Circular logic. It’s one of the hallmarks of drug war ideology. “Marijuana is bad!” Well, why is it so bad? “Because it is illegal!” Why is it illegal? “Because it is bad!”
The medical marijuana movement has dealt a crippling blow to the status quo of drug war ideology. When someone sees someone like Montel Williams speak to how marijuana alleviates the excruciating pain in his legs from multiple sclerosis, or when a harmless little old lady can now see thanks to marijuana easing her glaucoma, or when a cancer patient undergoing chemotherapy can finally work up an appetite and keep their food down thanks to smoking a joint, it forces the DEA to ask, “which do you believe: the propaganda we’re feeding you or your own lyin’ eyes?”
The latest circular logic comes from Arlington, VA. “Marijuana has no medicinal value,” the DEA says, “and there’s no science to prove that it does.” (Despite the fact that there is plenty of science to prove marijuana’s medical benefit, despite the fact that 37 states have resolutions on the books testifying to marijuana’s medicinal properties, and despite the fact that ten states’ citizens or legislatures have crafted laws governing the medicinal use of marijuana.) So researchers ask the government’s permission to actually grow and test the medicinal properties of high-grade marijuana, and the government says, “No, you can’t have the marijuana because it is a dangerous drug.” In other words, the science doesn’t exist to support medical marijuana, but they refuse to let the scientists produce any science that would end the argument once and for all.
(Sacramento Bee) After years of delay, the DEA’s administrative law judge is being asked to help overturn the agency’s rejection of a marijuana researcher’s application first filed in 2001. University of Massachusetts plant physiologist Lyle Craker had sought approval to grow 25 pounds.
“We (look) at marijuana as we would do any other medicinal plant,” Craker testified.
“We’re the only people in America who can’t get 10 grams of marijuana,” research advocate Rick Doblin testified Wednesday.
“We’re not doing marijuana research because we can’t seem to get marijuana,” said Doblin, head of the nonprofit Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, “so we’re spending money on litigation.”
The most maddening thing about this is that US Government has, by its actions, already admitted that there is a medicinal use for marijuana. In the 1960’s the US instituted the Government Pot Farm at the University of Mississippi, and has for over thirty years now supplied government-grown-and-rolled joints to a handful of patients.
Robert Randall… the 49-year-old glaucoma sufferer… receives his provisions under NIDA’s Marijuana Project, a little-known federal program established in the 1960s to grow marijuana for research purposes. After learning about the government’s hidden stash in 1975, Randall sued for access and became its first recipient. Soon after, he received his first shipment, paving the way for 13 others. Although the program has been closed to new applicants since 1992, it is still providing a ready supply of U.S.-approved reefer for its eight surviving patients.
When Randall was diagnosed with glaucoma in 1972, at the age of 24, doctors told him that he would be blind within five years. More than two decades and countless joints later, Randall, a former college instructor living in Sarasota, Florida, says he now sees as well as he did on that dark morning in 1972. “Marijuana is clearly helpful in ways other drugs are not,” insists Randall, who receives approximately $25,000 worth of pot a year. Indeed, research gathered by scientists such as Dr. Lester Grinspoon at Harvard Medical School suggests that marijuana can help combat any number of ailments, including epilepsy , multiple sclerosis, migraine headaches, menstrual cramps, and depression, in addition to nausea resulting from chemotherapy and AIDS treatments. “There is a mountain of evidence supporting marijuana’s medical benefits,” says Grinspoon. “It is foolish to ignore it.”
So, the government still runs a program to produce this material with “no currently accepted medical use in treatment in the United States” to seven surviving patients… for what reason, exactly?
Ironically, the government even cites the federal pot farm as reason why the researchers don’t need to have their applications for marijuana research approved:
Craker said the limited marijuana now grown under federal supervision at a 12-acre University of Mississippi site is weak and filled with stems and seeds. Craker, the editor of the Journal of Herbs, Spices and Medicinal Plants, said his more potent pot would help test new vaporizers as a healthier means for patients to ingest the smoke.
Drug enforcement officials reply that the University of Mississippi’s inventory already contains some 1,500 kilograms of marijuana. Officials say that stash, combined with rolling machines that can crank out 1,000 marijuana cigarettes every minute, can more than meet existing research needs for a drug the government considers dangerous.
You’d have to be stoned to believe such idiotic circular logic.
