Gyroscopic Investing

Did anyone else watch the CNN special on medical marijuana? I had it on my DVR and watched it last night.

A big part of the story focused on a 5-year-old girl born with a severe form of epilepsy who had reached a point where she was having 300 seizures a week, almost every 30 minutes and was in a near catatonic state in between. She was treated with all sorts of drugs to no avail until her parents decided to take the drastic step of giving her marijuana. Fortunately, she lived in Colorado and they were able to find a strain with a low amount of THC but a high amount of some other substance that is known to help prevent seizures. Results were dramatic and immediate. She now lives a near-normal life with only about one seizure a week.

Another segment was about a facility in Israel where they are doing extensive studies on using marijuana to treat cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy and, most interesting of all, old people in nursing homes who had lost the will to live. Results, again, were dramatic.

Then they turned to some of our federal government health bureaucrats to get their reaction. Results highly predictable. Didn't even want to hear about it.

The tide seems to be slowly turning in favor of legalization but the hard-core drug warriors are still running the show. I recall that one of Mitt Romney's campaign promises was to crack down on the use of medical marijuana. I couldn't help but wonder if that five year old girl would be alive today if he had been elected.

I really just don't get it. Do all of these people want to go back to the days of alcohol prohibition, too? The parallels are so stark that I have difficulty understanding the position of hardcore drug warrior types who love their booze.

These anti-pot Nancy Reagan groupies remind me a bit of those prosecutors who still go after people they have convicted even after DNA evidence definitively shows that they convicted the wrong person.

The fact that we are talking about burning a plant and inhaling the smoke makes the whole discussion seem especially absurd.

As I have noted before, if the aliens visited our planet and saw the criminal justice bureaucracy that has grown up around keeping people from inhaling the smoke from the combustion of this plant, I am sure they would be bewildered.

The fact that alcohol is legal just makes the whole current situation seem even more ridiculous.

We read in history books about how they used to burn "witches" at the stake and we congratulate ourselves on how much more civilized we are, and then we go out and yank people off the street who are inhaling smoke from a plant, take their money and either lock them up or place them under governmental supervision for years.  How far removed from witch burning is that?

I have talked with police officers on many occasions about this topic and they LOVE marijuana because it's such an easy type of arrest to make.  It's common enough that there is a pretty good chance you will find it by stopping someone who meets a certain profile, and the risk to the officer in making such an arrest is very small because people who are stoned are not typically violent or aggressive.  Cops joke about the topic a lot, probably because they know as well as everyone else that what they are doing is a stupid waste of law enforcement resources, but like anyone who is insecure in their position, I think they fear that there wouldn't be enough real law enforcement work to be done if "cop make work" programs like marijuana prohibition ended.

What I don't understand is why all the people interested in performing research into the medical benefits of medical marijuana don't just move over to someplace in Europe where it's legal and continue their research there.  You'd think that it would be pretty easy to get a grant for that kind of research in the EU if the results are as promising as the stories I've seen lead me to believe. 

Regardless of whether medical marijuana is a marvel or a dud, let the science prove it out.  A huge portion of our medicines are developed from exploiting compounds found in nature.  It absolutely boggles my mind that the government could classify pot such that it's illegal even to exploit it for medical research.  RESEARCH, not even to smoke.  Even if all you wanted to do was to try and figure out how to extract or replicate the compounds that occur in the plant naturally that may have some beneficial effect other than THC, my understanding is that it is illegal without federal approval (which is difficult) and then you have to use special "research grade" pot, which is apparently hard to get.  Thanks Federal Bureaucracy!

It would be nice if this kind of success at treating severe epilepsy were documented, verified, and then publicized.  I'd love to see some politicians cornered with "Why do you want to force small children to suffer 300 seizures per week instead of relaxing marijuana medical research laws or legalizing pot?"

Of course since the base of the politician food pyramid is "souls of the young and helpless", the question probably wouldn't have quite the impact I'd hope for.

It's sad and hypocritical that in the realm of drug legalization, the only arguments that seem to carry any weight are utilitarian ones. I.e., we argue that marijuana should be legalized because it can have a medical benefit for certain people in certain situations when absolutely nothing else works. Ethical and moral arguments regarding personal freedom? Pssshhh, get outta here with that nonsense, hippie.

The reason I say it's hypocritical is because the real reason the vast majority of marijuana advocates want to legalize marijuana has nothing to do with one little 5-year-old girl with epilepsy. It has to do with personal freedom. Certain people feel there's just something inherently wrong with someone else telling them they can't inhale the smoke of a certain plant. That's the real motivation. But what everybody debates in the mainstream media is whether marijuana has unique medical benefits or not. Evidently only utilitarian arguments are allowed to tip the scales when it comes to deciding whether a drug should be legal or illegal.

RuralEngineer wrote: What I don't understand is why all the people interested in performing research into the medical benefits of medical marijuana don't just move over to someplace in Europe where it's legal and continue their research there.

As far as I know, there is currently not a single country where weed is legal. That may be about to change, although not in Europe.

Libertarian666 wrote:

RuralEngineer wrote: What I don't understand is why all the people interested in performing research into the medical benefits of medical marijuana don't just move over to someplace in Europe where it's legal and continue their research there.

As far as I know, there is currently not a single country where weed is legal. That may be about to change, although not in Europe.

Interesting.  According to Wikipedia there are a few countries in Europe where marijuana is listed as "Illegal (decriminalized)," such as the Netherlands.  Officially it is illegal, but it's openly sold in coffee shops without criminal penalties for personal use.  Italy is listed as another one. 

However, the only country listed as having a complete absence of any law regulating the use of marijuana is....wait for it.....North Korea.  It's not even classified as a drug there, again, per Wikipedia.  Uruguay has apparently allowed you to possess weed for personal use, but banned the sale.  Their House of Representatives just passed a law to legalized the sale of marijuana in July, but it hasn't yet become a law.

interesting anecdote about north korea:  the plant grows along the roads, particularly in the northern area close the Chinese border.  I remember having seen bushes that would go for a 100 feet in the ditch along the road and at some places it would reach 10 feet high.

I even took a picture of a colleague standing on the road, I was actually more interested in the background... I will look for the picture one day, scan and post it.

One day I could nt resist and asked a north korean guy: hey what is that plant? any particular use?  I was attentive to his non verbal reaction.  He just replied nothing, just a bad weed. I believe he had no idea about its potential. 

I could then not help thinking that it was probably like that a 100 years ago in most of north america where we find a similar climate. Nowadays it is largely gone as a bad weed growing wildly in the country side :-)

There is now a petition in Florida to put a medical marijuana initiative on the ballot in 2014 and it has over 100,000 signatures so far. If it succeeds I might actually be motivated to go to the polls and vote for the first time in many years. There has been some evidence uncovered that marijuana helps in the prevention and treatment of Alzheimer's disease so maybe seniors like me will go to the polls and vote for it.

I think the reason we resort to utilitarian arguments rather than arguing on the basis of personal freedom is because we know that the freedom arguments simply don't register with drug war hawks. For a perfect example of a conservative thinker without a single libertarian bone in his body all you have to do is listen to Bill O'Reilly. I've never seen anybody get so riled up by the subject. The other day he went apoplectic about Holder's statements regarding enforcement arguing that we needed to get even more serious and become like Singapore (isn't that one of the countries where you can get the death penalty?).  In the minds of people like him, medical marijuana is a slippery slope and if we continue down it we will end up as a nation of pot-heads and it will mean the end of America as we know it. Unfortunately, I don't think the utilitarian arguments even register that much with people of this ilk. I think many of them, including Mitt Romney, would even deny the 5-year-old girl with epilepsy the use of marijuana using  the rationalization that it was for the greater good of society.

When you look at all of the ugly side-effects from the medicine cabinet that doctors prescribe today just so that their patients can deal with reality without freaking out, it's just one more reason to be sad that a plant with virtually no negative side effects that can help people chill out is illegal.

MediumTex wrote: When you look at all of the ugly side-effects from the medicine cabinet that doctors prescribe today just so that their patients can deal with reality without freaking out, it's just one more reason to be sad that a plant with virtually no negative side effects that can help people chill out is illegal.

I hope you don't think that it is a coincidence that the most valuable medicinal plant in the world is illegal everywhere.

Libertarian666 wrote:

MediumTex wrote: When you look at all of the ugly side-effects from the medicine cabinet that doctors prescribe today just so that their patients can deal with reality without freaking out, it's just one more reason to be sad that a plant with virtually no negative side effects that can help people chill out is illegal.

I hope you don't think that it is a coincidence that the most valuable medicinal plant in the world is illegal everywhere.

If you tweak the following exchange from Tropic Thunder, it captures the sentiment almost perfectly:

Tugg Speedman: "There were times while I was participating in marijuana prohibition where I felt..."

[pause]

Tugg Speedman: "...retarded. Like, really retarded."

Kirk Lazarus: "Damn!"

Tugg Speedman: "In a weird way I had to sort of just free myself up to believe that is was ok to be stupid or dumb."

Kirk Lazarus: "To be a moron."

Tugg Speedman: "Yeah!"

Kirk Lazarus: "To be moronical."

Tugg Speedman: "Exactly, to be a moron."

Kirk Lazarus: "An imbecile."

Tugg Speedman: "Yeah!"

Kirk Lazarus: "Like the dumbest mother fucker that ever lived."

Tugg Speedman: [pause] "When I was participating in marijuana prohibition."

You'd all enjoy Peter McWilliam's book on prohibition and consensual crimes:

http://www.buildfreedom.com/content/books/aint_nobodys/

He examines the history of marijuana/cannabis laws in detail.  It turns out that the main motivation wasn't to protect people from getting high, it was to outlaw hemp production.  There are many uses for the cannabis plant besides medicine, and hemp paper production is a huge one.  No more clear cutting forests to produce junk mail.

Moving to Europe or Israel in order to do medical research is a lot easier said than done, but I for one would dearly love to see the FDA approving a clinical trial of cannabis for epilepsy in the near future.  We have more drugs available today than 20 years ago, but many have potential side effects that are far worse than "getting high" (like permanent vision loss or bone marrow suppression).  And because the effectiveness of the drugs for an individual patient is highly variable, it's always good to have as many options as possible.

CA PP wrote: interesting anecdote about north korea:  the plant grows along the roads, particularly in the northern area close the Chinese border.  I remember having seen bushes that would go for a 100 feet in the ditch along the road and at some places it would reach 10 feet high.

I even took a picture of a colleague standing on the road, I was actually more interested in the background... I will look for the picture one day, scan and post it.

One day I could nt resist and asked a north korean guy: hey what is that plant? any particular use?  I was attentive to his non verbal reaction.  He just replied nothing, just a bad weed. I believe he had no idea about its potential. 

I could then not help thinking that it was probably like that a 100 years ago in most of north america where we find a similar climate. Nowadays it is largely gone as a bad weed growing wildly in the country side :-)

North Korea is always short of foreign exchange; I think you just let them realize their true cash crop.

They (or at least their dear leaders) could be rich!  Fat chance.

smurff wrote:

CA PP wrote: interesting anecdote about north korea:  the plant grows along the roads, particularly in the northern area close the Chinese border.  I remember having seen bushes that would go for a 100 feet in the ditch along the road and at some places it would reach 10 feet high.

I even took a picture of a colleague standing on the road, I was actually more interested in the background... I will look for the picture one day, scan and post it.

One day I could nt resist and asked a north korean guy: hey what is that plant? any particular use?  I was attentive to his non verbal reaction.  He just replied nothing, just a bad weed. I believe he had no idea about its potential. 

I could then not help thinking that it was probably like that a 100 years ago in most of north america where we find a similar climate. Nowadays it is largely gone as a bad weed growing wildly in the country side :-)

North Korea is always short of foreign exchange; I think you just let them realize their true cash crop.

They (or at least their dear leaders) could be rich!  Fat chance.

To foment rebellion in North Korea, the U.S. should ship a bunch of 1970s-era Trans Ams and Camaros, along with crates of classic rock albums, and just let the weed take care of the rest.

I'm imagining checking in on things a couple of years later and finding a North Korean George Washington leading the rebellion from the front seat of his black Trans Am with "Free Bird" blasting out of his speakers and a bumper sticker on the back that read "My other car is a Sovet-era missile launcher."

RuralEngineer wrote: Interesting.  According to Wikipedia there are a few countries in Europe where marijuana is listed as "Illegal (decriminalized)," such as the Netherlands.  Officially it is illegal, but it's openly sold in coffee shops without criminal penalties for personal use.  Italy is listed as another one. 

It seems to me that any US college/university campus is like that too, "decriminalized". How often do college students get arrested for smoking pot (or drinking alcohol for that matter)? Especially as long as they're not black...

MediumTex wrote: To foment rebellion in North Korea, the U.S. should ship a bunch of 1970s-era Trans Ams and Camaros, along with crates of classic rock albums, and just let the weed take care of the rest.

I'm imagining checking in on things a couple of years later and finding a North Korean George Washington leading the rebellion from the front seat of his black Trans Am with "Free Bird" blasting out of his speakers and a bumper sticker on the back that read "My other car is a Sovet-era missile launcher."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7x-Bs_u1H6E