High-Ranking Idiot and Laughingstock Chuck Rosenberg Declares Medical Marijuana "A Joke"

wrath
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From [Vox][1]:

“What really bothers me is the notion that marijuana is also medicinal — because it’s not,” Rosenberg told reporters, according to CBS News. “We can have an intellectually honest debate about whether we should legalize something that is bad and dangerous, but don’t call it medicine — that is a joke.”

This pisses me off. I have smoked less pot than Jeb Bush (claims to) and this pisses me off. Law enforcement should 100%, not. Ever. In a million election cycles. Over the course of the entirety of human history. Across multiple dimensions and spanning the infinite variations of time and space: Weigh in on scientific issues. Not with any legal force.

This is how it’s supposed to work: You let scientists figure this shit out, then you can apply it to policy. If scientists change their consensus based on emerging evidence, then you have to adjust.

In reality, the DEA by law, gets to decide if a substance merits its scheduling. Not a panel of scientists, not the CDC or NIH, the motherfucking DEA.

For those who don’t understand the pipeline of drug research, natural products are HUGE. A significant proportion of our medicines come from either using a substance normally synthesized by nature or from adapting an existing natural structure. So in theory, human biologists, doctors, and medicinal chemists will all get together and see something like THC, then try to adjust it so that they can get the desired effects and eliminate the others. So that people who take it medicinally can operate heavy machinery, for instance.

The way that it works with Schedule I drugs, however, is different. The DEA gets to decide if scientists are allowed to work with it. You are literally, by law, prohibited from carrying out research on the marijuana plant to first understand the physiological mechanisms that make it work, unless you succeed at the [lengthy review process][2] that ultimately stifles research efforts.

In the meantime we’re locking people up for something that is demonstrably more benign than alcohol abuse. I bet Rosenberg even sleeps well at night. Bastard.
[1]: DEA chief: medical marijuana is "a joke." Science: no, it's not. - Vox
[2]: Medical Marijuana Research Hits Wall of U.S. Law - The New York Times

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Thank you! this is an excellent and important rant! I can’t agree more.

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Well, cannabis has definitely inspired some fits of laughter.

But this character is setting themselves up when, in the same sentence, they refer to “intellectually honest debate” while working from an unfounded definition of the thing debated as “bad and dangerous”. They might as well put a blinking neon sign on themselves that advertises “BIAS”. I wonder if most scientists would sooner laugh a cannabis, or Chuck Rosenberg?

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Tried weed for the first time in my 30s, and my first question, while high, was, “this? This is illegal? You gotta be fucken kidding me.”

I remain absolutely dumbfounded that weed is illegal, especially in the face of numerous friends, associates, and family, who regularly get bombed on alcohol and then suffer the associated effects.

Every time I hear about a library that’s closed due to lack of funds, or social services being cut due to “budgetary concerns”, I wonder how much of my tax dollars were spent in that one day alone by the DEA and related agencies.

If anything, every day Colorado allows its residents to act like the adults we’re supposedly allowed to be is another day that the stigma and myths surrounding weed dies a happy, munchy life.

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I’ll be buggered if I can find it, but…
Alice Dreger (I think) posted this really interesting thing about pain management with opioids. Basically, the gist was that opioids don’t reduce the pain you’re feeling, they just make you care about it less. But they come with some serious risks.
Pot? Does the same thing, and carries virtually none of the risks. So. Yeah.

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Here’s to you guys. I’m going outside for a minute.

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pot smoker here… the guys a blow hart… couldn’t read past the first couple of lines… just too damn stoned…

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So, by his objection to bad and dangerous things one can assume that he’s proposing banning alcohol and cigarettes? Given that they are both much, much, much, more toxic than marijuana?

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About a lab I used to work at:

http://sydney.edu.au/news/84.html?newsstoryid=15109

Excerpt:

[quote]A $33.7 million gift to the University of Sydney places Australia at the forefront of medicinal cannabinoid research.

“Our vision is to make Australia a world-leader in researching how to realise the powerful medicinal potential of the cannabis plant,” said Barry Lambert, who together with his wife Joy, has funded the Lambert Initiative.

"The experience of our granddaughter, who suffers debilitating epilepsy, has opened our eyes to the extraordinary possibility of cannabinoids treating not only her condition but a range of chronic illnesses that often don’t respond to conventional treatments.

“We believe this investment in the future of Australian science and medicine will provide the much-needed evidence to rapidly advance the use of medicinal cannabinoids in the treatment of childhood epilepsy and other serious illnesses.”

The donation is the largest gift ever made to research at the University of Sydney.[/quote]

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Liked. :purple_heart:

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