Probably because the pro-cannabis lobbies of the past several decades have put most of their efforts into promoting legalization as a source of tax revenues. “Take that cash out of the hands of organized crime and use it to fund the hungry, runaway goblinment machine!”
I’d rather just grow my own. All of these frequent posts about cannabis frustratingly remind me that it’s been like 10 years since I’ve had any.
With all due respect, alcohol kills roughly 50K people a year from it’s direct health effects, and far more than that from indirect effects (alcohol-related accidents and violence). Tobacco kills hundreds of thousands per year. Do you really want to be comparing cannabis (global historic death toll: ZERO) to those?
That “a lot of people consider marijuana smoking a vice” is not a reason to base policy on that pernicious lie, or to extort more money from our citizens for using this powerful healing herb. Cannabis, in the words of the 1988 DEA legal ruling, is “one of the safest therapeutically active substances known to man,” and “safer than many foods we commonly consume.”
Decades of government propaganda and lies have made even supporters believe the lie that cannabis is nothing more than a “fun drug” that should be taxed. But it is a Big Lie that should be firmly rebutted. Cannabis has been shown by science and anecdote to be a completely safe and effective treatment for literally hundreds of medical conditions, mental and physical, large and small. Cannabis represents an existential threat to whole classes of pharmaceuticals, from the toxic painkillers women take to treat PMS to ADHD drugs (speed) to opiate painkillers…the list goes on and on and on.
You are unfortunately correct about that. Many of the top activists for medical cannabis have sold out the patients they claim to represent. The leader of one of the major organizations told my colleague and me to our faces that they opposed ALL taxation of medical cannabis. Then they betrayed us and supported taxation.
Taxes never go down, only UP.
A San Jose City Councilman told us he wanted cannabis taxes there capped at 3%. It’s currently 10% (plus the city’s 8.75% sales tax). That’s 18.75% tax on medicine for patients who often have to choose between food and medicine in the first place. Disgusting.
I agree that the extent of the taxation is ludicrous. But unfortunately, in these stuffy times, making cannabis sound like billions of “free money” through taxes might be the only reason the prohibition shows signs of ending. Even if this only prevents lives from being destroyed through the “justice system” it is still worthwhile.
FWIW, I am in no way opposed to taxes on general principle - provided that I trust the government who is using them, to be supporting citizens and infrastructure with the money instead of pissing it away on things which make life worse.
I was pointing out why the government is taxing cannabis.
And I’d love to see the thousands of studies done to show it’s useful for, as you say, hundreds of maladies.
Anecdote is nice and all, but a study here and there with an n=12 showing it’s good for ADHD isn’t very convincing to me.
I’ll grant that it has its uses. It’s wonderful for nausea management, and helping with appetite. It’s good for pain, and there’s interesting evidence for cannabinoids helping with epilepsy. And it obviously helps with sleep problems.
But there’s also a ton of crap assumptions made around what it can do, extrapolating from in vitro research, which is a big mistake.
I smoke weed pretty often. I’m not lying to anyone. You’re on a crusade and I’d like to see the evidence on the hundreds of things it supposedly treats. All previous panaceas have been bullshit, I don’t see any reason to assume weed is a real one.
And in anycase, high quality double blinded placebo controlled trials on the usefulness of weed are still pretty slim. I’m just jazzed that legalization can allow us to finally do some good research with decent population sizes and controlled dosages and consistent product.
The serotonergic analgesia effect of cannabis seems to be central to much of its lauded benefits and there are many papers floating around.
I agree that studies with high (ahem) participation rates across many boundaries are required for proper scientific development, probably leading to some super effective, narrow scope treatments but the thing as it is right from the ground is pretty damn effective on its own.
At what point does an overwhelming surfeit of anecdotal evidence become useful in determining its usefulness?
We should be mining the troves of anecdotal data to determine which strains to investigate for treatment of specific maladies based on the choices people are making given their own experimentation and what they already find useful.
For scientific studies, start here:
http://www.cannabis-med.org/studies/study.php
http://medicalmarijuana.procon.org/view.resource.php?resourceID=000884
And here’s a good beginner’s guide to the human endocannabinoid system:
http://reset.me/story/beginners-guide-to-the-endocannabinoid-system/
Of course, research on humans has been actively (and illegally) suppressed by the U.S. government for decades so we shouldn’t be surprised at the paucity of “high quality double blinded placebo controlled trials” on humans. I know a lot of patients and have seen many miracles, including:
A woman with horrible liver spots spread all over her body and face had them begin to decline within 24 hours of beginning to use a topical cannabis cream (enough so her husband asked her, “What are you taking?”). With 30 days of using the cream the spots (many were several inches wide) had decreased to almost nothing and surrounding scar tissue was healing up.
Diabetics (more than one) who drastically reduced their insulin requirements when they started using cannabis (which seems to regulate blood sugar)
Patients with chronic pain (lots and lots of them!) who reduced or eliminated pharmaceutical painkillers when cannabis proved to be safer and more effective
Patients with ADHD who weaned themselves off legal speed (Ritalin & other pharma drugs) by using cannabis
Patients (lots and lots of them) who treat anxiety and/or depression with cannabis
Yeah, yeah, anecdotes do not equal data, blah blah blah. When you actively suppress science, anecdotes (tens of thousands of them) are the only data we have to work with. And the anecdotal data is extremely compelling.
That third link is far below my standards as evidence for anything, seeing as it cites exactly zero sources, and appears on a website that promotes such quack remedies as reflexology, and acupuncture. It also mischaracterizes synthetic cannabinoids as “less potent than endocannabinoids and phytocannabinoids”, which is clearly false if you’ve read anything about or ever used JWH-018 or CP 47,497 or HU-210. Those three synthetic analogs/homologs/derivatives of classical THC are dozens to hundreds of times more potent than THC.
But that’s rather unsurprising to me, as I’ve noticed a prevalent bias toward the Naturalistic Fallacy and chemophobia among the strongest proponents of medical use of cannabis. Which isn’t to say that the plant has no value as medicine. Just that a lot of people who support its use don’t seem to be very interested in good epistemology. They can be right on some claims and wrong on others, as can I.
But your first two links are quite useful and I appreciate the introduction to the literature, and will be reading much further into the studies available.
Local libraries kick ass. Because of my local library I’m able to actually read most of these papers without having to shell out hundreds of dollars for access to the journals they’re in.
If you’d like, I could go over several more problems with the reset.me article, but instead, I’ll offer an article from ScienceBasedMedicine.org that is a much better Cannabis 101 that includes references and discusses clinical effects rather than being mostly a screed about how the man is keeping us down. (which is still a fair argument, since, you know, the DEA. But still, SBM is looking for reliable, replicable science rather than proclaiming panacea.)
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
