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August 13, 2013
Dr. Gupta and the AG: an historic one-two punch
Richard Nixon’s Drug War just sustained two historic setbacks within 48 hours. The first was when Neurosurgeon Sanjay Gupta, CNN's highly regarded "media doctor," said unequivocally in a Sunday evening documentary called WEED, that cannabis is medicine and backed it up with before-and- after video of en engaging toddler having non-stop seizures who became almost seizure free on oral cannabis after conventional treatment had failed. It was an anecdote that didn't surprise me; I have signed "recommendations" for several patients with similar stories, although none were so young or dramatically afflicted.Nor is it new. Valerie Corral, was a young woman who survived a serious head injury in 1973, but was left with disabling seizures controlled only by cannabis. She became an icon for medical marijuana after her grow was spotted by a sheriff's helicopter 20 years later. Her fascinating story is told by sociologist Wendy Chapkis and reporter Richard Webb in Dying to get High, which also reveals how malevolently the DEA, Nixon's federal drug police can enforce his Controlled Substances Act.
I now compare the DEA to the Gestapo and Hitler's Nuremberg laws to Nixon's CSA. Both were created by national leaders suffering from the same emotional disorder I've discovered is responsible for the sudden success of "marijuana," an herbal remedy that had been readily available in America as "hemp," but had remained relatively unknown to the public until it was discovered by the leading edge of the Hippie movement in the early Sixties, one of whom was LSD guru Timothy Leary.
In the forty years since Leary's remarkable adventures provoked Mitchell and Nixon into their ignorant transformation of Anslinger's shoddy Marijuana Tax Act into a truly disastrous law, there has been so much fear generated by the DEA and NIDA, the drug war's designated enforcers and liars, that the "truth" of anything written about hemp, marijuana cannabis is always suspect.
To paraphrase a popular world war 2 adage: never have so many profiteers told so many lies to so many dupes on behalf of so many control freaks for such devious reasons.
The second attack on drug war was when AG Eric Holder finally agreed that our bloated Incarceration Industry needs to be trimmed down to size. The whole criminal justice system has become so dependent on illegal drugs that the nation may never fully recover; but we'll never know if we don't try.
The only bright spot for me is that Holder is a pal of our toker-in-chief, so he must have cleared the move with Barack in advance. The major problem, of course, is the number of jobs that depend on continuing Nixon's unaffordable and (unwinnable) war.
Doctor Tom
Posted by tjeffo at August 13, 2013 04:21 PM