EVIDENCE FOR MEDICAL CANNABIS

A recent post was on a recent New York Times article on medical cannabis, which reported that there was great difficulty in getting medical cannabis but belittled the concept through ignorace, as if there were no evidence of cannabis' efficiency. Obviously, the reporter did not read Hemp for Victory or, it seems, any other book on the subject, or he would have noted that cannabis has been noted since early times as a useful remedy for ailments; early Chinese pharmacopeia such as the Pen T'sao Kang Mu start what is a long record of man's successfu use of the drug. The NYT conveniently does not mention Elvy Musikka, the Florida woman who won her case in court when she testified that cannabis alleviated the symptoms of glaucoma. In that same state, however, Kenneth and Barbara Jenkes, both of whom were AIDS patients, which they initially contacted when Kenneth, a haemophiliac, was given a tainted trasfusion, were prosecuted by the state for their use of cannabis. Some readers on would prefer I not mention that in that same state people by the name of Bush got away with possession of cocaine, but, as Oprah Winfrey would say, let's not go there...and indeed she, and many other overpaid media types, do not. They leave this to the desperate citizens of the land to fend for themselves.

Some in the legal system are not so blind; Judge Francis Young of the DEA in 1988 made the following ruling:

The evidence in this record shows that marijuana has been accepted of capable of relieving the distress of great numbers of very ill people and in doing so with safety under medical supervision. It would be unreasonable, arbitrary and capricious of the DEA to stand between those sufferers and the benfits of this substance in this record. The administrative law judge rerommends that the DEA Administrator conclude that the marijuana plant considered as a whole has a currently accepted medicinal use in treatment in the United States.

DEA Adminstrator John Lawn ignored this in 1989. So has Oprah, the NYT, the DEA and many other entities. The band played on, and the voice of reason was drowned, the press tuned out, and the pharmaceutical companies cashed in.