or that scientific evidence on the therapeutic use of cannabis meets the current standards for a prescription drug product.
...Of course, the low hanging fruit of the current standard being, "Did I really enjoy that handjob I got from the GS rep at the spa after we put 18 holes in?"
I think this is my favorite piece of literature to reference with regards to the American medical bureaucracy: they do a double blind test and find that cannabis, somehow, reduces pressure in the eye by about 25% (to this day, we do not understand the mechanism behind this action, and it is not being actively researched) for a few hours. This is comparable to any of the topical medical options available, and the drug is arguably less expensive (and unquestionably easier to produce).
Is that the conclusions offered? No. The conclusion offered foregoes the objectives facts of the discovery, opting for political weasel words instead:
Based on reviews by the National Eye Institute (NEI), the Institute of Medicine (IOM), and on available scientific evidence, the American Academy of Ophthalmology Complementary Therapy Task Force finds no scientific evidence demonstrating increased benefit and/or diminished risk of marijuana use in the treatment of glaucoma compared with the wide variety of pharmaceutical agents now available.
"Well, there's no scientific evidence that Advil has increased benefit over Tylenol. May as well make Advil illegal."
That's your favorite bit on drug regulation? It doesn't even have anything to do with drug regulation. Its about evaluating alternate (or "complimentary") therapy options to patients regarding whether they could potentially provide a benefit to more conventional treatments. It says nothing about legalization, it says existing research does not support claims marijuana is better at treating glaucoma than the wide range of existing treatment options and what would be needed to provide such evidence.
Complementary, or alternative therapies, are a growing part of health care in America. Americans spend an estimated $14 billion a year on alternative treatments.
...
The goal of these assessments is to provide objective information about complementary therapies and to provide a scientific basis for physicians to advise their patients, when asked.
To accomplish these goals, the assessments in general are intended to do the following:
Describe the scientific rationale or mechanism for action for the complementary therapy.
Describe the methods and basis for collecting evidence.
Describe the relevant evidence.
Summarize the benefits and risks of the complementary therapy.
Pose questions for future research inquiry.
Summarize the evidence on safety and effectiveness. ....
Benefits
Initial studies in the 1970s reported that smoking marijuana resulted in lower IOP hours after administration.4,5 The NEI-sponsored studies demonstrated that some derivatives of marijuana did result in lowering of IOP when administered orally, intravenously, or by smoking, but not when topically applied to the eye. The duration of the pressure-lowering effect is reported to be in the range of 3 to 4 hours.6 Benefits also include euphoria as an acute effect. Also, earlier when fewer therapies were available for glaucoma, some patients might have had few acceptable or well-tolerated alternatives. There are no studies directly comparing the IOP-lowering effects of marijuana with currently available therapies.
Risks
Potentially serious side effects associated with smoking marijuana include an increased heart rate and a decrease in blood pressure. Studies of single-administration marijuana use have shown a lowering of blood pressure concurrent with the lowering of IOP.7,8 This raises concerns that there may be compromised blood flow to the optic nerve, but no data have been published on the long-term systemic and ocular effects from the use of marijuana by patients with glaucoma.
Other adverse effects reported from the use of marijuana include conjunctival hyperemia, impaired immune system response, impaired memory for recent events, difficulty concentrating, impaired motor coordination, tolerance to repeated doses, decreased testosterone in men who are chronic users, and short-term withdrawal symptoms after cessation.9 Smoking of marijuana also can lead to emphysema-like lung changes,10 increased risk of cancer, and poor pregnancy outcomes.2 Because the duration of the induced fall in IOP is short, an individual would have to smoke a marijuana cigarette eight or ten times a day in order to control IOP over 24 hours.
...
In conclusion, the Academy Task Force on Complementary Therapies believes that based on a search of published peer-reviewed literature, no scientific evidence has been found that demonstrates increased benefits and/or diminished risks of marijuana use to treat glaucoma compared with the wide variety of pharmaceutical agents now available. These agents include topical miotics, beta adrenergic blockers, epinephrine derivatives, carbonic anhydrase inhibitors, alpha adrenergic agonists, and prostaglandin analogs as well as surgical treatments, such as laser trabeculoplasty, trabeculectomy, drainage devices, and cyclodestruction, which have been used effectively to lower IOP. If further investigation is desired, properly designed and analyzed studies are needed to describe the mechanism of action and to demonstrate the safety and effectiveness of oral and topical cannabinoids compared to other available therapies for treating glaucoma.
Here's a wider directory These are not from a government organization. Its from a research group.
The AMA, BMA and CMA oppose legalization and prioritize that over increased research that could lead to limited legalization. They do so because pot is a recreational drug that has only relatively narrow medicinal use. It gets attention because people want to back door it into legality by pretending its about medicinal use. Its disingenuous bullshit like when conservatives want to "educate" women who want an abortion with trans-vaginal guilt trips and non-consensual sermons and claim a medical basis.
I agree that the AMA should recognize that marijuana has legitimate medical uses.
Regardless of what they should do, the fact is that they don't recognize that.
Just to be clear, I'm not arguing with you: just speaking to the AMA representatives that are no doubt lurking in this thread, nodding in that Very Serious manner and taking notes.
Hi. I'm spacekungfuman. I hate drugs and criminals. And even I think this is a good thing. There is no credible defense of our policy of incarcerating non-violent drug users for such long stretches of time, and at enormous cost to the tax layered in exchange for little or no benefit.
Come on, guys. Come on. The conservative lawyer is telling you to change the policy. He is white and everything. He is so white, in fact, that he hires a cleaning staff for his home.
God help us if not even this voice can change your mind.
Conclusions. Results of short term controlled trials indicate that smoked cannabis reduces neuropathic pain, improves appetite and caloric intake especially in patients with reduced muscle mass, and may relieve spasticity and pain in patients with multiple sclerosis. However, the patchwork of state-based systems that have been established for “medical marijuana” is woefully inadequate in establishing even rudimentary safeguards that normally would be applied to the appropriate clinical use of psychoactive substances. The future of cannabinoid-based medicine lies in the rapidly evolving field of botanical drug substance development, as well as the design of molecules that target various aspects of the endocannabinoid system. To the extent that rescheduling marijuana out of Schedule I will benefit this effort, such a move can be supported.
How is that not clear? They say smoked cannabis has some medical properties. They say the state systems suck and don't support proper studies. They say they want to study and develop new cannabinoid synthetic drugs. They say marijuana should be rescheduled so they can do this.
life's a game that you're bound to lose / like using a hammer to pound in screws
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
And here is the AMA, quite clearly stating that marijuana has medical uses and should be reclassified.
The AMA is not clearly stating that at all :rotate:
The Council on Science and Public Health does not set AMA policy. They are a group inside the AMA. (Fallacy of composition.)
"Review of classification" =/= reclassification. (FWIW, there have been other groups within the AMA that have called for outright reclassification, like the AMA Medical Student Section.) This is a call for more research, not a call for rescheduling.
Cannabinoid compounds = marijuana. If the AMA were to accept a medical use for a constituent of marijuana, that does not imply a medical use for marijuana itself. (Again, fallacy of composition.)
You guys are taking a tiny baby step by the AMA as evidence of a giant leap.
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
Just to reinforce a point, that paper you guys are quoting is not AMA policy. Some verbiage from the report was incorporated into AMA policy, but not all of it.
I don't want to diminish it. It was a big deal when it was published because it was a huge step forward. Specifically, it opened up physicians to discuss marijuana with their patients without fear of professional sanction, and the official call for more research was important.
I've made no edits to this, except to remove unnecessary line breaks.
H-95.952 Medical Marijuana
(1) Our AMA calls for further adequate and well-controlled studies of marijuana and related cannabinoids in patients who have serious conditions for which preclinical, anecdotal, or controlled evidence suggests possible efficacy and the application of such results to the understanding and treatment of disease.
(2) Our AMA recommends that marijuana be retained in Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act pending the outcome of such studies.
(3) Our AMA urges the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to implement administrative procedures to facilitate grant applications and the conduct of well-designed clinical research into the medical utility of marijuana. This effort should include: a) disseminating specific information for researchers on the development of safeguards for marijuana clinical research protocols and the development of a model informed consent on marijuana for institutional review board evaluation; b) sufficient funding to support such clinical research and access for qualified investigators to adequate supplies of marijuana for clinical research purposes; c) confirming that marijuana of various and consistent strengths and/or placebo will be supplied by the National Institute on Drug Abuse to investigators registered with the Drug Enforcement Agency who are conducting bona fide clinical research studies that receive Food and Drug Administration approval, regardless of whether or not the NIH is the primary source of grant support.
(4) Our AMA believes that the NIH should use its resources and influence to support the development of a smoke-free inhaled delivery system for marijuana or delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) to reduce the health hazards associated with the combustion and inhalation of marijuana.
(5) Our AMA believes that effective patient care requires the free and unfettered exchange of information on treatment alternatives and that discussion of these alternatives between physicians and patients should not subject either party to criminal sanctions. (CSA Rep. 10, I-97; Modified: CSA Rep. 6, A-01)
...
H-95.995 Health Aspects of Marijuana
Our AMA (1) discourages marijuana use, especially by persons vulnerable to the drug's effects and in high-risk situations; (2) supports the determination of the consequences of long-term marijuana use through concentrated research; and (3) supports the modification of state law to reduce the severity of penalties for possession of marijuana. (CSA Rep. D, I-77; Reaffirmed: CLRPD Rep. C, A-89; Reaffirmed: Sunset Report, A-00) H-95.997 Marijuana
Our AMA: (1) recommends personal possession of insignificant amounts of that substance be considered a misdemeanor with commensurate penalties applied; (2) believes a plea of marijuana intoxication not be a defense in any criminal proceedings; and (3) urges that educational efforts be expanded to all segments of the population. (BOT Rep. J, A-72; Reaffirmed: CLRPD Rep. C, A-89; Reaffirmed: Sunset Report, A-00) H-95.998 AMA Policy Statement on Cannabis (Marijuana)
Our AMA believes that
(1) cannabis is a dangerous drug and as such is a public health concern;
(2) sale and possession of marijuana should not be legalized;
(3) handling of offenders should be individualized; and
(4) additional research should be encouraged. (BOT Rep. K, I-69; Reaffirmed: CLRPD Rep. C, A-89; Reaffirmed: Sunset Report, A-00)
Feral on
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
The AMA, BMA and CMA oppose legalization and prioritize that over increased research that could lead to limited legalization. They do so because pot is a recreational drug that has only relatively narrow medicinal use. It gets attention because people want to back door it into legality by pretending its about medicinal use. Its disingenuous bullshit like when conservatives want to "educate" women who want an abortion with trans-vaginal guilt trips and non-consensual sermons and claim a medical basis.
1) The fact that cannabis is a recreational drug is a political issue, not a scientific or medical issue. It should not be a factor to be considered as far as a test of it's properties go.
2) No, not everyone just want to 'back door' it into legality by pretending it's about medical use. @spacekungfuman , is this why you want it legal? PantsB is basically accusing you of being a druggie.
3) That is the most retarded analogy I've ever read, right up there with, "Well, not everyone who watches a Lexus ad will buy a Lexus, but some will!"
If you were dying of cancer and withering away with no appetite, and you saw that in the next state over people in the same position could at least go on for their last few weeks / months living a relatively normal life by using cannabis to mitigate the symptoms, would that make you mad? Would the arguments about 'narrow applications' ring true or hollow? Yes, some terrible and lazy people want it legal so they can get high after work while they play video games. Some disgusting people use it as an aphrodisiac! Those sickos.
Some people want it so they can at least eat a hamburger and drink a milkshake while their cancer kills them.
I think we should be willing to give the terrible people and the sickos their recreational enhancement drug so that the guy dying of cancer can eat his fucking hamburger.
With Love and Courage
+2
Options
spacekungfumanPoor and minority-filledRegistered User, __BANNED USERSregular
The AMA, BMA and CMA oppose legalization and prioritize that over increased research that could lead to limited legalization. They do so because pot is a recreational drug that has only relatively narrow medicinal use. It gets attention because people want to back door it into legality by pretending its about medicinal use. Its disingenuous bullshit like when conservatives want to "educate" women who want an abortion with trans-vaginal guilt trips and non-consensual sermons and claim a medical basis.
1) The fact that cannabis is a recreational drug is a political issue, not a scientific or medical issue. It should not be a factor to be considered as far as a test of it's properties go.
2) No, not everyone just want to 'back door' it into legality by pretending it's about medical use. @spacekungfuman , is this why you want it legal? PantsB is basically accusing you of being a druggie.
3) That is the most retarded analogy I've ever read, right up there with, "Well, not everyone who watches a Lexus ad will buy a Lexus, but some will!"
If you were dying of cancer and withering away with no appetite, and you saw that in the next state over people in the same position could at least go on for their last few weeks / months living a relatively normal life by using cannabis to mitigate the symptoms, would that make you mad? Would the arguments about 'narrow applications' ring true or hollow? Yes, some terrible and lazy people want it legal so they can get high after work while they play video games. Some disgusting people use it as an aphrodisiac! Those sickos.
Some people want it so they can at least eat a hamburger and drink a milkshake while their cancer kills them.
I think we should be willing to give the terrible people and the sickos their recreational enhancement drug so that the guy dying of cancer can eat his fucking hamburger.
Yeah, I don't like the idea of recreational use one bit. I accept it as a neccesary evil (but consider it an evil) because prohibition just isn't working.
Yeah, I don't like the idea of recreational use one bit. I accept it as a neccesary evil (but consider it an evil) because prohibition just isn't working.
Now you're making me feel like John Hammond.
I hate smelling it in public. I hate the subculture surrounding it, most of which is totally into 'alternative medicine' and superstitious fuckmuppetry. I hate trying to play League of Legends and getting That Guy on my team who is 'high as fuck right now' and wastes half an hour of leisure time for myself & three other people. All of my experience with users of the drug has been uniformly negative (or, at least, people I knew who were using it on a regular basis).
I agree with the LAWYER. This is not a statement I make lightly.
Ah, I didn't know that paper wasn't actually AMA policy.
Aside: the official AMA styling of "Our AMA" is some pretentious idiocy.
life's a game that you're bound to lose / like using a hammer to pound in screws
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
pot is a recreational drug that has only relatively narrow medicinal use. It gets attention because people want to back door it into legality by pretending its about medicinal use. Its disingenuous bullshit like when conservatives want to "educate" women who want an abortion with trans-vaginal guilt trips and non-consensual sermons and claim a medical basis.
Wow. Just... wow.
Nobody is "pretending" anything. Marijuana has several very legitimate medical uses. I would know. So would my wife. Both of us have had cancer.
Is it used recreationally as well? Yes! Absolutely! But the argument that it has no benefit other than gettin' stoned and eating all the Funyuns is so far off the mark, it's literally not the slightest bit amusing. Unless you yourself have gone through chemotherapy and know what it's like to waste away down to 124 lbs. when you're 6 feet tall and still throw up even thinking about eating a small bowl of steamed rice, I suggest you look at some actual studies.
Medical marijuana isn't a fucking joke. Please don't act like everybody who wants medical marijuana to be an option are just losers wanting to toke up. It's incredibly ignorant.
Oh, I don't doubt that medical Marijuana has legitimate uses, but I'm pretty sure a majority of people who use it (and want it legalized) are recreational smokers. So from a anti-drug perspective, it makes a lot of sense that these people would use the 'medical' uses to try to get it legalized, even if they don't need it medically.
Unfortunatly, you can't just say, "I want weed legalized because it's a relatively harmless drug that I like smoking" doesn't win hearts and minds. Using cancer patients and the 'medical' uses, or claiming it's part of your 'religion' (like certain groups do), while unethical, works better.
The promising medical uses of cannabinoids include such things as pain, insomnia, anxiety, and low appetite (non-psychiatric anorexia).
Those aren't narrow indications - they're remarkably broad.
They also happen to be things we have a lot of drugs for. If we were to limit the discussion to only those indications that we don't have already good drugs for, then we're arguably looking at a handful of conditions: neuropathic pain, pain combined with nausea (as with cancer pain), and anorexia.
Neuropathic pain, cancer pain, and anorexia are the most promising avenues for FDA approval of cannabinoids like Sativex. Pharma companies know this; the AMA knows this.
In that way, the approval paths are "narrow." But if by some miracle the DEA weren't to crack down heavily on Sativex prescriptions (which I'm sure they will, as it will almost certainly end up Schedule III) then the off-label uses would be broad.
Feral on
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
The promising medical uses of cannabinoids include such things as pain, insomnia, anxiety, and low appetite (non-psychiatric anorexia).
Those aren't narrow indications - they're remarkably broad.
They also happen to be things we have a lot of drugs for. If we were to limit the discussion to only those indications that we don't have already good drugs for, then we're arguably looking at a handful of conditions: neuropathic pain, pain combined with nausea (as with cancer pain), and anorexia.
Neuropathic pain, cancer pain, and anorexia are the most promising avenues for FDA approval of cannabinoids like Sativex. Pharma companies know this; the AMA knows this.
In that way, the approval paths are "narrow." But if by some miracle the DEA weren't to crack down heavily on Sativex prescriptions (which I'm sure they will, as it will almost certainly end up Schedule III) then the off-label uses would be broad.
Also, potentially, the mitigation of onset dementia.
We don't know that one for sure yet, but the initial trials had promising results.
The promising medical uses of cannabinoids include such things as pain, insomnia, anxiety, and low appetite (non-psychiatric anorexia).
Those aren't narrow indications - they're remarkably broad.
They also happen to be things we have a lot of drugs for. If we were to limit the discussion to only those indications that we don't have already good drugs for, then we're arguably looking at a handful of conditions: neuropathic pain, pain combined with nausea (as with cancer pain), and anorexia.
Neuropathic pain, cancer pain, and anorexia are the most promising avenues for FDA approval of cannabinoids like Sativex. Pharma companies know this; the AMA knows this.
In that way, the approval paths are "narrow." But if by some miracle the DEA weren't to crack down heavily on Sativex prescriptions (which I'm sure they will, as it will almost certainly end up Schedule III) then the off-label uses would be broad.
Also, potentially, the mitigation of onset dementia.
We don't know that one for sure yet, but the initial trials had promising results.
I missed that one. I knew that cannabinoids have some novel neuroprotective effects, but I didn't know there was a trial on humans. Do you have a link?
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
The promising medical uses of cannabinoids include such things as pain, insomnia, anxiety, and low appetite (non-psychiatric anorexia).
Those aren't narrow indications - they're remarkably broad.
They also happen to be things we have a lot of drugs for. If we were to limit the discussion to only those indications that we don't have already good drugs for, then we're arguably looking at a handful of conditions: neuropathic pain, pain combined with nausea (as with cancer pain), and anorexia.
Neuropathic pain, cancer pain, and anorexia are the most promising avenues for FDA approval of cannabinoids like Sativex. Pharma companies know this; the AMA knows this.
In that way, the approval paths are "narrow." But if by some miracle the DEA weren't to crack down heavily on Sativex prescriptions (which I'm sure they will, as it will almost certainly end up Schedule III) then the off-label uses would be broad.
Also, potentially, the mitigation of onset dementia.
We don't know that one for sure yet, but the initial trials had promising results.
I missed that one. I knew that cannabinoids have some novel neuroprotective effects, but I didn't know there was a trial on humans. Do you have a link?
spacekungfumanPoor and minority-filledRegistered User, __BANNED USERSregular
I am hopeful that whatever medical benefits there are can be derived from a pill or something else simple to use (and which hopefully doesn't get people as high). Feelings on recreational use aside, if people can get the medical benefits though a simple administrative method and not have mental side effects that impair their ability to conduct their lives, that would be a win-win.
Oh, I don't doubt that medical Marijuana has legitimate uses, but I'm pretty sure a majority of people who use it (and want it legalized) are recreational smokers. So from a anti-drug perspective, it makes a lot of sense that these people would use the 'medical' uses to try to get it legalized, even if they don't need it medically.
Unfortunatly, you can't just say, "I want weed legalized because it's a relatively harmless drug that I like smoking" doesn't win hearts and minds. Using cancer patients and the 'medical' uses, or claiming it's part of your 'religion' (like certain groups do), while unethical, works better.
it's really just another 'waiting for enough old people to die' issue. The current patchwork 'prohibition' status of the drug is built on the back of social attitudes substantially formed by reefer madness and reaction to the perceived excesses of youth in the 60s/vietnam era; even when these folks are willing to acknowledge intellectually that marijuana is pretty much safe and non-harmful, they'll stop short of favoring 'extreme' ( :rotate: ) measures like decriminalization because long-term attitudes are tough to change, especially when they're getting reinforced by a few particular lobbies.
I mean, in lots of major cities marijuana is already effectively decriminalized. You have to be trying pretty hard (or be a racial minority, sigh) to get arrested for possession of anything less than a pound here, and I go past two dispensaries on my morning bus ride alone.
it was the smallest on the list but
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
I am hopeful that whatever medical benefits there are can be derived from a pill or something else simple to use (and which hopefully doesn't get people as high)
SKFM, sometimes the objective - the medical objective, related to keeping you alive - is to make you high. I don't how else to say it. If you suffer life-threatening, painful physical trauma and are rushed to the hospital, the doctors and paramedics are going to get you stoned on opium-based drugs, because if they don't you're probably going to end-up toe tagged due to shock.
Getting high is not a bad or evil thing. Getting addicted to being high is a bad thing.
pot is a recreational drug that has only relatively narrow medicinal use. It gets attention because people want to back door it into legality by pretending its about medicinal use. Its disingenuous bullshit like when conservatives want to "educate" women who want an abortion with trans-vaginal guilt trips and non-consensual sermons and claim a medical basis.
Wow. Just... wow.
Nobody is "pretending" anything. Marijuana has several very legitimate medical uses. I would know. So would my wife. Both of us have had cancer.
Is it used recreationally as well? Yes! Absolutely! But the argument that it has no benefit other than gettin' stoned and eating all the Funyuns is so far off the mark, it's literally not the slightest bit amusing. Unless you yourself have gone through chemotherapy and know what it's like to waste away down to 124 lbs. when you're 6 feet tall and still throw up even thinking about eating a small bowl of steamed rice, I suggest you look at some actual studies.
Medical marijuana isn't a fucking joke. Please don't act like everybody who wants medical marijuana to be an option are just losers wanting to toke up. It's incredibly ignorant.
I don't think it's a joke as a concept, but it's sure being applied that way where I live. There is a pot-mart of every corner and every single person I know who smokes obtains their weed that way. None of them have cancer or even severe headaches.
That doesn't mean it shouldn't be legal, but from where I'm sitting the medicinal use thing is mostly bullshit. If most people are gonna lie their way to get it so that a few people benefit medicinally that's just fine.
pot is a recreational drug that has only relatively narrow medicinal use. It gets attention because people want to back door it into legality by pretending its about medicinal use. Its disingenuous bullshit like when conservatives want to "educate" women who want an abortion with trans-vaginal guilt trips and non-consensual sermons and claim a medical basis.
Wow. Just... wow.
Nobody is "pretending" anything. Marijuana has several very legitimate medical uses. I would know. So would my wife. Both of us have had cancer.
Is it used recreationally as well? Yes! Absolutely! But the argument that it has no benefit other than gettin' stoned and eating all the Funyuns is so far off the mark, it's literally not the slightest bit amusing. Unless you yourself have gone through chemotherapy and know what it's like to waste away down to 124 lbs. when you're 6 feet tall and still throw up even thinking about eating a small bowl of steamed rice, I suggest you look at some actual studies.
Medical marijuana isn't a fucking joke. Please don't act like everybody who wants medical marijuana to be an option are just losers wanting to toke up. It's incredibly ignorant.
I don't think it's a joke as a concept, but it's sure being applied that way where I live. There is a pot-mart of every corner and every single person I know who smokes obtains their weed that way. None of them have cancer or even severe headaches.
That doesn't mean it shouldn't be legal, but from where I'm sitting the medicinal use thing is mostly bullshit. If most people are gonna lie their way to get it so that a few people benefit medicinally that's just fine.
I think it should be sold at 7-11 anyway.
The medicinal route was also the path that alcohol took to being legal again after Prohibition. It's the reason you see so many "time to take my medicine" jokes in movies from the '30s when a character drinks. Since I rather enjoy being able to drink a beer with my meal, I'm not going to cry too much about the morality of it all.
Oh, I don't doubt that medical Marijuana has legitimate uses, but I'm pretty sure a majority of people who use it (and want it legalized) are recreational smokers. So from a anti-drug perspective, it makes a lot of sense that these people would use the 'medical' uses to try to get it legalized, even if they don't need it medically.
Unfortunatly, you can't just say, "I want weed legalized because it's a relatively harmless drug that I like smoking" doesn't win hearts and minds. Using cancer patients and the 'medical' uses, or claiming it's part of your 'religion' (like certain groups do), while unethical, works better.
it's really just another 'waiting for enough old people to die' issue. The current patchwork 'prohibition' status of the drug is built on the back of social attitudes substantially formed by reefer madness and reaction to the perceived excesses of youth in the 60s/vietnam era; even when these folks are willing to acknowledge intellectually that marijuana is pretty much safe and non-harmful, they'll stop short of favoring 'extreme' ( :rotate: ) measures like decriminalization because long-term attitudes are tough to change, especially when they're getting reinforced by a few particular lobbies.
I mean, in lots of major cities marijuana is already effectively decriminalized. You have to be trying pretty hard (or be a racial minority, sigh) to get arrested for possession of anything less than a pound here, and I go past two dispensaries on my morning bus ride alone.
There are other problems, not just Old Guard problems, associated with decriminalization. Note that I don't think any of these problems are compelling reasons for keeping it illegal, but they are certainly there:
What happens to the huge number of people that are currently in jail on various drug-related charges? They're all going to want to be let out of jail, right? That is going to be a logistical fucking nightmare for the judicial system.
What about all of the arms of government currently in place more or less just to deal with the War On Drugs? What about all of the associated government and police programs? Not only are at least some of those people now out of a job, somebody is going to have to now explain to the public that, yes, it really was all just a waste of time, money and lives all along. So, who wants to be that guy? Who wants to be the guy shutting down all of the DARE programs and telling everyone that the material within is no longer supported, so it can be tossed?
Again, I think it's important for those people to be able to get out of jail, and I think it's important that we do shut down those programs, but that shit ain't going to be either easy or pretty. It's going to be an ugly mess, and I can only imagine that while it's ongoing people are going to start saying, "...Fuck this. We should've just kept it illegal,"
I am hopeful that whatever medical benefits there are can be derived from a pill or something else simple to use (and which hopefully doesn't get people as high)
SKFM, sometimes the objective - the medical objective, related to keeping you alive - is to make you high. I don't how else to say it. If you suffer life-threatening, painful physical trauma and are rushed to the hospital, the doctors and paramedics are going to get you stoned on opium-based drugs, because if they don't you're probably going to end-up toe tagged due to shock.
Getting high is not a bad or evil thing. Getting addicted to being high is a bad thing.
It seems like medical marihuana would be a poor choice in that circumstance. Opiates are stronger and faster, right? As a general proposition, we try to eliminate the side effect of a high from medications, and the less we are able to do that, the stricter doctors are with that drug. As long as medical marijuana makes people high, it will be last (or at least late) resort drug. Eliminate the high, and it could be a first string drug for spurring appetite or controlling nausea.
I am hopeful that whatever medical benefits there are can be derived from a pill or something else simple to use (and which hopefully doesn't get people as high)
SKFM, sometimes the objective - the medical objective, related to keeping you alive - is to make you high. I don't how else to say it. If you suffer life-threatening, painful physical trauma and are rushed to the hospital, the doctors and paramedics are going to get you stoned on opium-based drugs, because if they don't you're probably going to end-up toe tagged due to shock.
Getting high is not a bad or evil thing. Getting addicted to being high is a bad thing.
It seems like medical marihuana would be a poor choice in that circumstance. Opiates are stronger and faster, right? As a general proposition, we try to eliminate the side effect of a high from medications, and the less we are able to do that, the stricter doctors are with that drug. As long as medical marijuana makes people high, it will be last (or at least late) resort drug. Eliminate the high, and it could be a first string drug for spurring appetite or controlling nausea.
The go-to opiate, morphine, will get you high. While a different molecule, it shares a lot of properties with heroin (also known as diacetylmorphine)
I am hopeful that whatever medical benefits there are can be derived from a pill or something else simple to use (and which hopefully doesn't get people as high)
SKFM, sometimes the objective - the medical objective, related to keeping you alive - is to make you high. I don't how else to say it. If you suffer life-threatening, painful physical trauma and are rushed to the hospital, the doctors and paramedics are going to get you stoned on opium-based drugs, because if they don't you're probably going to end-up toe tagged due to shock.
Getting high is not a bad or evil thing. Getting addicted to being high is a bad thing.
It seems like medical marihuana would be a poor choice in that circumstance. Opiates are stronger and faster, right? As a general proposition, we try to eliminate the side effect of a high from medications, and the less we are able to do that, the stricter doctors are with that drug. As long as medical marijuana makes people high, it will be last (or at least late) resort drug. Eliminate the high, and it could be a first string drug for spurring appetite or controlling nausea.
The go-to opiate, morphine, will get you high. While a different molecule, it shares a lot of properties with heroin (also known as diacetylmorphine)
And we almost exclusively use it in hospital settings, where clarity matters less. Won't marihuana always be inferior as a pain killer to morphine, when used in that type of setting? Seems to make it irrelevant.
I'm hardly an expert in the area, but a few reasons they're not ideal
- opiates are highly addictive leading to potentially severe withdrawals
- they can have some nasty side-effects
- long term use can lead to high tolerance
- allergies, adverse reactions or other contraindications
- they just don't work so well on some people
- difficult to use outside of the hospital
Getting a high from morphine is not a side effect; it is the intended effect. We get you high so you don't feel the pain of your extraordinary trauma. That is the primary function of morphine - getting you stoned. Killing the pain. There is no such thing as a painkiller that does not give you a bit of a high; even something mild like Advil is having a narcotic neurological numbing effect to take away your headache (or mask it). It's just a less extreme high because a headache is not as painful as having your arm shattered.
And we almost exclusively use it in hospital settings, where clarity matters less. Won't marihuana always be inferior as a pain killer to morphine, when used in that type of setting? Seems to make it irrelevant.
No, morphine is not always used in hospital settings. People dealing with chronic pain from an injury, or who are given leave from the hospital while still nursing an injury, are often prescribed morphine or Codeine (which is a derivative drug). And THC is not inferior to morphine when dealing with pain; it's not as potent and not as destructive (and it's cheaper), so it may make more sense in some situations. THC also helps with appetite problems, whereas opium drugs don't.
pot is a recreational drug that has only relatively narrow medicinal use. It gets attention because people want to back door it into legality by pretending its about medicinal use. Its disingenuous bullshit like when conservatives want to "educate" women who want an abortion with trans-vaginal guilt trips and non-consensual sermons and claim a medical basis.
Wow. Just... wow.
Nobody is "pretending" anything. Marijuana has several very legitimate medical uses. I would know. So would my wife. Both of us have had cancer.
Is it used recreationally as well? Yes! Absolutely! But the argument that it has no benefit other than gettin' stoned and eating all the Funyuns is so far off the mark, it's literally not the slightest bit amusing. Unless you yourself have gone through chemotherapy and know what it's like to waste away down to 124 lbs. when you're 6 feet tall and still throw up even thinking about eating a small bowl of steamed rice, I suggest you look at some actual studies.
Medical marijuana isn't a fucking joke. Please don't act like everybody who wants medical marijuana to be an option are just losers wanting to toke up. It's incredibly ignorant.
There aremany many many compounds that have better established and more profound medical use that are not generally available via prescription. It may be due to economic reasons. It may be because the side effects are such that it doesn't get approved. It may be that its still going through trials.
None of those lack of availabilities are treated as an important an issue medical marijuana. My wife is a pediatric nurse. She gives experimental drugs on a daily (or at least work-daily) basis to children who are are otherwise terminal. Many of these kids live because they are given treatment that won't be available to non-research hospitals for years, which will result in a number of children dying. Most are relatively specific cases, and we're talking usually making a 5% 5 year survival more like 50%, so we're probably only talking 50-100 kids a year per treatment. And she's usually only got 2 or 3 going at a time. Of course, some are experimental 10 years after she's been working on the same floor.
And those lack of availabilities, those prohibition of pharmaceutical sales don't make the paper. Any lobbyist group trying to get around the system is derided (correctly) as Big Pharma lobbying. Meanwhile medical marijuana gets a student organization is every college and magically turns everyone on the internet into an expert on biochemistry and psychopharmacology.
She also has on more than one occasion administered dronabinol. It produces superior results for AIDs wasting (effectively how its most commonly used, although not necessarily AIDs) and pain mitigation, chemotherapy based nausea and chronic pain than smoked or non-processed, ingested marijuana. These drugs are available by prescription in the United States, Canada, and across most or all of Europe. They are not controversial because they provide substantially less euphoric effects and have less potential for abuse.
Maybe that's because 20-somethings are really really concerned about nausea during chemo, end of life care, and glaucoma and won't settle for something that medical research says works essentially as well. Maybe this particular substance, above all the other potential treatments deserves the scrutiny it receives, and all the other drugs out there - including experimental cancer drugs and treatments not generally available that have the potential to save someone's life or spare them the suffering of older chemotherapies - need to take a backseat. Or maybe its because people enjoy smoking pot.
I'm all for decriminalization for possession of marijuana. Its not worth the time and resources people put into protesting marijuana laws, let alone to prosecute, try and punish small time violators. But I'm not for pretending its about the suppression of science and medicine, when its about cost-effectiveness and petty crime. If pot didn't make you high, there wouldn't be petitions about legalization topping every White House petition, it would just be an obscure substance with some obscure possible clinical uses.
It can be about all of that stuff. Our national policy on marijuana is so fucking profoundly stupid that it can manage to offend me on a number of policy grounds without one being just a stalking horse for another. It sucks that people can't get medicine, and that a bunch of people are in the criminal system who have no reason to be, and that yeah, I can't occasionally roll a blunt in my backyard if I feel like it (well I probably could, but whatever), or get it without talking to some drug dealer. It isn't somehow disingenuous to talk about one negative aspect of prohibition just because there are other aspects that also concern me and the only reason people even bring that up is to cast aspersions at a subset of activists that I guess they've decided they don't like.
ed:
None of those lack of availabilities are treated as an important an issue medical marijuana
because guess what, it turns out marijuana's clinical effects and side-effects are already pretty well documented and it's just about the cheapest thing to produce in the history of plants (or would be if it were legal to openly grow, anyway.) There isn't much that it has in common with some experimental cancer treatment whose effects are legitimately uncertain and may or may not be toxic.
ed2: I mean the argument here is... what? That all these people who are agitating for marijuana to be legalized should instead be agitating for like, faster progression of experimental drugs to the human trial phase?
Eat it You Nasty Pig. on
it was the smallest on the list but
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
I am hopeful that whatever medical benefits there are can be derived from a pill or something else simple to use (and which hopefully doesn't get people as high)
SKFM, sometimes the objective - the medical objective, related to keeping you alive - is to make you high. I don't how else to say it. If you suffer life-threatening, painful physical trauma and are rushed to the hospital, the doctors and paramedics are going to get you stoned on opium-based drugs, because if they don't you're probably going to end-up toe tagged due to shock.
Getting high is not a bad or evil thing. Getting addicted to being high is a bad thing.
It seems like medical marihuana would be a poor choice in that circumstance. Opiates are stronger and faster, right? As a general proposition, we try to eliminate the side effect of a high from medications, and the less we are able to do that, the stricter doctors are with that drug. As long as medical marijuana makes people high, it will be last (or at least late) resort drug. Eliminate the high, and it could be a first string drug for spurring appetite or controlling nausea.
The go-to opiate, morphine, will get you high. While a different molecule, it shares a lot of properties with heroin (also known as diacetylmorphine)
And we almost exclusively use it in hospital settings, where clarity matters less. Won't marihuana always be inferior as a pain killer to morphine, when used in that type of setting? Seems to make it irrelevant.
Opioids are notoriously bad at controlling neuropathic pain.
I think it's patently obvious that a huge part of the political will behind medical marijuana is just using it as a trojan horse towards decriminalization.
Like muzzmuzz said, "won't somebody think of the poor cancer patients" is better politics than "this drug doesn't hurt me and it makes My Little Pony into a profound experience of anagnorisis."
But there's also a huge intersection between those two groups. A lot of people get into recreational drugs to self-medicate subclinical almost-diseases that aren't quite bad enough to justify full treatment.
Also, one of the huge differences between marijuana versus an experimental cancer drug in a hospital setting is that we don't have to beg a pharmaceutical company to please bring your expensive molecular entity to market; we don't have to risk that a side effect that didn't present itself in clinical trials of sample sizes of 20 will start killing people when the drug is taken by tens or hundreds of thousands of people.
Marijuana is known to be mostly safe, and it can be grown nearly anywhere by nearly anybody. Failing to bring a drug to market hurts people through inaction; to contrast, marijuana prohibition is more like Congress going out of it's way to be a dick to people.
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
She also has on more than one occasion administered dronabinol. It produces superior results for AIDs wasting (effectively how its most commonly used, although not necessarily AIDs) and pain mitigation, chemotherapy based nausea and chronic pain than smoked or non-processed, ingested marijuana. These drugs are available by prescription in the United States, Canada, and across most or all of Europe. They are not controversial because they provide substantially less euphoric effects and have less potential for abuse.
Citation needed?
All of the trials I'm aware of demonstrated that patients experienced much slower symptom relief when using Marinol, and much more severe intoxication (hardly surprising, given that it's just concentrated THC - it's not magically different than the THC in the plants, it's just isolated).
Moreover, none of the CBD or CBC content from, say, a cannabis vaporizer (which is what most patients use) is present in Marinol, and those are the agents responsible for anti-inflammation.
It's more than a bit ridiculous to claim that concentrated THC - arguably the most toxic part of cannabis plants - is perfectly fine, but somehow a vaporizer is not fine. And the reason it's not fine is because God forbid the patient should feel better during treatment.
Posts
Regardless of what they should do, the fact is that they don't recognize that.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
That's your favorite bit on drug regulation? It doesn't even have anything to do with drug regulation. Its about evaluating alternate (or "complimentary") therapy options to patients regarding whether they could potentially provide a benefit to more conventional treatments. It says nothing about legalization, it says existing research does not support claims marijuana is better at treating glaucoma than the wide range of existing treatment options and what would be needed to provide such evidence.
Here's a wider directory These are not from a government organization. Its from a research group.
The AMA, BMA and CMA oppose legalization and prioritize that over increased research that could lead to limited legalization. They do so because pot is a recreational drug that has only relatively narrow medicinal use. It gets attention because people want to back door it into legality by pretending its about medicinal use. Its disingenuous bullshit like when conservatives want to "educate" women who want an abortion with trans-vaginal guilt trips and non-consensual sermons and claim a medical basis.
QEDMF xbl: PantsB G+
Just to be clear, I'm not arguing with you: just speaking to the AMA representatives that are no doubt lurking in this thread, nodding in that Very Serious manner and taking notes.
Come on, guys. Come on. The conservative lawyer is telling you to change the policy. He is white and everything. He is so white, in fact, that he hires a cleaning staff for his home.
God help us if not even this voice can change your mind.
How is that not clear? They say smoked cannabis has some medical properties. They say the state systems suck and don't support proper studies. They say they want to study and develop new cannabinoid synthetic drugs. They say marijuana should be rescheduled so they can do this.
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
I don't want to diminish it. It was a big deal when it was published because it was a huge step forward. Specifically, it opened up physicians to discuss marijuana with their patients without fear of professional sanction, and the official call for more research was important.
But here is the actual AMA policy on medical marijuana, in its entirety. You can retrieve it here: http://www.ama-assn.org/ad-com/polfind/Hlth-Ethics.pdf
I've made no edits to this, except to remove unnecessary line breaks.
(1) Our AMA calls for further adequate and well-controlled studies of marijuana and related cannabinoids in patients who have serious conditions for which preclinical, anecdotal, or controlled evidence suggests possible efficacy and the application of such results to the understanding and treatment of disease.
(2) Our AMA recommends that marijuana be retained in Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act pending the outcome of such studies.
(3) Our AMA urges the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to implement administrative procedures to facilitate grant applications and the conduct of well-designed clinical research into the medical utility of marijuana. This effort should include: a) disseminating specific information for researchers on the development of safeguards for marijuana clinical research protocols and the development of a model informed consent on marijuana for institutional review board evaluation; b) sufficient funding to support such clinical research and access for qualified investigators to adequate supplies of marijuana for clinical research purposes; c) confirming that marijuana of various and consistent strengths and/or placebo will be supplied by the National Institute on Drug Abuse to investigators registered with the Drug Enforcement Agency who are conducting bona fide clinical research studies that receive Food and Drug Administration approval, regardless of whether or not the NIH is the primary source of grant support.
(4) Our AMA believes that the NIH should use its resources and influence to support the development of a smoke-free inhaled delivery system for marijuana or delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) to reduce the health hazards associated with the combustion and inhalation of marijuana.
(5) Our AMA believes that effective patient care requires the free and unfettered exchange of information on treatment alternatives and that discussion of these alternatives between physicians and patients should not subject either party to criminal sanctions. (CSA Rep. 10, I-97; Modified: CSA Rep. 6, A-01)
...
H-95.995 Health Aspects of Marijuana
Our AMA (1) discourages marijuana use, especially by persons vulnerable to the drug's effects and in high-risk situations; (2) supports the determination of the consequences of long-term marijuana use through concentrated research; and (3) supports the modification of state law to reduce the severity of penalties for possession of marijuana. (CSA Rep. D, I-77; Reaffirmed: CLRPD Rep. C, A-89; Reaffirmed: Sunset Report, A-00) H-95.997 Marijuana
Our AMA: (1) recommends personal possession of insignificant amounts of that substance be considered a misdemeanor with commensurate penalties applied; (2) believes a plea of marijuana intoxication not be a defense in any criminal proceedings; and (3) urges that educational efforts be expanded to all segments of the population. (BOT Rep. J, A-72; Reaffirmed: CLRPD Rep. C, A-89; Reaffirmed: Sunset Report, A-00) H-95.998 AMA Policy Statement on Cannabis (Marijuana)
Our AMA believes that
(1) cannabis is a dangerous drug and as such is a public health concern;
(2) sale and possession of marijuana should not be legalized;
(3) handling of offenders should be individualized; and
(4) additional research should be encouraged. (BOT Rep. K, I-69; Reaffirmed: CLRPD Rep. C, A-89; Reaffirmed: Sunset Report, A-00)
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
1) The fact that cannabis is a recreational drug is a political issue, not a scientific or medical issue. It should not be a factor to be considered as far as a test of it's properties go.
2) No, not everyone just want to 'back door' it into legality by pretending it's about medical use. @spacekungfuman , is this why you want it legal? PantsB is basically accusing you of being a druggie.
3) That is the most retarded analogy I've ever read, right up there with, "Well, not everyone who watches a Lexus ad will buy a Lexus, but some will!"
If you were dying of cancer and withering away with no appetite, and you saw that in the next state over people in the same position could at least go on for their last few weeks / months living a relatively normal life by using cannabis to mitigate the symptoms, would that make you mad? Would the arguments about 'narrow applications' ring true or hollow? Yes, some terrible and lazy people want it legal so they can get high after work while they play video games. Some disgusting people use it as an aphrodisiac! Those sickos.
Some people want it so they can at least eat a hamburger and drink a milkshake while their cancer kills them.
I think we should be willing to give the terrible people and the sickos their recreational enhancement drug so that the guy dying of cancer can eat his fucking hamburger.
Yeah, I don't like the idea of recreational use one bit. I accept it as a neccesary evil (but consider it an evil) because prohibition just isn't working.
Now you're making me feel like John Hammond.
I hate smelling it in public. I hate the subculture surrounding it, most of which is totally into 'alternative medicine' and superstitious fuckmuppetry. I hate trying to play League of Legends and getting That Guy on my team who is 'high as fuck right now' and wastes half an hour of leisure time for myself & three other people. All of my experience with users of the drug has been uniformly negative (or, at least, people I knew who were using it on a regular basis).
I agree with the LAWYER. This is not a statement I make lightly.
Aside: the official AMA styling of "Our AMA" is some pretentious idiocy.
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
That makes sense. Yeah, it is pretty pretentious.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Wow. Just... wow.
Nobody is "pretending" anything. Marijuana has several very legitimate medical uses. I would know. So would my wife. Both of us have had cancer.
Is it used recreationally as well? Yes! Absolutely! But the argument that it has no benefit other than gettin' stoned and eating all the Funyuns is so far off the mark, it's literally not the slightest bit amusing. Unless you yourself have gone through chemotherapy and know what it's like to waste away down to 124 lbs. when you're 6 feet tall and still throw up even thinking about eating a small bowl of steamed rice, I suggest you look at some actual studies.
Medical marijuana isn't a fucking joke. Please don't act like everybody who wants medical marijuana to be an option are just losers wanting to toke up. It's incredibly ignorant.
Unfortunatly, you can't just say, "I want weed legalized because it's a relatively harmless drug that I like smoking" doesn't win hearts and minds. Using cancer patients and the 'medical' uses, or claiming it's part of your 'religion' (like certain groups do), while unethical, works better.
WoW
Dear Satan.....
Those aren't narrow indications - they're remarkably broad.
They also happen to be things we have a lot of drugs for. If we were to limit the discussion to only those indications that we don't have already good drugs for, then we're arguably looking at a handful of conditions: neuropathic pain, pain combined with nausea (as with cancer pain), and anorexia.
Neuropathic pain, cancer pain, and anorexia are the most promising avenues for FDA approval of cannabinoids like Sativex. Pharma companies know this; the AMA knows this.
In that way, the approval paths are "narrow." But if by some miracle the DEA weren't to crack down heavily on Sativex prescriptions (which I'm sure they will, as it will almost certainly end up Schedule III) then the off-label uses would be broad.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Also, potentially, the mitigation of onset dementia.
We don't know that one for sure yet, but the initial trials had promising results.
I missed that one. I knew that cannabinoids have some novel neuroprotective effects, but I didn't know there was a trial on humans. Do you have a link?
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
This is the PubMed article.
The work itself was done at Scripps, I believe.
it's really just another 'waiting for enough old people to die' issue. The current patchwork 'prohibition' status of the drug is built on the back of social attitudes substantially formed by reefer madness and reaction to the perceived excesses of youth in the 60s/vietnam era; even when these folks are willing to acknowledge intellectually that marijuana is pretty much safe and non-harmful, they'll stop short of favoring 'extreme' ( :rotate: ) measures like decriminalization because long-term attitudes are tough to change, especially when they're getting reinforced by a few particular lobbies.
I mean, in lots of major cities marijuana is already effectively decriminalized. You have to be trying pretty hard (or be a racial minority, sigh) to get arrested for possession of anything less than a pound here, and I go past two dispensaries on my morning bus ride alone.
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
SKFM, sometimes the objective - the medical objective, related to keeping you alive - is to make you high. I don't how else to say it. If you suffer life-threatening, painful physical trauma and are rushed to the hospital, the doctors and paramedics are going to get you stoned on opium-based drugs, because if they don't you're probably going to end-up toe tagged due to shock.
Getting high is not a bad or evil thing. Getting addicted to being high is a bad thing.
I don't think it's a joke as a concept, but it's sure being applied that way where I live. There is a pot-mart of every corner and every single person I know who smokes obtains their weed that way. None of them have cancer or even severe headaches.
That doesn't mean it shouldn't be legal, but from where I'm sitting the medicinal use thing is mostly bullshit. If most people are gonna lie their way to get it so that a few people benefit medicinally that's just fine.
I think it should be sold at 7-11 anyway.
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
The medicinal route was also the path that alcohol took to being legal again after Prohibition. It's the reason you see so many "time to take my medicine" jokes in movies from the '30s when a character drinks. Since I rather enjoy being able to drink a beer with my meal, I'm not going to cry too much about the morality of it all.
There are other problems, not just Old Guard problems, associated with decriminalization. Note that I don't think any of these problems are compelling reasons for keeping it illegal, but they are certainly there:
What happens to the huge number of people that are currently in jail on various drug-related charges? They're all going to want to be let out of jail, right? That is going to be a logistical fucking nightmare for the judicial system.
What about all of the arms of government currently in place more or less just to deal with the War On Drugs? What about all of the associated government and police programs? Not only are at least some of those people now out of a job, somebody is going to have to now explain to the public that, yes, it really was all just a waste of time, money and lives all along. So, who wants to be that guy? Who wants to be the guy shutting down all of the DARE programs and telling everyone that the material within is no longer supported, so it can be tossed?
Again, I think it's important for those people to be able to get out of jail, and I think it's important that we do shut down those programs, but that shit ain't going to be either easy or pretty. It's going to be an ugly mess, and I can only imagine that while it's ongoing people are going to start saying, "...Fuck this. We should've just kept it illegal,"
It absolutely has.
It's still going to leave quite a few sore spots once we try to remove it.
It seems like medical marihuana would be a poor choice in that circumstance. Opiates are stronger and faster, right? As a general proposition, we try to eliminate the side effect of a high from medications, and the less we are able to do that, the stricter doctors are with that drug. As long as medical marijuana makes people high, it will be last (or at least late) resort drug. Eliminate the high, and it could be a first string drug for spurring appetite or controlling nausea.
The go-to opiate, morphine, will get you high. While a different molecule, it shares a lot of properties with heroin (also known as diacetylmorphine)
And we almost exclusively use it in hospital settings, where clarity matters less. Won't marihuana always be inferior as a pain killer to morphine, when used in that type of setting? Seems to make it irrelevant.
- opiates are highly addictive leading to potentially severe withdrawals
- they can have some nasty side-effects
- long term use can lead to high tolerance
- allergies, adverse reactions or other contraindications
- they just don't work so well on some people
- difficult to use outside of the hospital
Eh, distract DARE by focusing them on other drugs and we all just collectively pretend this "pot is evil" shit never happened.
That seems to be how we humans handle most social changes like this.
Getting a high from morphine is not a side effect; it is the intended effect. We get you high so you don't feel the pain of your extraordinary trauma. That is the primary function of morphine - getting you stoned. Killing the pain. There is no such thing as a painkiller that does not give you a bit of a high; even something mild like Advil is having a narcotic neurological numbing effect to take away your headache (or mask it). It's just a less extreme high because a headache is not as painful as having your arm shattered.
No, morphine is not always used in hospital settings. People dealing with chronic pain from an injury, or who are given leave from the hospital while still nursing an injury, are often prescribed morphine or Codeine (which is a derivative drug). And THC is not inferior to morphine when dealing with pain; it's not as potent and not as destructive (and it's cheaper), so it may make more sense in some situations. THC also helps with appetite problems, whereas opium drugs don't.
There aremany many many compounds that have better established and more profound medical use that are not generally available via prescription. It may be due to economic reasons. It may be because the side effects are such that it doesn't get approved. It may be that its still going through trials.
None of those lack of availabilities are treated as an important an issue medical marijuana. My wife is a pediatric nurse. She gives experimental drugs on a daily (or at least work-daily) basis to children who are are otherwise terminal. Many of these kids live because they are given treatment that won't be available to non-research hospitals for years, which will result in a number of children dying. Most are relatively specific cases, and we're talking usually making a 5% 5 year survival more like 50%, so we're probably only talking 50-100 kids a year per treatment. And she's usually only got 2 or 3 going at a time. Of course, some are experimental 10 years after she's been working on the same floor.
And those lack of availabilities, those prohibition of pharmaceutical sales don't make the paper. Any lobbyist group trying to get around the system is derided (correctly) as Big Pharma lobbying. Meanwhile medical marijuana gets a student organization is every college and magically turns everyone on the internet into an expert on biochemistry and psychopharmacology.
She also has on more than one occasion administered dronabinol. It produces superior results for AIDs wasting (effectively how its most commonly used, although not necessarily AIDs) and pain mitigation, chemotherapy based nausea and chronic pain than smoked or non-processed, ingested marijuana. These drugs are available by prescription in the United States, Canada, and across most or all of Europe. They are not controversial because they provide substantially less euphoric effects and have less potential for abuse.
Maybe that's because 20-somethings are really really concerned about nausea during chemo, end of life care, and glaucoma and won't settle for something that medical research says works essentially as well. Maybe this particular substance, above all the other potential treatments deserves the scrutiny it receives, and all the other drugs out there - including experimental cancer drugs and treatments not generally available that have the potential to save someone's life or spare them the suffering of older chemotherapies - need to take a backseat. Or maybe its because people enjoy smoking pot.
I'm all for decriminalization for possession of marijuana. Its not worth the time and resources people put into protesting marijuana laws, let alone to prosecute, try and punish small time violators. But I'm not for pretending its about the suppression of science and medicine, when its about cost-effectiveness and petty crime. If pot didn't make you high, there wouldn't be petitions about legalization topping every White House petition, it would just be an obscure substance with some obscure possible clinical uses.
QEDMF xbl: PantsB G+
ed:
because guess what, it turns out marijuana's clinical effects and side-effects are already pretty well documented and it's just about the cheapest thing to produce in the history of plants (or would be if it were legal to openly grow, anyway.) There isn't much that it has in common with some experimental cancer treatment whose effects are legitimately uncertain and may or may not be toxic.
ed2: I mean the argument here is... what? That all these people who are agitating for marijuana to be legalized should instead be agitating for like, faster progression of experimental drugs to the human trial phase?
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
Opioids are notoriously bad at controlling neuropathic pain.
Cannabinoids are remarkably good at it.
(You don't have to take it from me.)
Also, opioids can cause nausea, while cannabinoids can relieve it. Hence their usefulness with cancer patients.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Like muzzmuzz said, "won't somebody think of the poor cancer patients" is better politics than "this drug doesn't hurt me and it makes My Little Pony into a profound experience of anagnorisis."
But there's also a huge intersection between those two groups. A lot of people get into recreational drugs to self-medicate subclinical almost-diseases that aren't quite bad enough to justify full treatment.
Also, one of the huge differences between marijuana versus an experimental cancer drug in a hospital setting is that we don't have to beg a pharmaceutical company to please bring your expensive molecular entity to market; we don't have to risk that a side effect that didn't present itself in clinical trials of sample sizes of 20 will start killing people when the drug is taken by tens or hundreds of thousands of people.
Marijuana is known to be mostly safe, and it can be grown nearly anywhere by nearly anybody. Failing to bring a drug to market hurts people through inaction; to contrast, marijuana prohibition is more like Congress going out of it's way to be a dick to people.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Citation needed?
All of the trials I'm aware of demonstrated that patients experienced much slower symptom relief when using Marinol, and much more severe intoxication (hardly surprising, given that it's just concentrated THC - it's not magically different than the THC in the plants, it's just isolated).
Moreover, none of the CBD or CBC content from, say, a cannabis vaporizer (which is what most patients use) is present in Marinol, and those are the agents responsible for anti-inflammation.
It's more than a bit ridiculous to claim that concentrated THC - arguably the most toxic part of cannabis plants - is perfectly fine, but somehow a vaporizer is not fine. And the reason it's not fine is because God forbid the patient should feel better during treatment.