TAMPA, Fla. (AP) — Olympic great Michael Phelps has acknowledged ”regrettable” behavior and ”bad judgment” after a photo in a British newspaper showed him smoking marijuana.

In a statement released to The Associated Press, the swimmer who won a record eight gold medals at the Beijing Games conceded the authenticity of the exclusive picture published Sunday by the tabloid News of the World.

Phelps said: ”I engaged in behavior which was regrettable and demonstrated bad judgment. I’m 23 years old and despite the successes I’ve had in the pool, I acted in a youthful and inappropriate way, not in a manner people have come to expect from me. For this, I am sorry. I promise my fans and the public it will not happen again.”

via Phelps Apologizes for Marijuana Use – NYTimes.com.

Youthful and inappropriate.  Childish things, as our president might say.  ”It will not happen again.”  Not to get all Clintonian on you, Mike, but does “it” refer to “smoking marijuana” or does “it” refer to “photos surfacing in newspapers showing you smoking marijuana”?

I’ll never understand the mindset that accepts as rational the idea that these world class athletes – Michael Phelps, Ricky Williams, Ross Rebagliati, those Russian sumo, etc. - can dedicate their entire lives to eating right, working out, honing their bodies and minds to the pinnacle of their sport, but should they wish to relax and unwind, they’re forced to ingest a hard liquid drug that has noticably deleterious effects on health and athletic ability (Max McGee notwithstanding) rather than a mild herb that doesn’t seem to  have affected their abilities whatsoever.

Even more perplexing is the notion that, in the name of “sports medicine”, these athletes are accustomed to taking all manner of narcotic pain killers and other pharmaceutical cocktails that aid performance or mitigate injury, but are addicting (Brett Favre, *cough*,) and wreak havoc on the liver and kidneys, yet if we catch them smoking weed we have to mete out severe punishment (Santonio Holmes, notwithstanding).

As I look at the coverage on Huffington Post (admittedly, a liberal website) almost all comments are “it’s well past time to legalize it” and “so what” and “didn’t hurt Phelps’ performance any”.  Oh, an Obama brother pot bust and an eight-time gold medalist bong photo following ten days of growing drumbeat over President Obama’s non-response to the Tahoe Raid… somebody really did get me a swell birthday present!

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Medical Pot Ineffective as Acute Pain Treatment – washingtonpost.com
MONDAY, June 23 (HealthDay News) — Oral cannabis (a form of medical marijuana) was ineffective in treating certain types of acute pain and actually increased sensitivity to some other kinds of discomfort, say researchers at the Medical University of Vienna, Austria.

Their study included 18 healthy women who were given oral cannabis or a placebo. The women were then evaluated for heat and electrical pain thresholds in skin areas that had induced sunburn. This is an accepted method of assessing response to acute pain.

“The surprising result of our study was the absence of any kind of analgesic activity of THC-standardized cannabis extract on experimentally induced pain using well-established human model procedures,” study author Dr. Birgit Kraft said in a prepared statement. “Our results also seem to support the impression that high doses of cannabinoids may even cause increased sensitivity in certain pain conditions.”

The study is published in the July issue of the journal Anesthesiology.

Pain is a strange thing.  There are many types of pain, and it seems that THC is effective for some and not for others.  For example, we’re finding great results in the use of cannabis to treat neuropathic, or nerve pain, which is very resistant to treatment with conventional analgesics.

We’ve also found that there is a “Goldilocks dose” when it comes to treating pain with cannabis — where low potency (2% THC) marijuana didn’t help and high-potency (8% THC) marijuana made it worse, but moderate-potency (4% THC) was “just right” and helped ease certain types of pain.  (See more NORML Articles on cannabis and pain here.)

Or we could just ask the tens of thousands of medical marijuana patients in America’s 12 Free States who list chronic pain as their qualifying condition whether cannabis is working for their pain…

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It’s Friday here on the stash, so take this musical puff from a UK punk rock group that was together from 1995 to 2002. The group P.A.I.N (which stands for Propaganga and Information Network) recorded the song “Grow More Weed” in 2001 with none other than Mr. Nice himself, Howard Marks, who joins lead vocalist Jon Eris on this heavy-dub reggae, ska-influenced tune. Mr. Marks famously spent seven years in an American prison for drug trafficking and later ran for election to UK Parliament on the single issue of the legalize cannabis campaign. He didn’t make Parliament, but he continues to write and campaign vigorously for the legalization of recreational and medical cannabis. Visit his page on the web here, or find out more information about the band P.A.I.N at http://music.podshow.com.

mp3 download

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