January 23, 2012

With Friends Like This...

If only NORML lawyers would stop playing doctor; when they do, they give aid and comfort to the DEA, one of a very few organizations even more clueless than their own. After over eight years of biting my tongue when cannabis reform "allies" pontificate about "legitimate" medical use, I'm finally breaking my silence to address complaints aired by one Norm Kent, an attorney, NORML board member, and talk radio host in the current Counterpunch. Kent complains that,”Flaws in the California system have allowed critics to expose that access to marijuana has not been legitimately reserved for those who are ill,” Oh, yeah, Norm? What medical school did you go to? How many years of residency have you done? How many medical histories have you taken from sick people? Do you think three years of law school and smoking dope for about 30 makes you an expert on the medical uses of cannabis, even if you are also a lymphoma survivor? For that matter, what do you know about the disgraceful role your own profession has played in creating, enabling, and enforcing America's abominable “war” on drugs. After all, when Harry Anslinger's fatuous Marijuana Tax Act was struck down by the Supremes in 1969, it was an AG named John Mitchell who dreamed up the medically indefensible “Schedule One” and his crony, the insecure Richard Nixon who protected it against revision (it should never have seen the light of day). Oh yes, it was also NORML's founder who scotched any chance of reclassification by a favorably disposed Carter Administration by spitefully alleging that his drug adviser had snorted coke at the 1977 NORML Christmas party. Way to go, guys.

It’s too bad your world is so disorderly that people who should have known that NORML’s strategy of “regulation through medicalization” required all but “legitimate” patients (like yourself) to refrain from selfishly seeking a recommendation for themselves on the mistaken notion that their severe panic attacks, seizure disorders, or debilitating migraines aren't all that serious, especially if they also look healthy from across the street.

I could go on, but you obviously know enough about medical use of cannabis from your own experience that you don’t have to familiarize yourself with the benefits it confers on victims of PTSD, young girls molested by relatives as children, or soldiers who’ve been repeatedly deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan and are prevented by both regulations and random drug testing from smoking cannabis. Too bad they are thus prone to drink excessively, beat their wives, and/or commit suicide between deployments.

You also obviously don’t know that NORML hasn’t lifted a finger to help disseminate my data, which ties the huge surge in the domestic pot market that began in the Sixties to the millions of baby boomers who were discovering the anxiolytic benefits of inhaled cannabis by getting “high,” as teens in that same era. I can see also from your wikipedia bio that you are a gay male who was born into the leading edge of the Baby boom, went to law school and has long been active in both NORML and talk radio. (also that you were a doper before being treated for the lymphoma). That’s enough info for me to make some reasonably accurate guesses about your drug initiation history and important family relationships. I could probably surprise you with what I know about you, but I also surmise from what you've written that you will probably be more comfortable pretending you never saw this.

By the way, all the questions raised in your Counterpunch article have only one answer: the drug war, as it has been enforced under the Controlled Substances Act had effectively blocked unbiased clinical research on users of any "drug of abuse" until Proposition 215 enabled an unbiased study of pot applicants. When I began taking applicant histories, I didn't know that my fellow pot docs were more interested in selling their signatures than in clinical research or that the majority of lawyers and policy wonks would be so confident in their clinical judgement about "valid" use. To say nothing of the stubborn dishonesty of federal drug police and US Attorneys.

BTW, you shouldn't have been so tough on President Obama. He's a post boomer who never knew his own dad, has admitted trying weed, getting high, and snorting coke, as well as having to struggle to quit cigarettes. He fits my profile so closely, so he might just be persuadable if he weren't also a lawyer and a prisoner of ambient drug war rhetoric.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 04:59 AM | Comments (0)

January 13, 2012

Error Correction

When the last entry was posted, I confused the terms "pharmacodynamic" and "pharmacokinetic," for which I apologize. The error has been corrected. The distinction is more than academic, because my criticism was based on significant differences between how lipophilic cannabinoids (fat soluble) reach their receptors and how water soluble "drugs of abuse" reach theirs. As noted in my posting, those differences are clinically significant, but have yet to be clearly addressed by either side in the "debate" over medical applications of cannabinoids that's been raging since 1972.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 05:21 PM | Comments (0)

January 11, 2012

The "Edible" difference, an analysis for the DEA to choke on

When cannabinoids are smoked, they are transported- almost in real time- to the brain, a phenomenon immediately appreciated by those who have have been able to get “high” on smoke at least once, as a sudden feeling that the world is somehow less oppressive than it was seconds earlier, i.e. that they are about to enter a controllable anxiolytic state. As explained earlier, there must be an as-yet unidentified population of cannabis aspirants who disobeyed the law by smoking the forbidden weed on one or more occasions, but were unable to get high.

Since federal drug policy minders have never acknowledged their existence, those unsuccessful initiators are unlikely confess their unlawful attempts unless they are really dumb as well as unlucky.

Because passage of a Draconian omnibus prohibition law, a.k.a. The Controlled Substances Act of 1970, had clearly been in response to the Supreme Court's nullification of the 1937 Marijuana Tax Act, the same absence of scientific scrutiny that existed in 1937 was applied to the CSA, thus the concept of hemp prohibition has never received any scientific (or even critical) scrutiny from within the federal bureaucracy. Beyond that, the idea that prohibition laws simply don't work has always been implicitly denied by modern feds who insist their policy is one of control.

Since the MTA also effectively scotched all production and consumption of “hemp,” (except for wartime emergency duty) the MTA also eliminated the troublesome environmental protection that might have accrued from the multiple other products never produced. The only crying over that spilled milk was an underground classic that has so far, been successfully ignored by the “straight” world.

Back to edibles: since the stomach and the gut digest everything presented to them and those (unknown) digestion products reach the blood stream via an entirely different route than smoked cannabinoids, it thus follows that two never-studied processes affect edibles: first, are the unknown breakdown products of cannabinoid digestion within the intestine. Second are the (unstudied) metabolites produced by their processing in the liver (because unlike inhaled cannabinoids, they enter the blood stream through the hepatic portal circulation, which, as its name implies, goes directly to the liver.

Difficult as it is for me to believe, I seem to be the first to note the pharmacokinetic differences between inhaled and orally ingested cannabinoids. Certainly I have been looking for such descriptions for a few years and have yet to found any. It occurs to me the main reasons for the silence of peer-reviewed literature on the subject may be: 1) the illegality of "marijuana," and 2) the reluctance of researchers to embarrass the drug war's notoriously protective federal agencies. Of course there's also their insistence that a "semisynthetic" analog of THC ( Marinol) the feds paid to develop is safer and more effective than the illegal natural product. Then, there's the entirely unsolicited FDA advisory that "marijuana" couldn't possibly be medicine because it had to be smoked!

If there's a better explanation of either the pharmacokinetic differences I've noted or the failure of either scientific and popular publications to tackle the touchy subject, I'd like to hear/read about them.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 11:32 PM | Comments (0)