First it was Marie Claire magazine with their “Stiletto Stoners”, followed by a sympathetic follow-up on the NBC Today Show. Now* Elle Magazine prints 2,758 words from another Stiletto Stoner who has discovered that cannabis is a superior medication for her generalized anxiety disorder than the Zoloft and Paxil her doctors had recommended.

(Elle Magazine) A thimbleful is all it takes. After a day’s work, I pinch off a small amount of marijuana and put it in a steel-tooth grinder. The flowers, covered in tiny white diamonds of THC, release a piney scent when crushed. I turn on the TV, and instead of taking a glass of wine with my evening news, I take out my vaporizer and set it on the coffee table.

One could say I diagnosed myself in high school, when I recognized my symptoms in a psychology textbook. Finally, I had “generalized anxiety disorder” to describe the dread I felt of some future event that was overtaking my present. I usually sensed the panic attacks first in my chest. Then my vision would start to go to static, and my body would crumple to the floor. There I’d ride it out until the adrenaline ran its course.

Soon after I started to suffer several of these episodes a day (and so often that fear of another one kept me indoors), I sought out a psychiatrist. I told her about the times I’d be driving and convince myself that I was about to spin off the road—the looping, invented terrors. A little talk therapy and a prescription later, I discovered that Zoloft only exacerbated my panic and depression. I stopped taking the little white pills and cut out caffeine instead; I exercised and practiced meditation. For years I abstained from medication, and aside from the occasional pot smoking with friends, I swore off drugs entirely.

About four years ago, another psychiatrist put me on lithium for what he described as my “Paxil-induced hypomania.” When it made me violently sick, I decided I needed to replace pills altogether and turn to a regimen that relied on what was, to me, the only proven drug. I headed down to the five-block stretch of marijuana advocacy groups known as “Oaksterdam.” There, I explained to an understanding doctor, wearing Lennon glasses and cargo shorts, that marijuana eased the symptoms of what studies showed and I knew to be a genetic disorder. (My two younger brothers have been diagnosed as bipolar, and my grandmother suffered from anxiety and depression.)

The writer continues by explaining how she is able to keep her job and be productive thanks to marijuana, and that her friends that use marijuana are all successful productive people she’s proud to know.  She worries about the legal complexities, especially how the California Ragingwire decision still allows employers to fire people for their medical use.

From a media standpoint, I believe when you’re having women speak favorably of marijuana in Marie Claire, the Today Show, and Elle Magazine, you’re winning the hearts and minds.

*By “now”, of course, I meant July 18, 2008, when this article was written.  I really need to watch the bylines on these stories that I pick up off the Fresh Stash.

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The Examiner family of online newspapers is now featuring the retired locksmith (and thus, drug policy expert) John English as a regular columnist.  It seems his entire series of columns is dedicated to pushing reefer madness.

In “Marijuana Crosses the Placenta“, John tortures the language he’s named after with fine writing like this:

Effects on the fetus, though scientifically difficult to evaluate, for a variety of reasons, the detection of metabolites in meconium establishes fetal drug exposure. The effects on the babies after birth is obvious.

Judging from his various cut’n'pastes from scientific articles I doubt he understands, I think his argument is that women who smoke a lot of pot while pregnant risk harming their babies, so we should lock them up.  Wait’ll he sees the statistics on fetal alcohol syndrome!

In “Who Populates the Prison System“, John claims to debunk the idea pushed by “pro-drug advocates and their financial backers (Soros, Sperling, et al.)” that the prisons are filled with non-violent marijuana possessors:

# The massive numbers of people in prison for marijuana, are / were smugglers and distributors.

# These skewed facts ignore that when a person actually is incarcerated for simple possession, invariably it’s because they’ve cooperated and been allowed to plead to a lesser charge!

John doesn’t understand, though, that a “smuggler/distributor” of marijuana can be a pot possessor who made the mistake of keeping his two separate strains in two separate baggies, or keeps Ziploc sandwich baggies in his home, or owns a postal scale, or grew more than one plant, or keeps a legal firearm.  He also doesn’t realize that folks on parole or probation who get busted for possession technically go back to prison for their original crime, not the pot possession, so they don’t show up in statistics as pot prisoners.  But it is refreshing to see him admit that there are “massive numbers of people in prison for marijuana” as he beats up his strawman.

In “Losing Our Youth to Depression“, John explains that marijuana doesn’t treat depression, it causes depression:

The marijuana user is in a constant state of depression interspersed with “short bursts of feeling almost normal again.” The user, when he’s reached out and achieved that “high,” he has a temporary reprieve from that constant, marijuana-induced state of depression, but it returns as the “high” fades.

That’s the cause, the scenario . . . ; users seek, the non-depressed state, they perceive as a “high”. They’re wrong; it’s the state they were in before – it’s the absence of depression. Over and over, they’re drawn into the ‘fog of marijuana addiction’ which has caused them to perceive it wrongly. The user has unknowingly, only taken a step down a rung, on the ladder of normalcy!

So I’ll bet when John learns that the suicidal/homicidal Columbine shooters, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, and just about every high-profile school shooting you can name in the past twenty years involved depressed teens who were prescribed SSRI anti-depressants, he’ll be eager to pump out a few columns about how we should be locking up people in possession of Paxil, Effexor, Celexa, Prozac, Zoloft, Luvox, Anafranil, Lexapro, Wellbutrin, etc.

In “Addiction to cannabis and mental disorders“, John reveals the insidious evil of marijuana – the “potheads” are seducing our youth into their debauched lifestyle (I guess we’ve been borrowing strategy from the “gay agenda”):

The most convincing reason why potheads must remain criminals, why marijuana must remain illegal, is their targeting of children. That behavior in and of itself reveals that they suffer from a deep psychological insufficiency, a need to draw children into becoming like them – whether it’s a need to justify their own beliefs or some other motivation, it doesn’t matter! They’re damaging future generations and doing so intentionally.

You know who’s targeting children, John?  Pot dealers who aren’t required to check IDs, a million of whom are teenagers themselves.  You know who else targeted children?  Alcohol and tobacco companies with their “Budweiser Frogs” and “Joe Camel”, but since those drugs are legal, we were able to set strong advertising restrictions on those products, create effective anti-youth drinking and smoking educational campaigns, and reduced teen drinking and smoking to the lowest levels ever recorded.

In “What is wrong with smoking marijuana for medicinal purposes“, John cites a video of “Nathan Edelman” (he means Drug Policy Alliance’s Ethan Nadelmann), which is actually video of former NORML Director Richard Cowan taken way out of context to illustrate our alleged secret agenda of telling pot smokers to lie about how marijuana helps them medically so we can legalize all drugs (and, naturally, recruit the children into our debauched lifestyle).

When considering at this question, one must take into account two related issues: 1) that the whole plan to make marijuana legal was published in “High Times.” They issued a call, compelling users to come forward saying that pot helped their suffering.

And there’s another part: 2) that a survey showed that medical marijuana cardholders had been smoking pot for an average of 17 years! That in itself, brings the whole system under more suspicion – - – for what if, marijuana does cause one to think their “medicine” helps their condition when it is instead, actually causing or contributing to it?

Then, there’s two further question that needs to be asked:

1) What weed is smoked without the particulate matter, tars, and (over 400 chemical compounds in the smoke) not causing harm? The doctor’s oath is “First, do no harm.”

2) If people who were already breaking the law using an illicit drug for 17 years before the system allowed this pseudo-legal use, do they have the credibility to allow us to believe this actually helps?

If you were nauseous, in chronic pain, spastic, prone to seizures, or were losing your eyesight to glaucoma, and you smoked a joint 17 years ago and found it helped you medically, would you choose to live in misery for another 17 years until it became legal to use, just so you could have some credibility in John English’s view?

You can read more of my responses to John English in the comments sections of his articles in the hyperlinks above.  Feel free to leave some of your own comments, too.

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CHICAGO (Reuters) – Many more Americans have been using prescription drugs to treat mental illness since 1996, in part because of expanded insurance coverage and greater familiarity with the drugs among primary care doctors, U.S. researchers said on Tuesday.

Really?  It wouldn’t have anything to do with the ubiquitous “ask your prescriber about new prescription Dammitol” advertisements on TV?

They said 73 percent more adults and 50 percent more children are using drugs to treat mental illness than in 1996.

Among adults over 65, use of so-called psychotropic drugs — which include antidepressants, antipsychotics and Alzheimer’s medicines — doubled between 1996 and 2006.

Here are some other interesting stats from that time period:

• In 1989, drug companies spent $12 million on direct-to-consumer (DTC) advertising.  By 2007 the figure reached $3.7 billion.
• DTC advertising began in 1983, but advertising was restricted only to the drug’s brand name and an “ask your doctor” pitch.  They could not describe what the drug would treat or how it would help a patient.
• In 1997, the FDA relaxed rules on prescription drug advertising to allow the ads we see now, where shiny happy people use prescription Dammitol, pretty music plays and birds chirp, and in the last ten seconds a muted monotone sped-up voice-over tells you all the side effects Dammitol can cause.
• 70% of all DTC advertising is television advertising, and 29% of all network news advertising revenue comes from pharmaceutical ads.
• The average number of prescriptions per person in the United States increased from 7.3 in 1992 to 14.3 in 2006.

“What we generally find is there has been an increase in access to care for all populations,” said Sherry Glied of Columbia University in New York, whose study appears in the journal Health Affairs.

Glied said expanded drug coverage under Medicare, the federal insurance program for the elderly, and the State Children’s Health Insurance Program for poor children, helped make such drugs more affordable.

The study found the number of children diagnosed and treated for mental health conditions by their primary care doctor doubled between 1996 and 2006.

Sure, that could be a part of the increase, but you don’t double the prescriptions-per-person and see 50%, 75%, and 100% rise in psychtropic drug use among children, adults, and seniors, respectively, in just over a decade because government programs made those drugs more affordable for children and the elderly.

In his book, Death by Prescription, Ray D. Strand describes our “self-medicated society” and how these pharmaceutical ads turn the patient into a drug seeker and the doctor into a dealer:

“Surveys reported in our medical literature reveal that when a patient comes into a doctor’s office and requests a specific drug that he has seen advertised in the media, the doctor writes the exact prescription the patient requested more than 70 percent of the time!”

So, let’s say that a consumer who has been feeling a little sad lately sees a commercial for the antidepressant drug Zoloft. The commercial demonstrates the symptoms for depression and the consumer identifies with them. Suddenly, he or she thinks, “I’m not just sad. I’m depressed, which is a ‘medical condition that can be treated by the prescription drug Zoloft.’” With this in mind, the consumer goes to a medical doctor and says, “I’ve been really depressed a lot lately. I’ve been [the consumer recites the depression symptoms listed in the Zoloft commercial]. I think I need Zoloft.” So, according to Strand, there’s a 70 percent chance the doctor will prescribe Zoloft, the exact prescription the consumer requested. That’s how pharmaceutical commercials really work. They directly influence consumer behavior, yet drug companies claim they only “educate” patients, but don’t persuade them to do anything.

It’s not just the patients that Big Pharma is seducing, either.  15 to 20 percent of the American Psychological Association’s (APA) income comes from pharmaceutical advertisements in its journals.  Pfizer alone has 4500 people in its sales force, which directly market these drugs to doctors through special promotions and free samples.  And while Big Pharma spends $3.7 billion to influence you, they spend almost twice that ($6.7 billion) advertising to doctors through these sales forces and in professional journals.

And it works.  $10.4 billion in total advertising is a small price to pay to reap the $227.5 billion spent on prescription drugs in 2007.  Comparing the cost of the raw ingredients vs. the retail cost to consumers, the markups on Paxil, Zoloft, Celebrex, Prozac, and Xanax are 2,898%, 11,821%, 21,712%, 224,973%, 569,958%, respectively.  The pharmaceutical industry is the third most profitable industry in America, according to Fortune Magazine (trailing only communications and internet industries for return-on-investment), with 2008 profits of 19.3% of revenues.  The profits of the three largest pharmaceutical companies were $12.9, $8.1, and $4.8 billion in 2008, respectively.

When you know these facts, you begin to understand the monumental task of legalizing marijuana in this country.  How far would that $227.5 billion prescription drug spending drop if people had legal access to marijuana?  I’ve already talked to many medical marijuana patients who report being able to kick 50% to 75% of their need for opioid painkillers thanks to cannabis.  Marijuana works better for some people for anxiety and depression than Paxil, Zoloft, Celebrex, Prozac, and Xanax, and you can grow it in your yard.  That little weed can replace a whole lotta pills that have nasty side effects like constipation, nausea, erectile disfunction, and so forth (for which, of course, they’ll write you another prescription).  And it makes you happy, hungry, and sexy, too!

So why would the AMA or APA want to support medical marijuana and anger the Big Pharma that keeps their journals funded?  Why would network television want to report positively on medical marijuana and anger the Big Pharma that keeps their news divisions funded?  Why would some doctors want to support medical marijuana and mess up the freebies they’re getting from Big Pharma?

The real reason marijuana is illegal has nothing to do with how it effects you or society, it’s how it effects business.

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Last year there was a horrible tragedy in Omaha when Robert Hawkins, 19, went to the mall and began shooting innocent people, killing eight and himself.  Yesterday, Hawkins’ mother Molly appeared on the Dr. Phil television program so the two of them could “get real” (to mock one of Dr. McGraw’s favorite catchphrases) about what led her son to go on a shooting rampage.

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While Dr. Phil did emphasize Robert’s troubled family life, history of depression and psychotic episodes, and easy access to an AK-47 assault rifle in exploring the reasons behind Robert’s suicidal rampage, he also goes to great lengths to emphasize Robert’s use of cannabis.   (I hope you enjoy this… Dr. Phil charged me $6 just to get the transcript of the program…)

TRANSCRIPT from JANUARY 07, 2009

McGRAW: Robert Hawkins’ mother says she did not see the warning signs because it was one year ago that her 19-year-old son walked into the Von Maur department store at Westroads Mall in Omaha, Nebraska, with an AK-47 and killed eight people. According to the police chief, Robert fired more than 30 rounds, then he took his own life.

… Your questions to me–and I get so many of them–are, `Dr. Phil, why? Why, why does this happen? Who does this? How can we spot it before it happens to protect ourselves or our children?’ Maybe it’s one of your own children acting strange. Maybe it’s one of their friends. Maybe it’s a co-worker or somebody that you’re around. You say, `How can we protect ourselves?’ We’ve seen this all too often. Columbine, Virginia Tech, Northern Illinois University, the Utah Trolley Square shooting. There are tragically just too many to name. But could these have been prevented?

… Did you smoke marijuana with this kid?

MOLLY: Yes, I did. 

Read the rest of this entry by clicking here

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