I just googled âcake feetâ to see whether this was some kind of insult I was unaware of.
It turned out there was something I was quite unaware of.
Hey, or even better, link the ballot measure. I understand it was a pia to find, but the devil is in the details.
Add: People with chronic pain.
Just fucking legalize it already. The ban is exhausting, pointless, and expensive. Hell, make legal for people eighteen and up. This isnât alcohol. Weâre not looking at the prospect of thousands of marijuana deaths.
ETA: And while weâre at it, ease up on taxes. This is an idiotic morality tax. Itâs not like alcohol or tobacco in creating new social costs. If itâs the price we have to pay because of stupid California property tax freezes, and to get the reticent on board, fine. But the next objective is to eliminate that tax.
This is the one indication for medical cannabis that has very solid research to back it up. And we badly need a non-opioid pain medication. Not just because of opioidsâ adverse side effects (constipation being a prime example) but also because opioids fail to alleviate certain types of pain such as neuralgia (for which cannabinoids* have proven much more effective than opioids).
*Yet another reason to use the term cannabis rather than âpotâ or âweedâ.
In a recent cover article for C&En (signs the times are a changingâ), the speculation was that cannibidiols alone are most likely to undergo a federal rescheduling. â9-THC and other cannabinoids are unlikely to see the same reclassification, unfortunately. But at least people are taking notice that a rescheduling is in order. Unfortunately the only moral question being asked seems to be, âDoes this make people feel funny? Yes? BAN IT!â Rather than âCould this help people?â And, âWhy would we care if people felt a little goofy?â
Exactly. No one questions opioids, whose euphoric effects are so reinforcing that we have an entire industry devoted to helping its addicts quit them.
Unfortunately weâre getting ridiculous about this too. I live with someone who takes them for severe chronic pain, and between insurance companies and the DEA hungry to nail pain docs, itâs starting to get bad. The drugs are effective, he hasnât developed an abuse problem, and yet the DEA is clamoring to monitor and intervene in cases like his. Why? Because people sometimes take them to get a high. Whoop-de-do. I get that it can results in problems for people, but hassling pain patients and their physicians is a shitty way of addressing those problems.
Cannabis (pps 56-57)
Drug Enforcement Agency Ruling (1988)
4. Nearly all medicines have toxic, potentially lethal
effects. But marijuana is not such a substance. There is no record in
the extensive medical literature describing a proven, documented
cannabis-induced fatality.
5. This is a remarkable statement. First, the record on
marijuana encompasses 5,000 years of human experience. Second, marijuana
is now used daily by enormous numbers of people throughout the world.
Estimates suggest that from twenty million to fifty million Americans
routinely, albeit illegally, smoke marijuana without the benefit of
direct medical supervision. Yet, despite this long history of use and
the extraordinarily high numbers of social smokers, there are simply no
credible medical reports to suggest that consuming marijuana has caused a
single death.
_ 6. By contrast aspirin, a commonly used, over-the-counter_
medicine, causes hundreds of deaths each year.
It would be nice if myâŚuhâŚfriendâŚyeahâŚdidnât have to renew his medical card every year.
Still not sure what youâre getting at. All sorts of things can be allergensâincluding cannabis.
I canât recall how many times Iâve read from BBers with chronic pain say they donât want to take opioid medication. Youâll hear the same thing from people prescribed benzodiazepines for their otherwise intractable anxiety. People prescribed amphetamine-based medications for otherwise crippling ADHD or narcolepsy. Itâs not a high for them. Itâs just a way to get them up to baseline functioning.
One of my former psychiatrists gave me what might be the single most important piece of advice for anyone taking psych meds: evaluate the med on outcome, not subjective experience. But this could easily apply to pain relief meds, too. Many people taking opioid medications report a reduction in pain sufficient to function in their everyday lives, and this, not the pain relief, is the ultimate goal.
Nods emphatically
Weed works for me, but I canât get it. And after my last experience with quacks, Iâm not in a hurry to trust them again and even then pills donât work all that well and the side-effects are often worse than the problems. Still, at least no-ones having fun, right.
All those years? Other than a couple of puffs over 20 years ago, I only started enjoying more regularly in the last year. While I appreciate and would be happy to thank profusely those that took risks keeping it available through the dark ages, they were compensated, at black market levels, for their efforts. I donât owe them a damn thing monetarily, but I would love to give them my future business.
If you write out in two columns the pros and cons of legalization, itâs not even close⌠violence, murder, corruption in the justice system, gutting civil liberties, racist effects, vs⌠making a little less profit in exchange for not having to hide from the police? Is it even a serious question?
Hmm, thanks for that, Snowlark. Thatâs a new one with me. As always, with clickbait headlines like this it pays to read a bit deeper. While cannabis seems to be a mild allergen in a small number of people the idea that anyone can be âdeathlyâ allergic is pure bullshit. If it werenât, we would have seen at least ONE cannabis fatality from allergies in the last 5,000 years â or certainly one at least in Colorado, where cannabis is widely legally available.
Perusing the actual paper, I note they mostly tested for allergic sensitivity to cannabis through the use of a skin test, which doesnât tell whether any of the people with positive responses had reactions to actual ingested cannabis. They also note a number of cases where the allergen is to either âindustrial hemp dust,â external mold, or other factors only tangentially related to cannabis as it is generally consumed (smoked, vaporized or eaten).
This Colorado allergist says:
Although I appreciated the fine review by Ocampo and Rans entitled Cannabis Sativa: The Unconventional âWeedâ Allergen, I thought it would be worthwhile to describe the few adverse reactions seen in our patient population. The relative paucity of these presentations since legalization of marijuana in Colorado suggests that cannabis sativa is a mild allergen, with significant exposure required to elicit respiratory and dermatologic allergic reactions.
As a more general point, research into cannabis has been heavily suppressed for many decades; any research funded either directly or indirectly by any government body pretty much has to be anti-cannabis in order to move forward. So research using actual cannabis to test its efficacy for, say, asthma, will never get approved while that showing how âdeadlyâ it is gets the green light. I donât know who funded this particular research; the authors say they have âNothing to discloseâ but the two editors both received money from pharmaceutical companies. This particular research has the following mysterious disclaimer at the bottom:
Disclaimer: The opinions or assertions herein are the private views of the authors and are not to be construed as reflecting the views of the Department of the Air Force or the Department of Defense. No unapproved or investigative use of a product or device is discussed.
Fair enough. Sounds like you know this topic well. But point taken. I got lazy this time; usually I do read the original sources, whether the topic is familiar to me or not.
What sort of feedback are you getting from cannabis reform opponents with this particular argument?
You should have a conversation with my grocery store, where I pay 2% tax for strawberries and 7.25%(?) percent for peanuts. 
Iâd love to compare it to my stateâs vice tax for liquor but that was designed by people who were fired from the IRS for being excessively bureaucratic (a joke at the 1040EZ form and how âEZâ it is) and it doesnât seem to be possible to make a meaningful comparison percentage-wise.
My state doesnât tax prescriptions (since we have a food tax, I was surprised to hear this ⌠50th in the nation, yâall). Iâm sure we would tax prescription cannabis if we had it. To cover the administrative overhead which wouldnât be going through already-FDA-regulated pharmacies ⌠and to bolster the schools we stopped paying for once we got a lottery.
Is it fair? Nope. Totally with you there.
Does it need to be 18%? Almost definitely not. Like with everything else in US society, it has a disproportionately bad effect on the poor. Does something need to be there to defray the state administrative costs while the Fed drags its heels? Yup.
You basic sentiments are correct of course, but I disagree with your conclusion (to vote no). The war on drugs is such a deeply destructive problem that I consider it wrong to allow the perfect to be the enemy of the better.
If I had my druthers, laws against drugs would be repealed and, generally speaking, replaced with absolutely nothing. But we live in a society in which âunregulatedâ is used as a scare word, and Americans are simply too fearful (and politicians to unwilling to give up power) to allow that much freedom. The initiative was crafted to try to appease the ignorant pants-wetters, without whom it would be very difficult to pass. Is the initiative you linked to better? Probably, but it doesnât matter because it wouldnât pass, and as you say initiatives need million dollar backers. Which this one has. If Ed Rosenthalâs shows up on the ballot, Iâll vote in favor of that one too. Whatever gets the job done.
One of the big disappointments of my lifetime is seeing the push for legalization go from issues of personal freedom, hypocrisy vis a vis alcohol, and the pointless harms of prohibition, to âOh look! A big pile of tax money!â
