Kevin Sabet Is Now Against Vaporization
Kevin Sabet, the nation’s leading anti-marijuana legalization voice and head of Project SAM, an organization dedicated to promoting a kinder, gentler drug war, held an “Ask Me Anything” (AMA) on the popular social network Reddit yesterday. (You can read the entire thing here at rad-r.us/SabetAMA.) Among the interesting bits of rhetoric was something we’ve not heard from him before: opposition to cannabis vaporization for medical users.
A reader asked Sabet his opinion of the recently passed Connecticut medical marijuana regulations and what did Sabet feel were the most important points a medical marijuana law should include. Sabet’s answer was, “Keep it for cancer, MS, AIDS, epileptic patients only. And have it be nonsmoked. No need to smoke/vape/eat it.”
Ignore for a moment that eating cannabis is a non-smoked form. This marks the first time we’ve seen Sabet oppose the vaporization of cannabis. Sabet’s opposition to smoked marijuana can be found all throughout his writings and within the pages of the Project SAM website he heads. Indeed, the American Medical Association and other medical groups have long opposed the smoking of medical cannabis, as introducing smoke into the lungs does cause some harm. This is why many medical cannabis doctors promote the vaporization of cannabis and its extracts, which heats the medical cannabinoids to vaporization temperature without burning any plant material – inhaling medicine without any smoke.
Note also that in this answer, Sabet seems to approve of medical marijuana laws for cancer, multiple sclerosis, HIV/AIDS, and epilepsy, just so long as nobody is using cannabis in its raw plant form. Sabet and the rehabitionists have a tough tightrope to walk now that mainstream America has met that little epileptic girl, Charlotte Figi, in the Dr. Sanjay Gupta special “Weed” documentary. Sabet can’t afford to be unsympathetic to the remarkable recovery of a little girl when so much of his propaganda is based on protecting the children, so he hypes the fact she’s using a CBD-rich extract that causes no “high”, hoping you’ll forget he supports the arrest and jailing of the brothers growing her Charlotte’s Web CBD-rich plants.
The longer you follow Sabet and the rehabitionists, the more you discover their strategy is to forestall the use of raw plant cannabis in favor of compounds and extracts of cannabis that can be patented, marked-up, and sold at profit. It’s not the “high” – they approve of Marinol and it will mess you up. It’s not the smoking – they don’t argue for illegal tobacco. It’s not the danger – they don’t argue for illegal alcohol. It’s the paradigm of medicine for profit Sabet and his ilk are fighting to protect.
