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MUSINGS OF A RECOVERING LIBERAL
Special to Culture Shock TV
By
Denis Donovan
Sunday, April 14, 2002
Having recently survived a life threatening illness, complete with hospital stays, surgery, scans, tests and every other sort of physical and mental indignity which one can imagine being inflicted to one’s body in the name of getting well, I have more than a passing interest in the topic of treating PAIN with medical marijuana.
For me my pain was brief and short-lived.
But others are not so lucky.
They live with real bone grinding day-to-day pain, the kind caused by diseases such as Glaucoma, Anorexia, Various Cancers, Multiple Sclerosis and Aids.
Or they suffer from the nausea and the sicknesses that are often a part of the cures for these diseases such as those experienced by chemo patients and hemo dialysis patients.
Even with all of the advances of modern pharmacopoeia, the sad fact is that most pain medicines while thorough and effective, are fraught with side effects, often times as unpleasant as the pain itself.
Enter a new drug, well an old one actually that ongoing scientific testing has proven to be equally effective in relieving pain with far fewer side effects. Couple this, with the fact that it is easy to administer, easy (well, still relatively) to get, and there is little danger of ever over medicating.
I’m speaking of the therapeutic uses of Marijuana, a.k.a. reefer, maryjane, weed, or the more common term, pot.
Yes folks the same stringy leafy product that a generation flocked to in the 1960’s, has now taken on a role far more significant to our aging baby-boomer generation than it ever did 20, 30 or 40 years ago.
And the same "forces that be", those same moralistic and religious do-gooders that have been trying to stamp this weed out since Congress made it a criminal offense in 1937, are at it again.
On October 25, 2001 scores of DEA agents under the direction of God’s Attorney General, John Ashcroft, and the new DEA administrator, Asa Hutchinson, descended upon the L.A. Cannabis Resource Center in West Hollywood, California, seizing the center's computers, files, bank account, plants, and medicine.
Using the May 2001 U.S. Supreme Court decision declaring that a "medical necessity" defense could not be used in federal court as justification for their heavy-handed actions, the Feds also raided a facility in Ventura, California, which grew the marijuana for the aforementioned distribution center.
While no charges were filed in either instance, the raids shut down the largest, best organized, and most respected medical marijuana distribution center in Southern California, and forced its many patients to seek their pain killing pot from street vendors or perhaps to even grow their own.
As this is in a state where medical marijuana is the will of the people.
One of eight states with such laws. The other states are Alaska, Hawaii, Oregon, Maine, Colorado, Nevada, and Washington.
Americans are a compassionate people, especially where family and loved ones are concerned.
And medical marijuana has in numerous studies commissioned by both individual states and the federal government been proven to be effective as a long-term treatment for pain.
Doesn’t anyone in Washington read these studies?
If they did, the Justice Department would not be harassing the growers of medical marijuana nor would the DEA be banning all foods manufactured with hemp grain.
This latest insanity reclassifies products such as pasta, tortilla chips, candy bars, nutritional bars, dietary supplements, salad dressings, sauces, cheese, ice cream, and beer which are made with or contain as one of its ingredients, hemp, as Schedule I controlled substances.
And tricky fellows that they are, the DEA published this bombshell as an "interpretive ruling", rather than as a new rule, thus bypassing the legal requirement for public notice and comment.
Claiming their actions are necessary to "protect the public health and safety", the DEA contends that hemp food products have always been illegal and that this new ruling was intended to just clarify that fact.
Hemp food has been produced and safely consumed in this country for over 200 years and is use worldwide without any adverse health effects.
Exempt from this new ruling are products that "do not cause THC to enter the human body", such as paper, cloth, and rope.
Raw hemp fiber is legal, but unprocessed hemp stalks are illegal.
Which means that while we can still manufacture products with it (and still is the operative word here), we are not permitted to grow it, even though the species of plant that hemp fiber is made from is not the one that people smoke to get high.
Tell me where the logic is there.
Personal care products, such as lotions, soap, shampoo, and lip balm are legal for now, while the DEA searches for evidence that these products can cause trace amounts of THC to enter the body.
And you can bet that the do-gooders in DC are looking.
Where will this insanity end?
Is it going to take Barbara or George HW Senior, contracting some too- horrible-to-name disease and seeking refuge in a marijuana haze for it to get through that all too thick skull of George W, that maybe his minions time is better spent protecting Americas interest’s at home and abroad from people that wish us ill, than from making criminals out of the sick and the dying?
The latest word out of DC is that Ashcroft is all saddled up and planning further federal raids.
Haven’t decent American citizens had enough of this man yet?
With tons of first class losers out their to prosecute, such as the terrorists, the executives of Enron, Arthur Anderson and those pedophile priests doesn’t the Attorney General have better things to do than to turn the massive resources of the US Government against those who use pot for medicinal reasons?
Of course I seriously question the capability of Ashcroft, beaten in his bid for the Senate by a dead man, to be Attorney General, or for that matter to hold any sensitive role in government.
I know the drill; he’s on the team to placate the religious right, but enough already.
W, if your listening, make him Human Services Secretary, or the Secretary of the Interior, or something more benign where he doesn’t have his own private army of investigators and prosecutors all chomping at the bit to earn headlines and willing to further his ultra right wing agenda.
Granted, the medical marijuana constituency is a small minority.
But it is quite often a well-heeled one whose voice grows more vocal as the age wave of our generation inches higher.
They will be heard at election time.
And the number of states that have codified their acceptance of medical marijuana continues to grow.
Could this be the issue that crystallizes the issue of States Rights?
Can Washington afford to find out?
Would it hurt them to back off and leave the sick and the dying to find solace and relief where ever they can find it?
I don’t believe it would. And I know there are others out there who feel the same.
Any other action is immoral, and doesn’t do justice to the greatest nation in the world.
But that’s just the opinion of a recovering liberal.
Through his company Galtymore Media, Mr. Donovan Creates and Executive Produces Documentary Programming for various Cable Television Networks.
He lives in Orange County, California, just up the road from Richard Nixons bones
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