Because its 420, and because Whipped Cream Difficulties has a great post on it.
I think you should totally be able to get drunk, high, stoned, twisted, freaked, and tripping balls at your own home and on your own time, and so long as you don’t bother anybody else, I think that’s totally fine.
What I don’t like is people demanding the repeal of stupid Marijuana laws for “Medical Marijuana” reasons.
I work in the drug industry, I also have been prescribed and taken prescription drugs. On all these medications must have lists of active and inactive ingredients, as well as the concentrations of all, also expiration dates for the ingredients that are relative to degradation studies.
OK now let’s go to the plant side of thing. Go buy a bag of fruit…oranges are in season here right now. Now look at all those fruits, some will be sweeter, some will be riper, some will be juicy others dry, I check each bag because some have rotten or moldy fruit in them. I used to have an apple tree, you’d see the same variations on different fruits from the SAME TREE. And that’s at one time of the year. Ever buy a tomato in the middle of December? They SUCK!
My point? Plants are living things, even with genetic clones like many cultivated plants (such as apples or Marijuana) there will be variations from different parts of the plants, more variation from different plants…even more from different seasons of different farms.
You will never get pharmaceutical-grade regularity from a naturally growing plant. The only way you’ll get pharmasudical grade is to extract the chemical you’re looking for, or synthesize it and made a medicine. Guess what? We already have that!
Sorry, people calling for Medical marijuana are looking to grow pot and sell it for illegal recreational use.
Now I’m not saying marijuana doesn’t have therapeutic effects, it does, but it can’t be prescribed as medicine because it isn’t. The simple solution is make it legal to smoke weed for whatever you want to use it for, and if you want to use it for medicine, do that just like doctors recommend alcohol for medicinal effects. This happens all the time, no prescription, just a medical advisory.
If you want to push something do it honestly, otherwise you’re just as bad as the people who push prohibition by lying.
Medical marijuana doesn’t remove corruption from the system. It just intensifies systematic corruption within the prescription drug process. Seriously. MJ prescriptions for “anxiety” are the medicinal gin drinking of our time.
I’m gonna have some medical gin when I get home.
The thing that gets me, in CO, at least, is they call it medical, but you can’t get it at a pharmacy, you have to go to a special “dispensary.” They’re not even trying to hide the farce.
Well as far as Hippa Laws go, I suspect that you’d have a good case to jail any doctor who writes a script for Marijuana, I imagine that also goes for pharmacists.
1. If aspirin was $2 a pill and prescription only, would you support a ban on the medical use of willow bark? Unregulated use of cinnamon? Nails used to fortify the iron content in apples? Medicine does not need to be pharmaceutically “standardized” to be therapeutic, especially when the effective dose is no where near the harmful dose level.
2. I see “medical marijuana” in the same light as I see state “permission slips” to carry effective self-defense. But permits were instrumental in getting Vermont-carry in several states. Think of this as baby-steps.
3. Prescription drugs are far from hypocrisy free. The number one example is Marinol itself. THC is schedule I, but somehow if you add the sesame seed oil, it gets transformed into this magic substance that is now schedule III (doesn’t need special lockup at the pharmacy and refills are allowed). I’d also like to note all the acid refux drugs that start out as only safe if prescribed by a doctor but instantly become safe for laypersons use as soon as patent protection expires.
4. There are other chemicals in marijuana that are almost certainly helping people manage stuff like Multiple Sclerosis Those other chemicals are not present in the products that make money for Big Pharma
That being said, yes I agree that many supporters of “Medical Marijuana” are pushing their agenda for non medical reasons. I also generally can’t seem to stand the type of people who need to “wake and bake” before they can function in the morning , (and I say that as a person who is throughly addicted to a hot water extract of several plants; and I regularly use that chemical for its mood-altering and cognitive-enhancing properties).
If your aspirin quandry was true, I would say it would be just as stupid to ban willow bark, given that it grows naturally, like Marijuana. I also think its stupid that I can’t grow certain poppy flowers. Bullshit!
I get the idea of incremental steps, but things like carry permits are not claiming something they don’t do…like saying that people taking the training course will be able to shoot guns out of criminals hands, or gain arrest powers. Permitless carry is identical to permitted carry where the transition has occurred. If people wanted to demand permission slips for somebody to buy weed sold in head shops and dispensaries for the purposes of getting high recreationally, awesome, I’m for it….and I’d be for dissolving the permit once the world doesn’t end from the reefer madness. “Medical Marijuana” is never about treatment of disease, its about using drugs.
Yeah the pharma world kinda sucks, I work here, I know it, its a government agency, those only go one way. Still I also do appreciate that I know that my asthma inhaler or my wife’s seizure drugs will be the same formulation and have the same active ingredients and concentrations from bottle-to-bottle until the end of time.
Oh also the conversion from Prescription to OTC is a lot more complicated, but that’s a topic for another day.
As for the treatment of MS, I don’t know much about the true therapeutic uses of marijuana, and I generally stay out of that field because A) The science is REALLY skewed because of the political push to claim it as medicine, or the political push to claim it as some sort of evil toxin that will turn your into a communist zombie. I WILL say if there are chemicals or mixtures of chemicals in marijuana smoke that has therapeutic value they can be isolated, tested, and made into a pharmaceutical drug.
Smoking a joint is NOT an ethical means for delivering a medicine #1 because of the variation in the plants consumed, #2. because the method and conditions of the plant being smoked can really alter the pharmo-kinetics in the body. #3 you’re burning a fucking weed, you’re consuming a massive amount of bizzare chemicals from incomplete combustion and vaporization, which varies greatly depending on the burning conditions, the plant conditions, and the method of smoking.
All that’s well and good for getting a recreational buzz, but its NONSENSE for a dosing regime for a drug in the treatment of disease.
A fun challenge is name another drug that the doctor-approved method of dosing is smoking. Smoking opium tar has similar pharmaceutical effects of taking IV or tablet morphine or other opiates, but we don’t have accident victims toke an opium pipe on the way to the hospital to alleviate pain.
As for the wake-and-bake, this and several other social problems, like people smoking in the car, and dealers selling to minor children would be greatly improved by legalization. I’m addicted to tea as well, but its socially OK to drink tea in the morning…even on my morning commute to work, and my work even supplies FREE tea and coffee to workers! They only supply alcohol on a few special occasions, and its always late in the day, and there is a social understanding that it is for celebration and enjoyment, not for getting severely impaired. My wife’s company had a similar policy, many others do too. There isn’t a problem because there are social norms. There are NO social norms for marijuana use, so its just as taboo to smoke first thing in the morning, or on your lunch brake, or for children to smoke it, as it is to smoke at the end of the day. Illegal is illegal, and there is no OK way to do it.
So there’s my take
Right, we’re actually close enough that it doesn’t even matter.
I work in a code shop. If you are not doing all you care to drink caffeine delivery beverages for your crew, you are probably throwing at least 15 minutes worth of productivity away per person, per day. Anyone want to go with me to Starbucks?
I know vitamins are not drugs, but just about every orange in your bag can ward off scurvy. Here, the prophylactic levels of vitamin C are far far away from the dangerous levels.
I know the other alkaloids in pot have not been proven to be safe and effective in treating anything, but that does not mean its not an valid therapy when dealt with on a case by case basis. That’s why a doctor’s office is called a “practice”. That’s why a doctor can prescribe drugs, (and gin), “off label” for an individual.
Also, plenty of people dope themselves with hash oil, or consume medical marijuana in other ways outside of smoking, by using a tincture or something.
I don’t like how they claim it’s a cure-all for just about everything under the sun. They’ll have a huge list for all the maladies you can think of, and then at the bottom it’ll say “…and generalized pain.”
Uh huh, generalized pain.
Like you, I think that so long as you are doing no harm to others, it is nobody’s business. I was talking to a coworker who is a huge pothead, but I told him the problem I had (with him) was that he drives stoned. He insisted that driving stoned has no bearing on reaction time whatsoever. “I drive better stoned than you do stone sober, man!”
Uh huh.
Its a depressant, of course it dulls pain. So does a Martini, but my doctor won’t write me a prescription so I can pull out the shaker on my lunch break just because I have a twisted ankle.
Yeah it dulls pain, yeah it can fight nausea, yeah it might help other things….but its smoke that gets you stoned, that’s why you want it. Alcohol does all sorts of good therapies too…its not why I have a liquor cabinet, or why I drink 40s!
You want to get high, I get it. Don’t blow *pot* smoke up my ass!
Incidentally, during prohibition, plenty of doctors wrote plenty of Rx for plenty of booze.
And go search-fu for this sometime: hadacol prohibition
It appears that you have irked the masses…
Totally agree 100% with your post. I live in a state that allows medical marijuana, and I swear there are more pot shops than legitimate pharmacies. I’ve also seen people heading into one at 11 PM on a weekend.
It seems to be run like gun control, they parade around a few cancer or AIDS patients who claim the Green Lady is their one salvation.
But it seems that all the others, may have various ailments from cancer to arthritis, to anxiety, but it seems they’re always selling, sharing, or adding to their “medication”, and lord knows how up-and-up the dispensaries are being run. Certainly as mentioned above you’ll never see a trained pharmacist in there…unless he’s looking to score a dime bag.
In Maine there are permits to GROW your own. Can you imagine the FDA allowing my wife to fabricate her own medicine? Also seems that many of those growing people seem to exceed their plants, and tend to be of the sharing kind.
Again none of this would be an issue if it was legal to smoke pot to get high….but that is still illegal, and “Bad” by our legal system. What they are SUPPOSED to be doing is smoking to treat disease, which is bullshit.
Pingback: Interesting Referendums | Weer'd World