Washington Post opinion article on medical marijuana is an insult to our intelligence

(Washington Post) The Justice Department says it’s backing off the prosecution of people who smoke pot or sell it in compliance with state laws that permit “medical marijuana.” Attorney General Eric Holder says “it will not be a priority to use federal resources to prosecute patients with serious illnesses or their caregivers.” Party hardy! I mean — let the healing begin!

I don’t think the federal government should be spending a whole lot of time on small-time druggies, and I’m undecided about legalizing pot, which enjoys 44 percent support among the general public, according to a recent poll. Recreational use is not the wisest thing — and if my 12-year-old son is reading this, that means you! — but it’s no more harmful than other drugs (e.g., alcohol) and impossible to eradicate. On the other hand, I worry it’s a gateway to harder stuff. So I think we probably should have an open debate about decriminalization.

The Institute of Medicine in 1999 and every peer-reviewed study since has concluded that there is no such thing as a “gateway effect” from marijuana to “harder stuff”.  What this writer, Charles Lane, wants is the government acting as parent to keep his 12-year-old off of pot by saying “don’t do it, it’s illegal”.  Which, by the way, has been a colossal failure; almost forty years into the War on (Certain American Citizens Using Non-Pharmaceutical, Non-Alcoholic, Tobacco-Free) Drugs™ and kids still say it is much easier to acquire weed than whiskey and blunts than beer.

But it should be a real debate, about real decriminalization, and not clouded — pardon the expression — by hokum about “medical marijuana.” … I do not deny that for some people, including some terminal cancer patients and pain-wracked AIDS sufferers, marijuana is a blessed relief. Let ‘em smoke, I say, just as the Justice Department has usually ignored such cases since long before Holder spoke up. But if you believe there is any scientific evidence that smoked marijuana has the multiplicity of therapeutic uses that advocates claim — well, I’ve got a bag of oregano I’d like to sell you.

There are over 17,000 peer-reviewed studies documenting the bona fide medical uses of cannabis and cannabinoids for a variety of conditions.  Would that count as enough “scientific evidence” for Charles Lane of the Washington Post?

Usually, drugs have to pass exacting testing by the Food and Drug Administration before they go on the market. There’s a good reason for this: we don’t want people spending money on products that might be ineffective or actually harmful. In California and elsewhere, however, snake oil — sorry, “medical marijuana” — got on the market via a different route: popular referendum.

Then it is a good thing that medical marijuana isn’t ineffective or seriously harmful, huh?  There are no recorded overdoses on cannabis because it is impossible; cannabis is non-toxic.  By contrast, many people die from over-the-counter aspirin overdoses every year.  You can actually die from drinking too much water, but too much cannabis will just put you to sleep.

What other substances should we handle this way? Cocaine? Laetrile? Didn’t President Obama just sign a bill authorizing the FDA to regulate the nicotine content of tobacco? And I thought he promised to “restore science to its rightful place.”

I don’t know… do you think you can get more than 50% voter support for medical cocaine or medical Laetrile, Charles?  Enough people have personal experience with marijuana’s medical efficacy — or at least marijuana’s lack of serious harms — to know that the FDA / DEA /NIDA stonewalling on medical marijuana is bullshit.  So the people legalized their medical access to marijuana by the only avenue available: taking it to the people by ballot.

By the way, we already do have medical cocaine; it is a Schedule II substance any doctor in any state can prescribe, so nobody ever considered handling it by ballot measure.  If President Obama restored science to its rightful place, do you think marijuana would still be considered to have no medicinal value while cocaine (and methamphetamine, by the way) are considered medicinal?

A few years ago, a California woman called Angel Raich took her defense of medical pot all the way to the Supreme Court. She lost on the legal issue, which had nothing to do with the medical effectiveness of pot. Along the way, though, she claimed that she was suffering from “life-threatening” scoliosis, temporomandibular joint dysfunction, bruxism, endometriosis, headache, rotator cuff syndrome, uterine fibroids, and Schwannoma. The Latin names might have snowed some judges, but physicians recognized each of these conditions as a common, non-life-threatening problem for which conventional treatments were available. Raich listed a cornucopia of potent drugs, from Vicodin to Methadone, that she had tried previously and gotten no satisfaction. I’m not a doctor, but I thought she might consider a consultation for hypochondria, or perhaps marijuana dependency.

Angel Raich's "hypochondriacal" brain tumors (courtesy of AngelJustice.org)

And you sir, have never met Angel Raich, and I have.  Perhaps you’d like to address the hypochondria in these brain scans that show the life-threatening tumors she is battling.

Charles Lane suffers from a form of Reefer Madness called Medicine of Last Resortism™.  As a man, I doubt he understands the pain of endometriosis, but maybe he’d like to join me in my special DeLorean to travel back in time to 2004, before my wife became a medical marijuana patient and she was crippled with pain, sobbing for days, from endometriosis.  This writer would prefer my wife to take Vicodin for that rather than smoke a joint, even though she is deathly allergic to Vicodin and most other opioid drugs, even though the cannabis is safe, non-toxic, works better on her pain and cramps than anything she’s ever tried, and doesn’t come with the typical opioid side effects of lethargy, constipation, and nausea.

This is not an isolated instance. According to a survey by NORML, the pro-”medical marijuana” organization, which can be expected to emphasize the desperate health of users, only 22 percent of California medical marijuana users suffer from AIDS-related disease. Most of the rest have more subjective maladies such as “chronic pain” or “mood disorders.”

For the people like Charles Lane suffering from Medicine of Last Resortism™, marijuana is an evil thing, dangerous and forbidden, and only those people who are deathly ill with only months to live and nothing to lose should be allowed to use it.  If you have something subjective, like pain or mood disorders, and you subjectively believe marijuana has been helping you treat that, why, you’re nothing but a dirty desperate drug addict lying to get a fix.  Here, take some Vicodin…

Raich’s physician was Frank Lucido, a well-known Berkeley doctor and pro-pot activist — he also makes money as an expert witness on “medical marijuana” — whose Web site boasts that he was “investigated by the Medical Practices Board of California for cannabis evaluation practices in 2003, and fully exonerated.” The case involved his recommendation of marijuana to treat attention deficit disorder in a 16-year-old boy, but, as I say, he was fully exonerated.

And you sir, have never met Dr. Frank Lucido, and I have.  I’m boasting that Charles Lane, opinion columnist for the Washington Post, was investigated by me just now on a Google Search of registered sex offender databases.  I found no record of Charles Lane as a registered sex offender, so, for now, he has been fully exonerated.  I did the search because I had my own personal suspicions about Charles Lane having a sexual relationship with a 16-year-old boy, but, as I say, Charles Lane has been fully exonerated.

In a brilliant article (requires subscription) on this subject in the Hastings Center Report, a bioethics journal, lawyer and anesthesiologist Peter J. Cohen noted that “medical marijuana” groups have been notably passive about demanding FDA testing and approval for this purported elixir. Instead, they took their case to the people. As Cohen argued, this is no way to make health policy: “medical marijuana,” he wrote, should be “subjected to the same scientific scrutiny as any drug proposed for use in medical therapy, rather than made legal for medical use by popular will.” The “medical marijuana” movement may not be a threat to our civilization, but it is an insult to our intelligence.

By all means, medical marijuana should be approved by the same FDA that gave us the scientific scrutiny to approve thalidomide, phen-fen, and Vioxx.  Here’s the thing: when we ask NIDA for the permission to put medical marijuana through scientific scrutiny so we can approach the FDA, the DEA and NIDA reject us.

But should non-toxic cannabis be forced to undergo FDA scrutiny when it is said that over-the-counter aspirin, if it had to go through the FDA today, would not be approved for use?  The real insult to intelligence is suggesting that “the safest therapeutically-active substance known to mankind” (according to a DEA judge) needs to be studied, restricted, and prohibited in the same way a toxic, addictive, side-effect-laden drug like Vicodin is.