As 50% of Americans now support marijuana legalization, the prohibitionists are coming out in full force with hysterical propaganda to once again terrorize voters about cannabis.  I intended to scour multiple sources to compile the five most common scare tactics they use, but Joseph Summerill, director of the Summerill Group LLC, a Washington, D.C.- based law enforcement think tank and general counsel for the Major County Sheriffs’ Association, made my job easy by using all five in one op-ed piece published today in the Washington Examiner entitled, “Facts on medical marijuana are stubborn things, too“.

Lie #1) Marijuana’s not really medical.  The government says so!

[M]arijuana is a Schedule I drug… a high potential for abuse or dependency… no accepted medical value… unsafe to use, even under medical supervision.  [M]arijuana has not passed the rigid scrutiny of medicine proposed by the FDA.

The Truth

• National Institutes of Drug Abuse (NIDA) puts the lifetime dependence rate on cannabis at 9%, same as caffeine.  Alcohol has a 15% rate of abuse and Tobacco’s is 32%.
• One third of federal jurisdictions (16 states and DC) accept the medical value of cannabis.
• The federal government is supplying four Americans with this “unsafe” medicine with no medical supervision.
• Cannabis has been used medically for 5,000 without a single human death – far greater safety standard than an FDA that approved phen-fen and Vioxx.

Lie #2) Doctors and scientists don’t approve of smoked medicine; they do approve of Marinol.

Institute of Medicine and the American Medical Association acknowledged the lack of data to support the use of smoked marijuana for medicinal purposes.

What is scientifically approved by the FDA and accepted by the medical community is a medicine called Marinol, a legal, widely prescribed drug currently in pill form containing synthetic THC, a main constituent in marijuana.

The Truth

• The American Medical Association said, “smoked cannabis reduces neuropathic pain, improves appetite and caloric intake especially in patients with reduced muscle mass, and may relieve spasticity and pain in patients with multiple sclerosis.”
• Marinol is 100% synthetic THC (the psychoactive component) suspended in a sesame oil capsule.  Cannabis flowers are around 8%-15% natural THC combined with CBD (a component that moderates psychoactivity) and other beneficial compounds.
• Explain to us how a cancer patient violently heaving from chemo is supposed to swallow a pill and keep it down?  Then explain how doctors approve of all sorts of inhaled medications (think: asthma inhalers) and why inhaling cannabis vapors, not smoke, from a vaporizer would be any different?

Lie #3) Marijuana smoke is much worse than cigarette smoke!

[S]moked marijuana contains more than 400 chemicals, many of which are identical to the most harmful chemicals and carcinogens found in cigarette smoke. The fact is that a marijuana cigarette contains four times as much tar as a tobacco cigarette.

The Truth

• My pencil contains graphite and wood, which are identical to the graphite found in golf clubs and the wood found in golf tees.  This does not make my pencil a golf club or golf tee.  Water contains two flammable elements, hydrogen and oxygen.  This does not make water flammable.  Many recipes call for the same ingredients; it’s how you put them together that matters.  Joints aren’t cigarettes, they’re far safer than that.
• Dr. Donald Tashkin went looking for that “marijuana causes cancer” connection and found quite the opposite, that cannabis smokers had lower incidence of head, neck, and lung cancer.  We even have compelling evidence that cannabinoids may be instrumental in unlocking the cure for cancer.
• Very few tokers smoke 20 to 40 joints a day, but even if they did, where are these marijuana smokers with the tar-ravaged lungs filling up our hospitals?  Again we have zero recorded deaths from cannabis smoking and over 400,000 annual deaths from tobacco use.  Joints aren’t cigarettes.

Lie #4) Marijuana is the gateway drug to cocaine, meth, and heroin!

[L]egalizing marijuana leads to the use of more dangerous and harmful drugs, such as cocaine and methamphetamine…. [T]eens who smoke marijuana were found to be 85 times more likely to use cocaine than those teens who do not smoke marijuana.

The Truth

• Teens who ride bicycles were found to be 85 times more likely to join an outlaw biker gang than teens who don’t ride bicycles*.  So we should outlaw bicycles?  Sure, cocaine users may have started first with pot, but they also probably started with alcohol before that.
• That same Institute of Medicine report Mr. Summerill referenced in Lie #2 said, “There is no conclusive evidence that the drug effects of marijuana are causally linked to the subsequent abuse of other illicit drugs.”
• According to National Survey on Drug Use and Health, over 100 million American adults have tried cannabis.  There are currently about 1.5 million monthly cocaine users, 430 thousand monthly meth users, and 192 thousand monthly heroin users.  So for every 46 people who’ve tried pot, only one went on to be a monthly hard drug user.  A gateway that only affects 2.1% of the people isn’t much of a gateway.

Lie #5) Marijuana legalization leads to carnage on the highways!

[M]arijuana use, including its use for medicinal purposes, is directly related to motor vehicle accidents and reckless driving, as cannabis affects psychomotor functioning.

In a study of fatally injured drivers in Washington state, a state with legalized medical marijuana, about one every eight tested positive for marijuana.

The Truth

• The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has said of marijuana testing of drivers, “It is inadvisable to try and predict effects based on blood THC concentrations alone, and currently impossible to predict specific effects based on THC-COOH concentrations” because “[d]etection time is well past the window of intoxication and impairment.”  Finding pot in some drivers’ systems following a crash just tells you some people smoke pot.
• From 2008-2009, fatal crashes in the states that had medical marijuana declined overall 9.34%.  Only one medical marijuana state, Rhode Island, had an increase greater than 3%, which resulted in 18 more deaths.  Four other states had 1%-3% increases, leading to 9 additional deaths.  Of the remaining eight states that saw declines, half saw double-digit declines, including the laxest medical marijuana state, California, which had 353 fewer traffic fatalities.
• Legalizing marijuana does not legalize DUI.  People who smoke pot and drive now are busted in all fifty states and legalization doesn’t change that.

* OK, that one I just made up. But I’ll bet if you asked 100 Hells Angels bikers, nearly all of them rode a bicycle as a kid. I’ll bet a great majority of rapists have used pornography. I’ll bet nearly every anorexic has seen a skinny model on a magazine cover. But we don’t prohibit something most people handle responsibly because we think it might lead a few people to do something else irresponsibly.

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3. Missoula overrides citizen initiative making marijuana the lowest enforcement priority

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• Roots Monday: Blind Lemon Jefferson – “Easy Rider Blues”

Government at Work

• Ed Docter from Montana Cannabis Industries Association on referendum on SB 423

Radical Rant

• Lessons we can learn from Part I of Ken Burns’ Prohibition documentary on PBS

Alcohol = good! Caffeine = good! Alcohol + caffeine = bad! Cannabis = very bad!

I’m a cannabis consumer.  I don’t drink much alcohol anymore; maybe a margarita at a Mexican dinner or a bottle of wine on the beach but never more than, say, a drink per month.  Maybe that’s why I’m only now getting caught up on the phenomenon known as “Four Loko”.

For those like me who missed it, Four Loko is a 23.5 ounce can of booze with lots of calories and caffeine that’s popular with the young binge-drinking set.  By “lots”, I mean that one can of Four Loko contains:

1. 12% alcohol (like a sparkling white wine, which comes in a 25.36 ounce bottle)
2. 260mg of caffeine (“roughly the same amount of caffeine as a tall Starbucks coffee“, which is 12 ounces, but who really drinks “talls” when 20 ounce “ventis” are available?)
3. Guarana and taurine (like a Monster energy drink, available in 23.5 ounce cans as well)
4. 660 calories (like a McDonald’s cheeseburger Happy Meal and a Coke)

The company was started in 2005 by three friends at The Ohio State University (motto: “Don’t dare confuse us with that other Ohio State University!”) who obviously noted the popularity of “Red Bull and vodka” and “Jaegerbombs” among college drinkers.  They took out SBA loans and in this awful economy created a successful company, created American jobs, and made many charitable donations.

But then, college kids got a hold of this new drug cocktail and, being invulnerable as they are at that age, misused it and were hospitalized.  More horror stories followed, including a young healthy person who had a heart attack and the disturbing story about a brutal rape where the victim was forced to drink 10 cans of Four Loko!  (What difference does it make whether packs of vile rapist scum force the victim to drink Four Loko or chocolate milk?  Never mind, it was awful and Four Loko was there!)  University of Florida studied the drinks and found they led to a fourfold increase in drunk-driving intent.

Next came the frenzy to ban the drink in state legislatures.  Washington’s governor said the fruit-flavored drinks in bright-colored cans were just too appealing to young people.  ”It’s no different than the kind of appeal that Joe Camel had to our kids when it came to cigarettes,” Gov. Christine Gregoire said.  Today we get a lawsuit from Florida parents whose son partied for 30 hours straight, played around with a loaded handgun, and shot himself in the head… dead because of Four Loko!  (Don’t you dare bring up easy access to a loaded handgun… Four Loko was there!)  Now, bowing to what would surely be FDA action to force them to do so, the makers of Four Loko are removing the caffeine, guarana, and taurine.

The urge to prohibit when the youngsters discover the Next Drug Scare runs strong in the American people.  Here we have what amounts to a ban on mixing two legal products.  Nobody is calling for bans on energy drinks and certainly nobody is calling for a ban on “tallboy”-sized cans or fruity flavored alcohol.  I can still buy Mike’s Hard Lemonade, a triple-serving energy drink, and a Double Quarter-Pounder with Cheese.  But not a can of Four Loko?

The only thing this ban does is return young drinkers back to mixing the Red Bulls and vodka or rum and coke or good ol’ fashioned beer and coffee.  Oh, and cripple a start-up company and probably end a few American jobs.  Meanwhile, another popular drug choice for young people, cannabis, is not just banned for sale but also criminal to possess.  Using it can end a student’s financial aid and college housing, a punishment not meted out for alcohol even when a student is underaged.

About 1,700 college students die every year from binge alcohol drinking… so let’s ban the caffeine, taurine, and guarana in one of their drinks when a few of them end up in the hospital.  And for the children’s sake, don’t let them use that cannabis that has never killed anyone in 5,000 years!

The New York Times Freakonomics blog had a great question and answer post comparing marijuana prohibition and lessons that could be learned from alcohol prohibition.  It’s worth reading the whole post (Henry ford conspiracy theorists, I’m lookin’ at you), but this one part underscores something I’ve been preaching for years: Women are critical to ending prohibition.

Q: It has been said that Prohibition in the U.S. would not have come about but for the efforts of the women’s movement, but how critical were women to the repeal of prohibition? — Seano

A: Absolutely essential. When the prominent socialite and Republican Party figure Pauline Morton Sabin came out against Prohibition in 1929, the repeal movement began to pick up support. Traveling to various cities with other socially prominent, wealthy women with whom she had formed the Women’s Organization for National Prohibition Reform, Sabin drew huge female crowds. Her example established that it was respectable for women to oppose Prohibition.

Sabin was an extraordinary woman and probably my favorite character among all the people I write about in Last Call. She was honest, forthright, fearless and willing to change her mind – qualities all too absent in our public life today.

via What Prohibition Can Teach Us About Marijuana Legalization — and Other Tales From Last Call Author Daniel Okrent – Freakonomics Blog – NYTimes.com.

(The Denver Channel) DENVER — Two Denver elementary schools were put on temporary lockdown Wednesday morning after an armed robbery at a medical marijuana dispensary.

Munroe Elementary and Castro Elementary were locked down after shots were reported fired at The Healthy Choice Wellness Center, at 3005 W.Gill Place in southwest Denver. The lockdown was lifted shortly before noon.

According to a co-owner of the business, two people tried to rob the dispensary and shots were fired.

Three people were transported to the hospital with unknown injuries.

One of the robbers was arrested and a second robber is still being sought.

I can hear the reefer mad prohibitionists now, wailing about how the dispensaries bring crime and violence to the neighborhood and My God, What About the Children!?!

Why do people commit robbery?  In this case, they were either desperate for money or desperate for marijuana.

If they were desperate for money, they could’ve robbed a bank or a convenience store, and nobody would complain that we shouldn’t open banks and stores near schools.  They robbed a dispensary because it is flush with money, because marijuana prohibition keeps the price of marijuana artificially high.

If they were desperate for marijuana, either for themselves or for resale, then once again, it is the prohibition of marijuana that makes its theft a lucrative option and its acquisition more difficult for healthy people.

This is the backlash I fear on the path from medical marijuana to legalization.  For years we’ve been told drugs create violence, corruption, and death.  We know it is the prohibition, not the drugs, that is the cause (prohibit sugar and you’d see sugar gangs and sugar wars), but that point is missed by most of the public.

So when a violent armed robbery occurs in a dispensary, it’s their opportunity to say, “See, we legalized marijuana just a little bit and look what happened!  We told you drugs cause violence and crime!”  Where prohibition’s social harms had been blamed on the drug itself, now there’s the risk of the harms being blamed on the effort to legalize the drugs.

Me, thirteen years ago at the top of the World Trade Center

Eight years ago today I was living in an alternate reality.  I was Mr. Buttondown Corporatedude, commuting across town in Boise, Idaho, teaching computer software to corporate audiences for a company called New Horizons.  On that particularly unremarkable Tuesday morning, I was scheduled to teach an advanced course in Microsoft Project.

I arrived at work at 7:46am Mountain Time.  By then, it has been one hour since the first jet hit the World Trade Center and 44 minutes since the second jet hit.  But I drive to work without any radio and was a bit late, so I go straight from the prep room to my classroom to set up.  On the way, I notice two co-workers intently studying their internet connections and mentioning something about a plane hitting a building in New York, but nothing that catches my attention more than it being a small plane and a tragic accident.

My class begins at 8:30am.  By now, all flights have been grounded and President Bush has addressed the nation about the terrorist attacks over an hour ago.  A half hour prior, Todd Beamer and the heroes of United 93 are fighting their hijackers and crash-landing their jet outside of Shanksville PA and the South Tower (upon which I stood for that photo five years before) has collapsed.  The North Tower collapses just two minutes before I begin my presentation.

I teach my sixteen corporate project managers until first break at 10:30 am.  None of us have any idea that our nation is under attack.  Nobody from our sales staff or management bothers to tell any of us, though they know, as they were huddled around a television in the break room.  At break, nearly every teacher and student has gathered in this room to watch the news reports.  President Bush gives a statement six minutes into the break.  It is clear that we are at war.  I am devastated; I had served my state and country from 1985-1990 in the National Guard and have always been a proud American.

Then comes a moment that crystallized my disdain for the corporate world.  Thinking back today, I realize this is the moment where a part of me realizes that I cannot be Mr. Buttondown Corporatedude for the rest of my life.  Our company president announces that due to the attacks, any students who wish to leave will be given vouchers to re-take their classes.

In other words, for us teachers, the show must go on for any students that don’t want to re-take the classes, and as luck would have it, my project managers had all come in from out-of-town, and all sixteen decide to stay.  I had to spend the rest of September 11th, 2001, trying to teach advanced software skills when all I really want to do is watch the news and cry.

Every time I think about September 11th, I have to pull myself back from conspiracy thinking and my urge to jump whole-hog into the 9/11 Truth movement.  I think there are far too many unanswered questions about 9/11, but I’m overloaded as it is fighting prohibition without adding another huge cause to my agenda.

But about that prohibition and 9/11, just remember: if the attacks were indeed masterminded by Bin Laden and the Taliban out of the caves of Afghanistan, the money that fueled their activities was earned through the sales of opium for heroin, which is only massively profitable due to its prohibition.  And today, the money that fuels the murderous activities of Mexican Cartels (who’ve killed quadruple the number of people killed on September 11th, by the way) is attributable to prohibition.

Drug prohibition is a terrorists best business opportunity.  When you support prohibition, you support terrorism.

We need them to know that there is only ONE option to rid us of these people and prevent them from returning – end the prohibition and license reputable businesses to legally produce and sell marijuana to adults with prices low enough to undermine the cartels.

These videos make this point graphically clear. Be aware that they contain extremely disturbing but very real images of what’s happening right now as a result of our prohibition. Every day the cartels brutally murder an average of 17 people.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Officials with the Gwinnett County Police Department said they seized 457 pounds of marijuana and a cache of guns from a Lilburn home

Investigators with the department’s drug task force said they received an anonymous tip from a citizen who was concerned about possible drug activity at the house.

457 pounds of marijuana worth $2,118,293.00 was located and seized, according to police. Five weapons including a M16 and AK 47 assault rifle were also confiscated along with a large amount of ammunition.

I can’t write like Russ so I’m just going to post what I commented on the article and what I’m currently sending to my legislators and all the community and family groups I can find in Atlanta and Georgia:

Wow, this is right here in Atlanta! These people are here in our city, they make pot easy for kids to buy and they bring guns and violence and home invasions right into our communities.  It’s only a matter of time before it’s our door that gets kicked in and it’s us who are tied up and brutalized and killed.

What are our legislators doing about it? The police made one lucky catch here but there are many more of these people in our city right now with their pounds of weed and their guns. They’re here to make money. They’re here because the federal prohibition on marijuana has driven the price of pot up so high that these people can come here and get filthy rich selling their weed to anyone with money. And they don’t care how young their customers are or who gets injured or tortured or killed in the process.

We HAVE to take action on this. The prohibition was supposed to keep us safe but it does not. It’s been in place for seventy years and it does NOTHING to reduce the amount of marijuana smoked by teenagers and it does nothing to prevent violent people from coming here and getting rich from selling pot. If the prohibition worked then after seventy years stuff like this wouldn’t be happening!

The prohibition itself is the reason they’re here. They come because there’s no competition for what they’re selling. And every arrest by our police officers, and every bust of every illegal seller just clears the way of competition for new people to come here and do the exact same thing!

The prohibition HAS to go. We have to force these people to leave and we have to prevent new ones like them from wanting to come here. And the ONLY way we can do this is by ending the prohibition and issuing licenses for reputable businesses to legally produce marijuana and sell it to adults with after-tax prices set too low for these people to compete.

That’s what we have to tell our legislators! Senator Chambliss, Senator Isakson, Representatives Price, Kingston, Westmoreland and all the rest. We must write to all our legislators and the candidates running for next year’s elections and tell them that they must act NOW to make our families safe.

Don’t let your kids get arrested for buying pot from these people and don’t leave your family in danger of being beaten or killed by them. Tell our legislators that they have to end the prohibition and take control of the marijuana market, that they have to allow it to be legally produced and sold to adults and that they have to regulate it and tax it. The prohibition is an archaic failure, we must end it before it ends us.

Forty-one percent (41%) of likely U.S. voters think the United States should legalize and tax marijuana to help solve the nation’s fiscal problems.

However, nearly half (49%) oppose this idea, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey.

These results show little difference from a survey conducted in February that asked Americans about legalization only. At that time, 40% said marijuana should be legalized, but 46% disagreed.

Over half of Democrats (52%) support the idea of legalizing and taxing pot, but only 28% of Republicans agree. Most GOP voters (65%) are against the idea, as are 37% of Democrats. Unaffiliated voters are more evenly divided: 41% are in favor of the idea and 47% are opposed to it.

Adults between the ages of 18 and 40 are much more likely to support legalizing and taxing marijuana than those over 40.

The new survey also shows that nearly half of voters (46%) believe marijuana use leads to use of harder drugs. Thirty-seven percent (37%) do not see marijuana as a “gateway” drug.

That “gateway drug” argument sure is persistent, isn’t it?  I guess I could give it a positive spin: at least if you’re relying on the “gateway drug” argument to show how awful marijuana is, you’re tacitly admitting that the marijuana itself isn’t so harmful.

The only three effective tools left in the prohibitionist’s rhetorical arsenal are:

1. Marijuana is a gateway drug that leads to use of harder drugs.
2. If we legalized marijuana, our streets would be filled with stoned drivers!
3. What about the children?  For God’s Sake, won’t somebody think of the children?

So it is up to us to educate our friends and family and elected representatives.  We need to have people who bring up “gateway drug” laughed out of the room like people who insist the moon landing was faked*.

We’ll deal with “stoned drivers” and “what about the children” another time.  For your peers that shoot you the “gateway drug” argument, you could tell them that the Institute of Medicine debunked this theory in 1999 and every study subsequent to it has agreed.  Or you could point out that the “gateway theory” is a logical fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc reasoning (that since this came before that, this caused that).  But if your peers were swayed by logic and reason, we wouldn’t have 46% of them believing the “gateway theory”.

The theory survives because it fits a pattern familiar to most people.  They understand that the falling-down drunk who’s loaded on scotch was once probably a guy who drank a beer or two.  They understand that the chain smoker was once probably a guy who had a cigarette now and then.  They understand that the right-wing talk radio host who was downing 30 illegal Oxycontin a day probably started on one or two a day.  They also realize — accurately, I’ll admit — that the crack addict and heroin junkie probably smoked a joint or two before they moved on to the hard stuff.

So the way you attack this is to flip the perspective.  They’re looking at all the hard drug addicts and noting that almost all of them used pot.  You need to make them see all the marijuana users and show how few actually use hard drugs.  Here are your three rhetorical attacks on the “gateway theory”:

1) 721-15-1.  This is the ratio of people who have ever smoked marijuana (95.9 million) to people who used cocaine last month (2 million) and people who used heroin last month (133,000).  “For every 721 people who’ve ever smoked pot, only 15 currently use cocaine and one uses heroin,” you might say, “how much of a gateway to addiction is it when only 2% of the people who ever try it use hard drugs?”  (Note: “Gateway to addiction”, not “gateway drug”.  The latter sets the prohibitionist’s frame of marijuana as a drug like heroin and coke.  The former frames the hard drugs as something you’ll get addicted to, but implicitly says if you’re using marijuana, you haven’t gotten to addiction yet.)

2) 721-49½.  This is the ratio of people who have ever drank alcohol (204 million) to people who become alcoholics (14 million).  “For every 721 people who try alcohol, 49½ of them become alcoholics – or alcohol addicts,” you continue.  “So how is it that beer isn’t considered a gateway to addiction when three times as many of its users become addicted?  6.8% of people who try alcohol become alcoholics, while only 2% of people who try pot become coke or heroin addicts!”  (With the combination of #1 & #2, we’re using their implicit understanding that marijuana is not such a big deal, because it is only its “gateway” to coke and heroin that scares them.)

3) 0.  This is the number of different hard, addictive illegal drugs available at your local liquor store.  “Even though almost 7% of the people who try alcohol become addicted, we learned from Prohibition that trying to stop people from drinking didn’t stop anyone and only created violent crime and moonshine that would blind you.  So we control alcohol at the liquor store, check IDs, and we make sure that people can’t buy cocaine and heroin there.  The only gateway with marijuana is to the illegal drug market, where everything is for sale.”

This isn’t going to instantly convince most of them, because at its core, marijuana prohibition is a moral issue – you smoke pot, you’re a “druggie”, no less morally repugnant than a cokehead or junkie; you drink beer, you’re “Joe Sixpack”.  But at least it defuses one of their junk-science justifications so we can get to the moral root of the issue.

*Seriously, you’re not one of those people who think the moon landing was faked, are you?

The amazing thing about marijuana is its ability to addle the brains of people who don’t smoke it.

Then they’ll summarily reject the best science in the universe, which says unequivocally marijuana is safe, even medically beneficial. Facts don’t count, somehow.

Neither does policy failure. If it did, I’d mention 85 percent of high school seniors surveyed said marijuana is “easy to get.”

Waste of time, such data. Blowing billions remains important to marijuana prohibitionists. They are as dissuaded by failure as they are dismissive of fact.

There must be a reason.

In 2005, I found a Nixon-era study that illuminated some of it.

“Many see the drug as fostering a counterculture, which conflicts with basic moral precepts as well as with the operating functions of our society,” the report said.

In other words, rational drug policy is an afterthought; pot is a skirmish in the culture war. To defeat it is to defeat the counterculture. Liberalism. Whatever.

For them, a Pyrrhic victory over the ’60s, however destructive, is preferable to a pluralistic country in which people live by values anathema to them.

via Marijuana prohibitionists are just blowing smoke | Recordnet.com.

That opening line is going to be my new signature line for email.  Brilliant.  It’s not the marijuana the prohibitionists fear, it’s the late 1960′s.  Students protesting war, questioning authority, people actually living free, exploring sexuality, accepting diversity, expressing themselves, rejecting hierarchy and the status quo.  Marijuana is a threat to all of that and more – it threatens the very paradigm of nature as man’s “domain”, a “resource” to be extracted and refined, rather than man as a part of nature, co-equal to all things from redwood to paramecium.

How many times have I heard the prohibitionist in his tirade against medical use of marijuana say, “We don’t chew willow bark for pain, we take an aspirin!”, as if the willow bark were somehow harmful or ineffective without the factory synthesizing it into pill form.  Why don’t we chew willow bark, or drink a tea, or rub an aloe vera leaf on our sunburned skin?  It’s almost as if we’ve been trained to think of nature as an enemy to be defeated, tamed, organized, instead of a mother who provides everything we need in natural form.

We also have professionalized health care as if it is something we require a trained expert for, rather than understanding our own role in our own health.  You can’t be trusted to just smoke an herb and feel better, a doctor has to evaluate your condition and recommend a factory-synthesized remedy for it.

This rant is not to diminish the power of Western Medicine.  If something’s really wrong with your health, Western Medicine has the best technology and pharmacology science can provide to help save your life.  The problem is that the paradigm of Western Medicine isn’t very good when things are right with your health.  Western Medicine is all about fixing what’s broke, not keeping it from breaking in the first place.