to eat his face.
i'd buy that for a dollar.
Last Edit: Nov 5, 2018 11:20:05 GMT -5 by nighttimer
Nothing I accept about myself can be used against me to diminish me. Audre Lorde
Human beings cannot be willed and molded into non-existence. Angela Davis
I can't believe what you say, because I see what you do. James A. Baldwin
I haven't studied this subject in detail, and I've never used cannabis myself, but I do get regular medical articles on it, and I've looked into CBD on the request of my daughter who had anxiety after having a severe medical complication following her appendectomy at the age of 15 that lasted several months (and the anxiety about it lasted much longer and still lingers).
A couple of my admittedly brief and scattered thoughts:
1) Resistance against Hemp related products is utterly stupid.
3) Much more research needs to be done on the benefits AND adverse effects of cannabis and cannabis derived products. Yet the research is also stymied by bureaucratic nonsense which puts this in a catch-22 sort of situation.
3) I do think there is a danger, in this climate of legalizing cannabis, that kids will grow up thinking cannabis is harmless and totally safe. It's not. Especially for adolescents, for multiple reasons including addiction potential, effects on the developing brain, decreased motivation, risk of psychosis, etc.
4) Concerns I have about cannabis use include both adverse effects of cannabis itself - (granted not in all people, but certainly in some) - examples: marijuana hyperemesis syndrome usa.thelancet.com/blog/2017-11-27-recent-rise-cannabinoid-hyperemesis-syndrome , the addictive potential, the risk of psychosis, as well as risks from variability in THC content of plants, variability in preparations of product, the presence of pesticides on cannabis plants which can be toxic, etc.
5) accidental ingestion of edibles containing THC - how can this not happen when it looks like candy or cookies or brownies?
Note, adults look back on their weed smoking as a benign experience, but apparently, back in the 1970s to 1980s THC content was much lower. I've read articles that state THC content in joints these days is 4-7 times greater than back in the day. That's a HUGE difference.
6) how can a doc prescribe medical marijuana when all of the above variables are so confusing? The actual dose is impossible to know in an unregulated product, pharmacokinetics differ greatly in various preparations and methods of ingestion, lack of evidence on interactions with other medications, lack of evidence on benefits for certain diseases. The list goes on. It's like tying a docs hands behind their back and waving the prescription pad in front of them.
7) the whole federal vs state regulatory stuff is soooo confusing
To sum it all up, this is an absolute MESS. And that's really unfortunate.
Last Edit: Nov 5, 2018 14:17:04 GMT -5 by celawson
I haven't studied this subject in detail, and I've never used cannabis myself, but I do get regular medical articles on it, and I've looked into CBD on the request of my daughter who had anxiety after having a severe medical complication following her appendectomy at the age of 15 that lasted several months (and the anxiety about it lasted much longer and still lingers).
A couple of my admittedly brief and scattered thoughts:
1) Resistance against Hemp related products is utterly stupid.
Agreed. But there are powerful interests behind the resistance include Big Pharma which doesn't want to compete with a drug their customers can grow at home.
My wife has undergone three knee surgeries. One was to repair the damage done to her left knee by a previous surgeon. The kneecap had slipped off and the screw holding it in place had come loose and was "floating" in the back of her leg. Very painful, as you might guess. She has continual pain issues in her knee, back troubles, and trouble sleeping.
She has used various prescription medicines for pain management including Oxycontin, Rush Limbaugh's drug of choice. She very much wants to try CBD products for relief. As you may already know, celawson, Black patients don't receive pain medications or certain medical procedures as readily as White patients do. I believe she deserves a chance to find alternative methods to treat her chronic pain.
3) Much more research needs to be done on the benefits AND adverse effects of cannabis and cannabis derived products. Yet the research is also stymied by bureaucratic nonsense which puts this in a catch-22 sort of situation.
3) I do think there is a danger, in this climate of legalizing cannabis, that kids will grow up thinking cannabis is harmless and totally safe. It's not. Especially for adolescents, for multiple reasons including addiction potential, effects on the developing brain, decreased motivation, risk of psychosis, etc.
Nothing makes something more attractive to kids than being told they can't have it. Cannabis, like alcohol, is not for the kiddies until their bodies and minds are developed enough to handle it. If you're drinking cherry Kool-Aid today, you probably shouldn't be slamming a bottle of Jim Beam tomorrow. I think there is some small risk that some kid who shouldn't be smoking weed does, but I could say the same thing about the ones I see weaving in and out of traffic on a motorized scooter.
4) Concerns I have about cannabis use include both adverse effects of cannabis itself - (granted not in all people, but certainly in some) - examples: marijuana hyperemesis syndrome usa.thelancet.com/blog/2017-11-27-recent-rise-cannabinoid-hyperemesis-syndrome , the addictive potential, the risk of psychosis, as well as risks from variability in THC content of plants, variability in preparations of product, the presence of pesticides on cannabis plants which can be toxic, etc. You could say the same thing about America's food and water supply. There is a certain amount of assumed risk to anything and that includes marijuana and its byproducts. it's just another reason why there needs to be more research even if assholes like Jeff Sessions doesn't want it to happen. If I start in the morning and try to go to midnight, I'm more certain it's the bourbon that will kill me before the grass does.
5) accidental ingestion of edibles containing THC - how can this not happen when it looks like candy or cookies or brownies? You could say the same thing about the kiddies getting into the entirely legal liquor cabinet.
Note, adults look back on their weed smoking as a benign experience, but apparently, back in the 1970s to 1980s THC content was much lower. I've read articles that state THC content in joints these days is 4-7 times greater than back in the day. That's a HUGE difference. You don't say? Shit, I must be getting some trash-ass stuff then.
6) how can a doc prescribe medical marijuana when all of the above variables are so confusing? The actual dose is impossible to know in an unregulated product, pharmacokinetics differ greatly in various preparations and methods of ingestion, lack of evidence on interactions with other medications, lack of evidence on benefits for certain diseases. The list goes on. It's like tying a docs hands behind their back and waving the prescription pad in front of them.
Thanks to NT for stopping in with yet more wisdom about this travesty. I'll take this personal and away from recreational based on his comments about his wife. NT, I hope our experiences can offer you a way forward.
She has used variouds prescription medicines for pain management including Oxycontin, Rush Limbaugh's drug of choice. She very much wants to try CBD products for relief. As you may already know, celawson, Black patients don't receive pain medications or certain medical procedures as readily as White patients do. I believe she deserves a chance to find alternative methods to treat her chronic pain.
My wife has major problems with her back and neck, and it wasn't "recreational" pot that finally induced me to take an activist position in the War on Cannabis. It was the day she went from a Morphine Zombie to a real human again.
As her pain increased from her problems over the years, doctors moved her from opiate to opiate. By the end of her Opiate use, she was on Morphine, all she wanted to do was sleep, and her ability to orgasm was totally gone. (Don't discount the importance of an orgasm.) Also, because regulations required a doctor visit every 30 days to renew, it was a horribly expensive regimen that kept her locked into a specific location every 30 days. Our travel days were over.
She knew that a puff or two could provide temporary relief, so she decided to try the edibles route, for longer impact and more controllable dosages. This was a few years ago, in an illegal state, so it was fairly unscientific. We got a bag of "shake" (fairly cheap cannabis; what falls out when the buds are being weighed and bagged) and made a batch of brownies, using a recipe from my college days.
After a period of experimenting with dosage, my wife slowly untangled herself from the Opiate train, initially against the recommendation of both her primary and pain management doctors, both of whom are now aware of her results and are on the route to becoming scofflaws themselves. Who says education doesn't work?
She's now been opiate-free for over two years. No longer locked down with expensive doctor visits and even more expensive opiates, and with a viable, dosage-adjustable solution to her pain, we're traveling the country again. She no longer wakes up just to take a pain pill and move from the living room TV to soak up some sun from the pool and back again. We have lives again. And, we even have sex lives again.
Now that she has a "legal" medical "marijuana" card, she can buy pharmaceutically-prepared pills or vapes from the dispensary, as long as she pays a fortune for yearly doctor/gatekeeper visits where absolutely nothing happens except the doctor signing a slip and my wife paying lots of money. Then each time she wants to shop at the approved store, she pays more money for a prescription slip from the same doctor, then goes to the store and pays three or four times what the same products are available for in Washington or Oregon state.
Or she can do a yearly visit to keep her "legal" card, have more dosage flexibility and treatment options, and better overall results, by baking her own medication. She's tried both, in both legal and illegal states, and has found the second approach far more effective and viable. But she's technically still a criminal, even crossing as many Ts and dotting as many Is as she has. The whole thing is fucked up beyond repair.
The bottom line is as plain as it can possibly be. Illegal, scofflaw medicinal cannabis gave my wife her life back. It gave me my wife back. And we could both spend the rest of our lives in jail because of it.
If ol' Harry, Tricky Dick, Jeff Sessions and FedGov had their way about it, my wife would still be an Opiate Zombie with no hope. Et tu, robeiae?
Yeah, Fuck FedGov. And by now it should be glaringly obvious why.
____________________________________________________ Economics puts parameters on people’s utopias. ~Peter Boettke "It's the voter's fault" is victim-blaming in its purest sense. ~Don The 'social contract' is to the politician what 'original sin' is to the priest. ~Don The vision of the helpful and protective state is the most pervasive and counter-productive ideology in the world today. ~Don ____________________________________________________