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May 02, 2011

Humanity’s New Reality?

Yesterday’ somewhat disjointed entry was interrupted by the announcement of bin Laden’s death before I could make my somewhat tortuous point: cannabis prohibition’s complex legislative history, which NORML’s founders had no way of knowing in 1970, had obviously blinded them to the dishonesty they would be encountering from NIDA and the DEA for the simple reason that those agencies were created after NORML. Thus NIDA with its Congressional mandate to only fund research that favored policy, also had the tactical advantage of being able to counter “reform” arguments without revealing their own considerable ignorance. Meanwhile clinical research on actual users was literally impossible because they had been decreed to be both "criminals" and "recreational" users by Anslinger's machinations in 1937 years before the CSA had even been thought of.

When my study began in 2001, the Controlled Substances Act had compiled an extensive track record of failure deeply rooted in that same ignorance. It was also being provoked into fresh errors by Big Pharma’s burgeoning interest in endocannabinoids and pot’s expanding medical market. As I would finally, learn, there are surprising gaps in the clinical knowledge of both sides, tending to confirm the general lack of clinical research other than the standard student surveys.

But there’s still lots of time to point out those errors. What I‘d like to focus on today is the weather, which I see as further confirmation of a dangerous warming trend and another example of how intrinsic human dishonesty has set us up for disaster.

Neither natural disasters nor their consequences are under political control; beyond a certain magnitude, they are also almost impossible to ignore. We may have a lot of floods and tornadoes in our immediate future at a time when money for rebuilding is scarce, the fed is tapped out, and energy prices are going through the roof.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at May 2, 2011 04:22 PM

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