Marijuana Not Just For Stoners Anymore :: Local News and Newspapers

Marijuana Not Just For Stoners Anymore

July 15, 2008

Weeding Out The Highs Of Medical Marijuana

ScienceDaily (July 15, 2008) — Research exploring new ways of exploiting the full medicinal uses of cannabis while avoiding unwanted side-effects will be presented to pharmacologists on July 15 by scientists attending the Federation of European Pharmacological Societies Congress, EPHAR 2008.

For a second time today I am posting a pot related story, which only goes to prove that any smoking I might have done in my youth has not hampered my long term productivity or ambition. There is a down side to too much pot for sure. There is a down side to almost anything we put in our body in excessive quantities. From cannabis to carbs, pot to protein, THC to trans fat, they all have down sides. The government funds and encourages hundreds of studies a year to the tune of billions of dollars to tell us over and over again junk food, lack of exercise, not believing in god, not believing the president is god, or the economy isn’t that bad because people aren’t jumping out of skyscrapers on the account of their electric bill. What the US government refuses to spend money on is pot might have some beneficial effects.

I am not talking about legalizing it, even though I think that is a good idea too. I talking about just pure clinical research to back up the claims that pot has a benefits besides that happy feeling you get before grim creeper sets in. We have lots of anecdotal evidence from many medicinal users. We have studies done in other countries with respectable medical credentials. What we refuse to do is allow clinical experimentation, the development of medications that don’t have to be smoked, or even admit the real reasons it was banned in the first place.

Why do we still not accept their might be some benefit to it? The so far right that they are fringe elements of the extremely radical left would have a field day with it. If pot might have some benefit, they would have to let go of the very old notion that it was bad and accept they banned it because it was preferred by minorities to the bastion of American economics, tobacco. They might also have to accept J. Edgar Hoover wanted it banned so he could arrest and harass more “subversives” who admittedly preferred it for its non medicinal uses.

What evidence do they base this ban on? The evidence that always gets brought up as the gold standard by the anti-pot crowd was done in the 1970’s. They put a rat in box, piped in huge quantities of pot smoke. When the rat was dead they declared pot is bad, and had a dead rat as evidence to back it up. Of course the necropsy didn’t reveal any sort of poisoning from the pot, it showed the rat died of suffocation. When you lock a living creature in a box and then replace the breathable air with smoke suffocation is a forgone conclusion. That study was rigged to prove a predetermined government position, just like the few that have been done since to counter Canadian, European, and Japanese studies that all show benefits of pot.

Whether we are still kowtowing to big tobacco or just pandering to the fear mongers the evidence does exist that marijuana has beneficial effects does exist. We don’t have to stick our head into a cloud of smoke simply to pull our head out of the sands, so we might as well let the truth present itself for what it is worth.