Web Log of Dr. Tom O'Connell

June 29, 2008

Why this Blog? (an update from July 5, 2005)

Note: What follows is a rewrite of the July 5 2005 entry. It's intended to enhance the longitudinal quality implicit in any blog as a (unique) kind of accessible public journal.

This blog will focus on a conundrum that has developed since California passed its unique "medical marijuana" law (Prop 215) in 1996. Although in effect for over eight years, recent developments- including the execrable US Supreme Court, Raich "decision" and yet another overwhelming vote against a Congressional attempt to rein in the DEA, (the Hinchey Rohrabacher Amendment) demonstrate that the strategy of drug war opponents (using sympathy for medical use as a political tool) is still grossly unsuccessful at the federal level. In the past, that was arguably because supporters of the drug war had enjoyed such great success in preventing meaningful scrutiny of their policy; but an alarming new development,: rejection by the organized "drug reform" movement of credible evidence that federal policy has been both egregiously dishonest and indefensibly destructive, is now helping the feds avoid the kind of scrutiny needed to indict the drug war in the only court that matters: public opinion.

In that connection, it's important to realize that in 1969, newly elected President Nixon's "drug war" was a radical expansion of what had been a long-standing, but small and unimportant (in terms of the size of existing illegal markets), policy. Nixon's drug war, as implemented by the Controlled Substances Act of 1970, represented a huge legislative expansion of what had really been a carefully protected sixty-five year policy failure. The CSA quickly allowed drug policy supporters at the federal level enhanced control of drug-related research while simultaneously allowing them to conduct a tax supported propaganda campaign on behalf of their version of the truth: Although ostensibly one of Public Health aimed at protecting careless teens from addiction, the policy had taken diagnostic and therapeutic decisions away from physicians through Supreme Court decisions upholding the Harrison Act of 1914, thus leaving future control of "addiction" to police, prosecutors, and judges for the indefinite future. Both that power and the false sense of control promised by federal policy were greatly increased by Nixon's dug war, as implemented by the CSA in 1970. What (finally) allows some contrary opinions in the ever-contentious drug policy arena is information gathered from thousands of California pot smokers in compliance with Proposition 215. The new law relied on licensed physicians to evaluate those requesting a patient designation; the feds literally created cannabis evaluations as a (suspect) new specialty by immediately threatening any doctor trying to do so. Subsequent developments seriously impeded the ability of applicants to access compliant physicians while also reducing the willingness of both groups to publicly acknowledge such encounters; let alone reveal whatever personal information had been either sought or disclosed.

To cut to the chase; by late 2001, conditions in the Bay Area had devolved in such a way that it was obvious to me that most of the applicants trying to convince me they were "legitimate" pot users were claiming some form of chronic pain relief because they thought it would be their best tactic. They simply hadn't known (as I hadn't) how receptive I'd be to data suggesting that the same emotional symptoms that had made anxiolytics, mood stabilizers, and anti-depressants Big Pharma's most lucrative products had also inspired the modern pot market .

In other words, what I intuited from those early patient encounters was that inhaled pot had long been treating emotional symptoms more safely and effectively than Prozac, Paxil, Ritalin, or Adderall when those agents first came on the market. Analysis of patient responses, still incomplete, has now progressed to a point where it allows some very pejorative conclusions about pot prohibition itself and also casts serious doubt on any substance prohibition as responsible public policy.

A report, written in December, 2004 for the Winter/Spring 2005 O'Shaughnessy's, is still accurate. It was updated by "peer reviewed" publication of similar data from over 4000 applicants in 2007. What is even more recent is my evolving understanding of the rejection with which "reformers" greeted both articles. While not exactly positive, that experience was has proven as important as the data itself for the implications it allows; not only as to why drug policy evolved into a public policy monster, but also why our species may now be poised on the edge of an abyss of it own making.

I hope to continue commenting frankly on why I believe current observations should impact drug policy politics, and will not be shy in identifying both opposing opinions and those venturing them. However, I will try to deal only with the opinions themselves, and then only in settings where authorship is unmistakable.

Readers who disagree are, of course, free to e-mail me. If enough interest develops , a public forum might result.

Doctor Tom tjeffo@comcast.net

Posted by tjeffo at 07:59 PM | Comments (0)

June 28, 2008

Notes on the Modern Human Dilemma:1

Although we humans are the only cognitive species and the recent enhancement of those cognitive powers through the “discovery” of empirical science about five centuries ago greatly accelerated our ability to create wealth and expand our numbers, it now also seems probable that uncritical exploitation of the technology produced by Science, has, in the absence of appropriate political leadership, already created several species-wide problems from which escape will be difficult, if not impossible.

Precisely because I’m so aware that such doom and gloom thinking has very little appeal, and also because my own acceptance of key false assumptions responsible for our present dilemma retarded my own recognition of those problems, I will attempt to illustrate them by comparing two real doomsday scenarios: one humanity has already avoided late in the Twentieth Century, albeit with little recognition of the risks then faced. The other one is facing us today.

Unfortunately, because global political leadership clearly hasn’t yet understood how lucky we were last century, nor that the mechanism by which we avoided disaster is no longer available, our modern problems are even more urgent.

In its own way, the Cuban Missile Crisis recapitulates the Cold War: the Soviet Union and its allies, always noticeably more willing to take risks, also took on the West under American leadership in a game of Nuclear chicken after World War Two. That game brought the world closest to a global nuclear war in October 1962 when a daring Soviet ploy succeeded in landing a formidable force of nuclear weapons within easy striking distance of the US mainland. US detection at that point placed President Kennedy and Premier Kruschev into crucial one-on one negotiations with the potential of creating Nuclear Winter two decades before that catastrophe had even been defined. We now know that both men had to reject the hawkish advice of key military advisers and that neither man would emerge intact: Kennedy was assassinated 13 months later, and Kruschev’s fall from political power a year after that was clearly related to the Russian loss of face in 1962.

A key modern realization is that the unique circumstances that prevailed in 1962 gave two men the power to save the world; the very different conditions prevailing today mean that significant correction of rapid climate change will require the active cooperation of billions.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 08:49 PM | Comments (0)

June 26, 2008

No Relief in Sght

As one of the worst Summers in memory grinds on, one is forced to wonder how much worse things can get; however, the casual perusal of most newspapers or just a few minutes listening to the news on CNN serves to remind us that the present cascade of bad news seems much closer to its beginning than to its end. A prime example is Zimbabwe, still caught in the tyrannical grasp of Robert Mugabe, its only ruler since the country, then Rhodesia, gained its independence in 1980. Over the intervening 28 years, Mugabe has progressed from Prime Minister in a parliamentary system to President (since 1987). Events since then confirm that although Zimbabwe, under Mugabe’s rule, has degenerated into one of the cruelest and most ludicrous dictatorships in the modern world, both the nation and its President are apparently beyond the reach of the vaunted “rule of law.”

All of which prompts me to ask a rhetorical question: so long as their presidencies remain credible within their national borders, what’s the difference between Robert Mugabe and George W. Bush?

Two other straws in the wind: In an interview seen this morning on CNN, Michael Nutter, the outspoken mayor of Philadelphia, described federal presence as “invisible,” in his city's growing housing crisis. When I tuned in to CNN again during the noon hour, the news was interrupted by a bulletin reporting that a high ranking federal police official in Mexico had just been gunned down in a restaurant while having lunch with his bodyguard. Apparently, the public execution was in response to the planned extradition a leading drug dealer for trial to the US.

Shades of Colombia in the Twentieth Century... are we winning yet?

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 10:05 PM | Comments (0)

June 25, 2008

A Personal Opinion

A cascade of recent developments has persuaded me that it’s now time to publish the following indictment of the drug war, which can also double as a tentative diagnosis of the evolutionary flaw that has propelled humanity into a dangerous state of denial. Like the rest of this blog, it’s based on a real time analysis of facts being gathered and analyzed on the fly out of a growing sense of urgency. It’s also become my considered opinion that the urgency isn’t misplaced and may be confirmed in the relatively near future, perhaps even before November.

Three glaring reasons to question the legitimacy of the Marijuana Tax Act that Harry Anslinger persuaded a bored Congress to pass by voice vote in 1937, were the deceptive transfer tax gimmick by which the criminal prohibition of all hemp products was to be implemented, the absence of any credible medical evidence supporting it, and the luridly improbable nature of its “reefer madness” propaganda.

Whether Anslinger’s real purpose in banning hemp was pleasing the rich friends of Andrew Mellon, his political sponsor (and wife’s uncle), or protecting his Federal Narcotics Bureau from a rumored reorganization planned by Henry Morgenthau, Mellon’s successor as Treasury Secretary, is moot. Certainly whatever dangers “reefer” posed for American teens were largely imaginary because its relatively few hip devotees were considerably beyond teen age and demand for it was not growing.

While establishing a negative is somewhat more difficult than for a positive, it’s also abundantly clear from the prolonged media silence on marijuana throughout World War Two and the Korean conflict that young American draftees weren’t getting high in either the Forties or Fifties, despite the potentially lucrative market that had been enabled in 1937. Clearly, what was lacking during the thirty years between the Summers of 1937 and the Summer of Love in 1967 was the discovery of pot’s appeal to the Baby Boomers my study reveals were the first youthful generation to try it in large numbers during adolescence. As such, they were also the first buyers and suppliers in what would gradually mature into today’s multi-billion dollar colossus.

The logical implications of that delayed appeal of marijuana for youth, the subsequent inexorable growth of its illegal market despite an increasingly punitive drug war, and the revelation that a substantial fraction of its original youthful initiates are seeking to use it medically are straightforward: the domestic American policy embraced by UN treaty and protected from critical scrutiny by the same mechanisms employed in the US is a woeful failure. If the highest levels of world leadership are capable of such flagrant denial, how likely is it that our species can avoid the worst effects of the global climate change we are now experiencing(and clearly don't want to acknowledge) ?

Or, given the UN's demonstrated propensity for denial in the matter of drug policy, how likely is it that the multiple “peace processes” it has implemented and re-implemented since its founding in 1945 will ever succeed?

The specific reasons for the thirty year delay in pot market development being overlooked were, like the delay itself, only evident from analysis of demographics collected from the aging baby boomers who constituted the first large contingent of older applicants currently seeking medical marijuana “recommendations” under the aegis of Proposition 215. That the amalgam of federal and state officials, plus the various law enforcement agencies that have remained united in opposition to implementation of the proposition for nearly a dozen years, had no access to my data indicates how automatic and pervasive is our (human) tendency to deny any and all “inconvenient truth.”

As of today, the jury is still out on whether those revelations of sustained market growth since the First Nixon Administration declared “war” on drugs will persuade enough drug policy “experts” to acknowledge the drug war’s many failures and consider either repeal or radical revision of the policy itself.

Perhaps the most ironic development of all has been the stubborn rejection of solid evidence by a medical marijuana community that has pretended not to hear it for at least four years, a position even more ludicrous than continued federal insistence that their prohibition is both rational and successful. Considered together, both the federal and reform positions tend to confirm two worrisome implications: the first is that denial has long been the preferred mechanism by which our cognitive species avoids painful reality. The second is that its routine use to avoid unpleasant reality may have already painted our species into a very tight corner.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 07:08 PM | Comments (0)

June 22, 2008

More on Ernest Becker

A few days ago, I related how my increasing focus on the importance of denial as an important human coping strategy had led me to cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker, whom I’d never even heard of before. I’ve now had time to read about half of The Denial of Death, the work Becker completed while on his own death bed in 1973, one for which he is best known and received a 1974 Pulitzer prize.

I’ve now read enough of it to discover that although Becker and I had come to an almost identical conclusion about denial, namely that fear of death seems to play a major (and generally unacknowledged) role in human motivation, we got there from quite different points of departure, and by very different means. Another discovery was that Becker’s own short life provides evidence supporting another conclusion I've been closing in on: that the generation into which we are born plays an important role in shaping the constantly changing intellectual substrate of human history. Thus any understanding of how history itself has evolved is made even more difficult for reasons I will introduce toward the end of this entry and develop more fully at a later date.

To return to Becker, the subject of denial, and how he and I differ: he turns out to be a Freudian maverick who was also heavily influenced by some maverick Nineteenth Century philosophers as well. Although Becker makes frequent use of the terms clinical and science, he does not employ them the way I would, and although we were born less than a decade apart, his military service in World War Two, his early death in 1973, the flowering of his academic career during the tumultuous Sixties, would have, if considered in conjunction with my own late-bloomer chronology, served to focus us on two very different eras. For him, it was clearly the first half of the Twentieth Century; for me, it's been the second half plus the first decade of this one. The critical dividing line of the Sixties played an important role for both of us: Becker career was directly affected in ways he never had an opportunity to either process or respond to. On the other hand, I've had almost forty years to catch up with the Sixties and a unique opportunity to debrief the casualties of Nixon's drug war. That said, some of Becker’s penetrating insights are timeless and stated in such arresting prose that I can readily understand why they caught and held the attention of a cluster of influential contemporaries who have been subsequently moved to create a foundation honoring his work that, even as this is written, is preparing to meet in Seattle to continue discussing his influence.

As for me, although I’ve only just discovered Becker (and learned he was a colleague of Thomas Szasz at Syracuse), I consider his early death a tragedy. I’m also reasonably sure he’d find his modern adulation somewhat distracting and find myself wondering instead, what more he might have contributed if he’d been blessed with Szaszian longevity. How would such a gifted intellect have adapted to the modern information age? What would be his present take on the Sixties? What he have thought about the DSM and the current pharmaceutical management of anxiety? They are but a few of the questions for which, sadly, we’ll never have Becker's answers.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 09:23 PM | Comments (0)

June 20, 2008

What If? (Personal)

Although I’m busier than ever, I did have time to get Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death into my Kindle and begin reading it. Although not exactly in the way I’d anticipated, Becker’s opus is proving both eminently readable and an extremely valuable addition to my understanding of human cognition, one I hope to be blogging about soon.

In the meantime, the news is providing an endless supply of less complicated ideas to write about, especially the pummeling we are now receiving from the weather: record heat on both coasts at the same time the Midwest is experiencing both unusual tornadoes and record flooding. As anyone with a TV set can see (and hear) for themselves, dramatic footage of widespread levee breaks and flooded farmland is accompanied by the usual saccharine voice overs focusing on the heartbreak of the victims and the noble efforts of volunteers (often also victims) to rescue their neighbors and fill sandbags.

It’s in that setting that I’m posing the following hypothetical question: suppose the Bush Administration, in its first two years in office, had taken a more rational course in the two critical areas of climate change and foreign policy? If they had heeded the warnings of a majority responsible scientists, they might have considered the potential consequences rapid climate change posed for the two areas that have been devastated by flooding since 2004: New Orleans and the Midwest. The Army Corps of Engineers has always been under their direct control, as has been funding for repair of long neglected infrastructure. The urgent repair of levees, even then recognized as inadequate, might have avoided the tragedies of Katrina and the current flood (amply foreshadowed by the Flood of 1993, which, although triggered by a different mechanism, revealed the pattern now being followed with a vengeance).

That question becomes particularly pertinent (and poignant) in the light of the manpower, fiscal, and policy bind the Bushies were warned against before invading Iraq at the behest of the intellectually dishonest Neocons, profiteers, and assorted religious whackos now dominating the modern GOP (not that the Dems offer much of an alternative).

If that sounds angry, it is. If the feds want to punish me for my impertinence, it would at least bring some long overdue attention to the damage being done by the nation’s longest running bipartisan folly, a.k.a. the War on Drugs.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 05:24 PM | Comments (0)

June 17, 2008

An Unexpected Discovery

The history of ideas, especially since the advent of scientific thought, reveals that our most important discoveries were almost entirely unexpected and were initially resisted, often savagely, by both the temporal and religious authorities of the time.

Anyone following this blog, even casually, must have noted that its recent emphasis has been on denial as a major element of human cognition; in fact the search function quickly reveals how much I’ve been complaining about denial and the degree to which I’ve been led to suspect it has become the modern world’s greatest problem, simply because our lack of focused response to disasters already in progress or looming in our immediate future may have painted us into a corner from which escape will be difficult, if not impossible.

Typically (as it turns out), just as I was beginning to think I might be the first one to have arrived at such a novel conclusion, I discovered that at least one other person has beaten me to it. Not only that, his ideas had been recognized with a Pulitzer prize in 1973. Tragically (and ironically), he then died of cancer the following year at the age of 49 and the attention of the denial-prone intelligentsia of our denial-prone world quickly shifted to more comfortable areas.

As is so often the case, the premature loss of promising intellectual leadership has probably had dire consequences, but we’ll never know. That was certainly true of my near contemporary named Ernest Becker, a man whose name was completely unknown to me, but who had already arrived at conclusions about denial eerily close to mine well over thirty five years ago, and from an entirely different starting point.

I discovered Becker and his ideas only hours ago by simply Googlng a pair of words: “denial & death.”

That’s all I have time for now: I’ll obviously be returning to Becker and his revolutionary ideas ASAP... all I need is a little time, and some sleep.

Doctor Tom
 

Posted by tjeffo at 01:03 PM | Comments (0)

June 15, 2008

E-Mail Exchange

The following e-mail exchange with a stranger took place late last year because one of my remaining allies in the “movement” put me in touch with someone he met at the NORML conference in Los Angeles
 
What follows is a composite of the e-maill he sent me (blue) and my response (red).

And yes, the disaster in Iowa continues its rapid fade from media consciousness, which continues riveted on the coming election.

On 10/15/07, J___ R_____ wrote:
I really need to talk to someone (probably a psychiatrist). I am hoping you might have recommendations about someone that would not only understand marijuana but would also know that it is possible someone can experience improved breathing using marijuana. It is also important that they understand the relief and ramifications that happen because of fuller deeper breathing. I am hoping to find someone that will  listen to my struggle with this drug. I will be 55 in Dec. and I did not start smoking cannabis until about 4 years ago. I tried it for asthma after reading about it on the Internet and reports some people had gotten significant relief. Unlike the many other asthma drugs I had taken and tried over 40 years, the marijuana gave me significant relief. Life changing relief. I could breathe in a way I never thought possible.


Dear J____,
I'm not a psychiatrist, but I am well qualified to tackle the questions you've posed, which are even more complex than you may realize. The only reason I'm so qualified is that I've been listening patiently to thousands of pot smokers seeking to use marijuana medically in California for the past six years and finally think I understand what they've been saying well enough to explain it to others; especially people like yourself who have their own reasons for being curious about a scorned illegal drug.


This did not fit my world in any way. It definitely did not fit my family's world. I am from a conservative Christian background. Please don't write me off as a mental midget or decide I can't be trusted, please. My world is upside down.

I also have come to understand some of the many ways that  the beliefs a child grows up with influence  both the emotions and thinking of the adult that child will gradually become over their first twenty-five or so years. Those attitudes seem especially dependent on two things: one is their experience at home between 4 and 12 when capacity for abstract thought is not fully developed; the other is the array of drugs available for them to try from Junior High School on.

 
I attended the NORML conference on a soul searching mission to determine how important marijuana was to me and hopefully to get information to help persuade my family that marijuana really was beneficial for me and my asthma. I have a great family. I am not only talking about my wife that I have been married to for 37 years, but my son in college in PreMed and 37 year old married daughter. I have a wonderful son in law and 4 fabulous grand kids. I also have a father and mother, and three brothers and their families that live in Amarillo. They are really great people and I love them all. They are convinced that marijuana is satanic.

What you have just described is the setting for conflict between two opposing ideas: one is that because marijuana is sinful, it can't possibly be medicine. This is not a medical idea, although the US federal government has spent literally billions of taxpayer dollars trying to convince the world it’s responsible Public Health. Their campaign has succeeded best in those areas where the kind of religious beliefs you describe are strongest.

On the other side of the conflict is knowledge that cannabis ("marijuana") a complex herbal medicine, has the ability to relieve the symptoms of a wide variety of conditions, one of which is asthma. Cannabis predictably does two things asthmatics find valuable: it directly reduces bronchospasm and also helps mobilize the sticky secretions that must be coughed up. For at least some asthmatics, it does those things  better and more predictably than the gamut of "approved" asthma medications. As with several  other debilitating illnesses, even a little bit of relief can make a huge difference in one's day-to-day ability to function.

Thus the dilemma you are hung up on is between your family's faith-based belief in an irrational policy masquerading as public health and the practical realities of the clinical pharmacology of pot.

They are wrong. If I had been in their shoes I probably would have thought the same thing. It does not appear that I am going to be able to convince them of the benefits of this medicine for me at this time. I have hope they will come around sometime in the future, although it doesn't appear to be any time soon.

I agree. The next question you have to answer for yourself is whether you are willing to defy their beliefs or will continue to suffer from symptoms that can be safely relieved.

I feel like an astronaut who returns from a trip to the moon and when he gets home, there is no one to relate to regarding the life changing experiences he has gone through. That is how I feel about my experience with marijuana.

Well put. I had a similar experience when I returned to San Francisco in August 1967, ten years after I'd come here for an internship in July '57. What I found was that the city I'd come to describe as the alcohol capital of North America had become its pot capital. How that happened in such a brief interval is the untold story of the drug war...

I have tried to figure out how to explain what I am going through. Basically with my family, it is renounce the marijuana and go forward acknowledging that mistake or lose my family.

As I said earlier, this has been a real soul searching time for me. I had to know if marijuana is worth this great a price. I have decided it is something I have to do.

You are the only one who can make that cruel choice; All I can do is give you some background. To put it as simply as possible, what adolescents who have come of age since the Baby Boom have discovered when they reach Junior High is a well developed illegal pot market that began in the late Sixties and has made pot as easily available to "kids" as alcohol and tobacco. What we know from the government's own statistics is that pot has remained third among all drugs tried by kids all over the nation. No other illegal drug comes close; either  in terms of those who try it or go on to long term use.

Nevertheless, there are many kids, often from family backgrounds like yours,  who didn't try pot, precisely because they were nurtured by loving parents. However, if they develop a medical condition helped by pot, they can  find themselves facing the difficult choice you’re struggling with now. Limited experience with others who tried pot in HS, but didn’t become “chronic” users also suggests that trying it while still a teen is like giving yourself permission to use it as medicine later on.

It appears that I am going to have to separate from my family and move to a more marijuana friendly city, and hope that in the future as more information comes out they will understand they are wrong. It is a long story regarding this path I have been traveling, but I have hope. I also know that I can live a better life than I have in the past. I can be a better kinder person. I am not a criminal and I am excited about the future. I can breathe and that is a fantastic thing to be able to do.

I am also hoping you are not wishing you had not given me your email address.

J____ R_____

I can't think of any of the 4000-plus patients I've seen in the past six years  (all seeking my recommendation to use medical marijuana) who has stated the problem any more succinctly; Cannabis is safe and effective medicine precisely because when it's inhaled, it allows for very precise user control. It also works so well against such a wide variety of symptoms that people with a limited knowledge of its clinical pharmacology and a belief that all non medical use is wrong often end up supporting the arrest and prosecution of users I know to be "legitimate".

The only antidote I know of for such political/religious ignorance is the truth.
 
Tom O'Connell MD

Posted by tjeffo at 05:59 PM | Comments (0)

June 14, 2008

Denial After the Flood

My wife is still in a local hospital, an ordeal I intend to blog about at a more appropriate time. Thus this entry is simply a follow up on yesterday and will be similarly short. What struck me most was that by this morning, such a signal event was already being minimized, even allowing for a plethora of other bad news from the nation and world. For example, the NYT gave  Iowa  second billing to mere speculation that Saudi Arabia may be growing nervous enough about the high price of crude oil to pump more. Now that I’m becoming more aware of how important denial is to human behavior and how seamlessly it can be woven into disaster reports, I wasn’t that surprised that a major media outlet featured the opinion of the Army Corp of Engineers, an organization at least partially responsible for Katrina's  devastation of New Orleans. Sure enough, their spokesman was quick to cite the flood of 1993 as worse than yesterday, with no reference to several other factors that clearly make it more worrisome: the rains of ‘93 were probably seeded by the eruption of Mount Pinatubo, while today's is probably related to global weather change. Also, the resultant farm damage and agricultural shortages from yesterday will be superimposed on global grain shortages and food riots.

Most significant of all, yesterday's damage occurred in a setting of global climate change that can't be effectively  addressed while concern over the price of gas and crude oil dominate the national consciousness.

A future entry will describe the cognitive tools of denial and how they have always been used to sugar-coat inconvenient truth and thus facilitate repression.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 10:37 PM | Comments (0)

June 13, 2008

Katrina in Iowa: A Real Time Example of Denial

I was working on another entry, but decided to switch subjects after turning on the TV and seeing CNN footage of the rapidly rising waters in Iowa made me wonder what it will take to get Americans past the extreme denial that allowed them to re-elect the Bush Administration in 2004 despite overwhelming evidence of its incompetence and the fiasco that propelled it into office in 2000.

I’ve since realized that such denial is neither purely American nor modern; it's quintessentially human. That realization, as perusal of just a few recent entries will show, has been supplied by data provided by my study of pot smokers and, even more directly, my need to understand why the study itself was so profoundly and uniformly misunderstood by people who consider themselves supporters of “medical marijuana.”

The reason is now glaringly obvious to me: denial of unwelcome reality is a universal human characteristic. Of even more concern; it’s the one most responsible for our current global problems.

CNN news is still in progress and growing worse by the minute; it's now covering the switch in Pakistan's attitude toward al Quaeda in Afghanistan..

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 03:05 PM | Comments (0)

June 11, 2008

Fraud Enabled by Denial (Personal)

This entry will have to be quick because, right now, I have even more to do than ever and even less time than usual. Yesterday evening, quite by accident, while returning from a hospital visit to my (very sick) wife, I happened to catch the entire Terri Gross interview of someone I had never heard of before: Elizabeth Pisani is an articulate epidemiologist with a charming British accent who has just published a scathing denunciation of the Bush Administration's program for combating HIV/AIDS overseas.

What immediately called my attention to Pisani’s message was its brutal candor and the accuracy of her analysis; while giving our government full credit for its program’s (unexpected) therapeutic success in funding AIDS treatment, she was also very efficient in explaining how its moralistic insistence on “abstinence only” education is working to undo that success and helping spread infection with HIV, as well as uncertainty regarding the ultimate fate of those seemingly able to lead “normal” lives on what amounts to life-long, treatment (with expensive drugs produced by the American pharmaceutical companies now receiving a subsidy for producing them).

 What especially caught my attention was her recognition that the same bullying and arm twisting support characterize both our HIV/AIDS program overseas and our drug war at home; also that both have a similarly well-documented lack of success. Also impressive was her recognition that both frauds rely heavily on what I have recently come to recognize as humanity’s greatest cognitive weakness: a seemingly built-in willingness to prefer denial to reality as well as the lies we are forced to tell each other in order to sustain faith in such irrational beliefs.

More later,

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 01:01 PM | Comments (0)

June 09, 2008

Pertinent Questions (Political)

The last entry frankly acknowledged using Nicholas Carr’s complaint in Atlantic about Google-induced symptoms as a vehicle for calling attention to evidence that admitted pot users have provided: that they’ve been successfully self-medicating for Carr’s list of symptoms for years. In fact, the weight of their evidence, plus data yet to be published, is so convincing and was so easily obtained that I know my fellow “pot docs” have, by not asking the right questions,  been missing the prevalence of anxiety among their patients, to say nothing of the various anxiety syndromes they were either diagnosed with or treated for in the past.

Also; given the American scientific community’s reluctance to challenge our drug policy, I might perhaps be dissuaded from my increasingly radical (and lonely) position on pot prohibition, were it not for three discrete phenomena. First, the unanimity with which most reformers avoid discussing my findings; it tells me that, like the feds, they are also in denial and just as bereft of evidence supporting their notion of “personal” use as  the government is for its claim that their archaic, never-validated notions of “addiction” confer legitimacy on an incoherent policy.

 Then there’s the intense interest of Big Pharma in cannabinoids following discovery of an intrinsic (“endocannabinoid”) signalling system in the early Nineties, even as it curries favor with the same dishonest federal policy with a genuflection toward “drugs of abuse” in their scientific abstracts. That the only agent the industry has developed for human use without a federal subsidy was an antagonist is further  evidence of compliance with federal supidity; ordinary logic should have told them that agonists of a helpful substance would be safer and more likely to offer therapeutic benefits than an antagonist. Sure enough: the antagonist is proving troublesome and one is left to wonder whether its developers were greedy as well as stoopid.

 The third phenomenon reassuring me I’m on the right track is sustained federal opposition to any cannabinoid research with a human application, along with their punishment of marijuana activists in California to the full extent of federal law. While not quite so blatant as the Nazis’ continuation of the Holocaust, it signals the same die-hard mentality.

In any reasonable system of government, particularly one claiming to honor the canons of Science, NIDA and ONDCP should have long ago been forced to bear the burden of explaining the intellectual gap between the drug war’s never-validated assumptions about addiction and the growing mountain of evidence challenging those assumptions. The ability of Congress, acting through NIDA and the DEA to block human research for four decades has been crucial in protecting that policy; as has their ability to prosecute people self-medicating with marijuana as ‘druggies” or “addicts” while respected “researchers” callously promulgate  “truth” for profit and receive a slap on the wrist.

What makes US policy even more reprehensible is that its enforcement automatically encourages troubled youth to use more dangerous agents. Thus it has both juvenile and adult blood on its hands and blights other lives by unjustly sending people to prison. Almost as an afterthought, it also creates violent markets that kill people, corrupt society, and siphon tax money from worthwhile projects.

Given current US  political calculus and the likelihood other glaring policy errors will be exposed, a change in attitude toward the drug war could come about at any time between now and election of our next  President.  Which of the two survivors is likely to win? An additional question: will the chaos of the modern world America has helped to create be enough to get us past the racism embedded in our original Constitution and still openly practiced after all efforts at correction?

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 07:22 PM | Comments (0)

June 07, 2008

More Evidence of Dangerous Insanity

The cover of the July-August Atlantic that arrived by snail mail yesterday (but is not yet on line) was cleverly designed to resemble the ubiquitous Google logo. It asks provocatively if the search engine might not be making us “stoopid.” The cover worked as intended; I began reading Nicholas Carr’s piece almost immediately. The litany of complaints he lists in his first few paragraphs added interest because, although not recognized by Carr as such, they are symptoms of ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder), an entity that has commanded my interest for nearly seven years because so many of the pot smokers I’ve been interviewing have either been diagnosed with it or have easily recognizable variants.

To cut to the chase, Carr’s piece provides additional support for my growing belief that humanity is at a cognitive fork in the road: the decisions (choices?) now facing us represent a fleeting opportunity to mitigate the pain so obviously threatening the next several generations.

The entity  now known as ADD ADHD has been recognized since (at least) the mid- Nineteenth Century,  but wasn’t called that until the Nineteen Seventies when Paul Wender, MD, then a professor at the University of Utah, named it and reported its response to the stimulant methyl phenidate (Ritalin).  Since then it has been mistakenly (in my view) popularized as a “disease” for which an increasing number of patients of all ages are being treated with a growing list of pharmaceuticals.

At first mostly male primary school children, so many of both genders and all ages are now being treated for it and other Autism Spectrum Disorders that both the entities and their pharmaceutical treatment have given rise to backlash and controversy.

What I find especially disconcerting is the obvious failure of both intelligent pundits like Carr and all respected scientific institutions to note obvious connections between population growth, the increasing prevalence of anxiety syndromes, and the undeserved respect accorded to a globally enforced lunatic US drug policy.

I will have more to say about Carr’s important article later; my own ADD is forcing me to deal with some essential details needed for survival on this desperately overcrowded planet...

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 06:19 PM | Comments (0)

June 01, 2008

Approaching Anniversaries and Rare Front-Page Coverage (Historical)

As the twelfth anniversary of Proposition 215, the fortieth year since Richard Nixon’s election to the Presidency, and the end of Dubya’s calamitous eight year reign draw ever closer, the San Francisco Chronicle finally took appropriate notice of the medical marijuana issue with a front page, above-the-fold story complete with color picture.

The bad news is that, as usual, the story missed the background reality that’s been driving the medical marijuana controversy since 1996 by focusing on the usual clueless arguments being offered by each side.

To be blunt, the federal position on the “marijuana” issue has been a lie ever since a Democratic Congress and President agreed with the absurd “reefer madness” campaign orchestrated by a Hoover Administration holdover named Harry Anslinger. The 1937 MTA was a total ban on both cannabis and hemp thinly disguised as a transfer tax. Whatever its “real” purpose, the law arguably violated the Tenth Amendment by expanding federal power; whether the responsibility for licensing physicians is regarded as “explicit” or “delegated.”

As has been inevitable with other prohibitions of desired products, that ban was ultimately followed by a lucrative criminal market; however in this instance, its development was unique: it wasn’t until the Sixties that the “reefer” banned by the MTA would be discovered as “pot” by millions of Baby Boomers who hadn’t been born until nine years after after the MTA was passed. That neither ONDCP or NORML take note of that delay is revealing.

Although the Chronicle story began by describing how ubiquitous and lucrative marijuana cultivation has become in Mendocino, it exhibited no curiosity about either its delayed market development or still-increasing popularity. I can’t fault them for that because I didn’t understand them myself until I started to take histories from market participants hoping to take advantage of Proposition 215.

Discovering that pot appeals to troubled teens because it’s a safe, effective, and user-controllable anxiolytic was relatively easy; what is proving more difficult has been understanding the surprisingly uniform and spontaneous denial exhibited by a reform community that seems just as taken with irrational doctrinaire arguments as their federal opposition. 

An afterthought: manipulating parental fear of "addiction" has long been the mainstay of drug war propaganda; an articulate industry insider relates how she discovered that commonly prescribed anxiolytics can also exhibit a "potential for abuse"

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 06:27 PM | Comments (0)

Cognition, Culture, and the Origins of Morality (Logical, Scientific)

The last entry suggested that American drug policy exemplifies an intrinsic anomaly peculiar to human cognition, one that probably affects us all to some degree and has now evolved sufficiently to threaten our well-being. In that case, a rigid drug policy that has been immune from scrutiny since 1914 should be seen as urgently needing honest scientific assessment and correction to the extent possible.

Yet, any call for such a review seems very unlikely. The possibility it could happen at all is probably more contingent on how rapidly the planet’s established weather, economic, health, and behavioral threats  continue to evolve. Prolonged denial and resistance can be expected from a variety of sources with opposing interests.

The cognitive anomaly referred to is most likely an internal conflict produced by the separate evolution of two brain centers with critical roles in cognition, the amygdala and the neocortex. The conflict is manifested as the strong preference by both individual humans and human organizations for maximizing profits and prestige while minimizing failure and evading responsibility to the extent possible.  Such practices, whether by organizations or governments, are praised as healthy competition by some and damned as malfeasance by others; dishonest competition has long been the human default and is now more widespread than ever. It’s particularly dangerous in  our modern world because both the consequences of a hostile nuclear exchange and the likelihood one will occur are increasing and we are also being reminded that the economy of an overcrowded planet is more fragile, unequal, and interdependent than ever.

Murderous new resentments are also being generated daily.

Ironically, once it’s accepted that cheating, violence, and dishonesty dominate human interactions, understanding how that came about and its partial control could be efected by designing a policy designed to take maximum advantage of scientific objectivity while consciously trying to reduce the introduction of bias. It should be superior because it would reduce the influence of faith and authority. Science attempts to predict the future by studying the past. Historically, the religions that promulgated elaborate dogma in complex agricultural societies had a paucity of solid information from the past on which to theorize,  but they did have the inside track with the power structure, which gave their religious beliefs plenty of time to consolidate power and status before the arrival of Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton.

Historically, the scientific knowledge that led to the Industrial Revolution also facilitated a huge two-century spurt in human numbers and wealth. However recent recognition of overpopulation’s danger to the ecology and political stability have yet to generate any serious discussion of population control and opinion is clearly split. China, the only nation enforcing a population control policy;  is not reporting results systematically, and the social consquences are still unknown. It’s also fairly clear that birth control measures would be anathema to many and, to be effective, would have to be practiced by a majority of humans on a voluntary basis.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 08:48 AM | Comments (0)

May 30, 2008

Neuroscience, Cognition and Extinction 3

The last two entries dealt with how an uplanned ad-hoc study of a drug using population relates to a fundamental, and still unresolved controversy dating back to the origins of empirical science. Stated succinctly, that controversy is whether the universe (cosmos) was created by a “supreme being” or its origins are still uncertain. The former idea, still an item of faith for the three major monotheistic religions, is that an anthropomorphic god not only created the universe, but maintains an interest in the behavior of individual humans.

The scientific alternative, as it has evolved from about the time of Copernicus, Galileo and Newton, now holds that such a belief has been rendered optional by the technology-enabled observations of Science. A critical political corollary, that systems of government should not force religious beliefs on their populations, was formally articulated in the then-revolutionary US Constitution 150 years later, but continues to be vigorously disputed by all three montheistic religions despite their own continued, and frequently murderous, sectarian conflicts.

Intrinsic to the extended controversy between Science and Religion, and relating directly to notions of our accountability to a creator, is whether or not human behavior is “naturally” (fundamentally) moral. That such concerns are of increasing importance to the welfare of our species should be obvious from a quick survey of curent domestic and international events, yet it’s also quite clear from the way certain intractable problems are not being dealt with that as our human population has been increasing, the various disputes dividing us have become ever more intractable, even as our scientific knowledge has been expanding at a staggering rate.

My purpose here is nothing less than proposing that America’s drug policy, a.k.a. the “war on drugs” could serve as an ideal model for identifying the important cognitive anomalies that now threaten the welfare of our species. Implicit in that concept is the notion that although Science has recently been able to identify several previously unsuspected threats to life on Earth, the most pressing may be one we have both the greatest responsibility for and the best opportunity to control: the fear-driven competitive behavior that so clearly threatens our survival.

Doctor Tom
 

Posted by tjeffo at 01:13 AM | Comments (0)

May 28, 2008

Neuroscience, Cognition and Extinction 2

The last entry touched on relationships between the brain and how we think and behave. It also ventured a quick overview of cognition and ended with the hint that man’s unquestioning embrace of empirical science and his exploitation of the technology it has generated may have may been, at best, a mixed blessing because scientific advances have served to exacerbate two of the modern world’s most pressing problems: overpopulation and pollution. Although those admittedly controversial opinions may not be shared by many, they can be logically (and readily) inferred from the unique study of pot smokers I’ve been engaged since late 2001 and blogging about since the Spring of 2005.

Ironically, much of my confidence in the study’s reliability is based on the fact that when it began, I was in complete agreement with many of the misconceptions now being parroted by media and public officials throughout California; namely that “valid” medical use undoubtedly exists, but there is still too much “recreational” use and we must rely on police to control it, especially in the case of “kids” (adolescents).

Using the 1988 ruling of Judge Francis Young (promptly overruled by his DEA administrative superiors) as a starting point, those arguments date from the rescheduling petition filed by NORML in June, 1986 and argued before Young for two years before his enlightened decision was rendered. My study suggests that not only was Young correct, but also  prescient. That he could have been so promptly overruled by his DEA superiors and his findings so quickly forgotten by the public points up a critical weakness in our system of government.

What (gradually) became even more of a surprise than the study’s findings, was their apparent failure to attract  attention from the two groups with most at stake. The first is the federal government, which has been spending billions of tax dollars each year in a failing effort to discourage adolescents from trying pot, as well as to paper over multiple other drug war failures. In the other camp are several drug policy “reform” organizations (a majority of whose memers smoke pot) united in their outrage at the drug war, plus the fact that, thus far, they have been unable to mobilize public opinion against it.

The opportunity to do a systematic study of a controversial behavior had been a no-brainer when I discovered that every Californian seeking my approval to use “Marijuana” in 2001 was already a chronic user; especially after further questioning revealed they shared several other characteristics. I eventually had the study published, but while writing it up, I encountered such an intense negative response from some former colleagues that I was eventually moved to find out why. This blog reflects how that effort has led me even further afield, into the exotic territory of consciousness, cognition, and cosmology. In any event, the availability of behavioral information that had been taboo for over forty years at a time when search engines are becoming more powerful by the week and the databases they  search are expanding at an equivalent rate, may have made this the best time ever for such an exploration.

Two of study's clearest inferences are that our emotions, which clearly exert a powerful influence on behavior throughout our lives, appear to be decisively shaped by childhood experiences in many instances. That alone would explain federal indifference: why would the guardians of a failing policy publicize a study they can't rebut by attacking it?  At the same time, the hostile indifference of reform is best understood by the fact that NORML has never claimed its members use pot to cope with anxiety; only because it's innocent fun.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 12:47 AM | Comments (0)

May 26, 2008

Neuroscience, Cognition and Extinction

Over the second half of the Twentieth Century, “Neuroscience” has gradually evolved into the term most often used for the still-expanding, somewhat motley cluster of disciplines studying the brain with particular reference to behavior. That some of those disciplines are strange bedfellows is both obvious and understandable: as more became known about the physical brain in the mid Twentieth Century, it attracted increasing interest from “hard” sciences like Neurophysiology, Molecular Biology, Pharmacology, and Genetics. To the extent behavior later became an issue, “softer” disciplines like Anthropology, Psychology, and Sociology were called on to contribute. Several other fields, Economics and Criminology, for example, although not traditionally thought of as sciences, became involved as their behavioral implications became more appreciated.

Also, declaration of a federal “war” on illegal drugs almost forty years ago has had a number of sweeping, and generally under-appreciated, influences on both Amercan and global behavior.

There is now general awareness that our unique cognitive function is what allows humans to choose a particular course of action from among several alternatives. Although many other animals also make choices; none do so to a comparable degree; our modern ability to store information in digital form and then retrieve it using computers was foreshadowed at least three million years ago when an early hominid ancestor began walking upright. More recently, in the past 100,000 to 200,000 years, still younger ancestors began migrating from Africa and eventually spread worldwide. At what precise point they became Genus homo and developed speech is unknown, but impressive Cro-magnon cave art began appearing in Europe thirty thousand years ago; and though we don’t have solid evidence of writing for another several thousand years, we know it was at least four thousand years after the last Ice Age is thought to have ended.

All the above information was unknown to the “modern” humans who started the separate Agricultural Revolutions that took place in a variety of hospitable temperate climates around the world over an extended interval. Unfortunately, most who write aout the “agricultural revolution” as a phenomenon seldom stress the (obvious) fact that similar insights had to have occurred in several different parts of the world and then developed in conformity with local conditions.

The complex relationships between agriculture, modern belief systems, writing, and human organizations become obvious when we realize that without the security, stability and leisure provided by a guaranteed food supply, modern societies would simply not have developed. On the other hand, the development of densely populated cities in several different parts of the "ancient" world over a span of thousands of years has provided anthroplologists, historians, archeologists, and linguists with an abundance of information about the belief systems under which they both prospered and declined. The accumulated evidence discloses that while human interactions have always featured the same elements they do  today, namely competition, warfare, natural disasters, and epidemics, there was also "progress" of a sort in terms of irregular trade and cultural exchanges between regions. However "globalization" didn't really begin until the Fifteenth Century when the aggressive European voyages of exploration and conquest that would extend to the entire globe and usher in modern times became enabled by the first stirrings of modern Science.

Within a relatively short time, the combination of religion, advances in transportation, and European colonization  had produced the Industrial Revolution of the early nineteenth Century that would profoundly shape our modern world by expanding its population while mindlessly pursuing policies of short term exploitation on the basis of racial and religious beliefs.

In the next installment I'll go over why evidence from an opportunistic study of pot users suggests human behavior is not only flawed by its emotional component, but it's that component we need to compensate for if we hope to give ourselves (our species) its best chance for long term survival.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 12:21 AM | Comments (0)

May 23, 2008

I’m No Economist, But.. (Personal)

Like most others who have been reading newspapers and magazines for more than a few decades, I’ve followed economic news on an as-needed basis. Because the BA I earned as a pre-med hadn’t required Economics 101 and I had little interest to begin with, I gratefully avoided it;  all of which makes it very improbable that I may be among the first to notice major changes that seem to be overtaking the American economy.

Actually; I think critical contributing changes have been discernible for decades, but because they were obscured by our usual focus on competition and the accumulation of material wealth, their connections to each other haven't always been noticed; much like other phenomena I’ve been blogging about. Similarly, they only came to my attention through a series of unexpected (some would even say off-the-wall) insights.

Important Background
Human cognition is inevitably biased and contentious; a fact that becomes very obvious when one examines the role ideology has always played, and still plays, in the shaping of History. It also helps to realize that religious belief is the most prevalent form of ideology and that “godless” sectarian doctrines (Nazism or Communism, for example) are completely interchangeable with those of any “organized” religion.

Also, whatever we humans may think privately, there is overwhelming historical evidence that those responsible  for repressions as inhumane as the Spanish Inquisition, American chattel slavery, or the Nazi Holocaust have all claimed that their actions, like the current  suspension of the Constitution on behalf of our War on Terror, are necessary for some greater good.

That such arguments can be effective over a protracted interval in a nation claiming to be the bastion of Democracy is evidenced by the four-fold increase in our prisoner population in the slightly less than four decades since a drug war became American national policy.

A Different Perspective on Medical Economics
Among several things I gradually (and irregularly) became aware of as a surgeon entering private practice in 1971 after thirteen years in the Army were how changes attributable to three discrete developments had drastically altered the practice of Medicine. One was how the miniaturization and electronic research required by the Space Program had accelerated development of pacemakers, hemodialysis, and other expensive technical advances that also prolonged the lives of the elderly and indigent patients just being covered by Medicare. Thus had legislation bitterly opposed by the AMA in 1965 created a bonanza that would allow a burgeoning Healthcare Industry to displace physicians from their traditional leadership roles and empower Medical Insurance Companies, Big Pharma and the multiple other components of an emerging Medical Industrial Complex to negotiate directly with the Federal Government over how the new “benefits” would be provided. The first to be gradually reduced or eliminated were the erstwhile “charity” cases covered by Medicare,  but since then, other recipients have been gradually shut out by the series of cuts now forcing over forty million Americans, including many gainfully employed workers or their family members, to go without any medical coverage.

A third major influence on Medical Care was fighting the Viet Nam War under a “guns and butter” policy by Presidents Johnson and Nixon between 1965 and 1973. The (slow-to-emerge) cost of that inattention was the stagflation of the Seventies, compounded by two OPEC oil shocks, the second of which was exacerbated further when the Shah abdicated and the Middle Eastern policy that had cast him in the role of Persian Gulf  policeman suddenly unraveled.

A Different Perspective on Oil
Although debate over global climate change has made us very aware of the importance of petroleum to the global economy, we may have not been paying enough attention to certain critical nuances; particularly since 9/11. One is that among the first two industries hit by it were the very Airline Industry used to deliver the attack, along with the Global Petroleum Industry progressively roiled by a War on Terror allegedly waged to avenge it.

Even more recently, there has been mounting evidence from a variety of sources that America’s Airline Industry may have already been forced into the same economic strait jacket as its Medical Care Industry: that of  having its services placed beyond the reach of a majority of citizens. How else does one interpret skyrocketing airfares, an onerous variety of new surcharges for luggage, seating space, food and other basics, coupled with an aging inventory parked in the desert because it’s too expensive to replace; even as our smaller cities contemplate total loss all airline service?

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 02:19 AM | Comments (0)

May 21, 2008

Some Pertinent Questions about Cognition and Belief (Personal)

Although there’s now general agreement among scientists that the most recent of several Ice Ages ended about eleven thousand years ago, most of the thinking leading to that conclusion is less than five hundred years old and much of the now-abundant supporting data weren’t gathered until the second half of the Twentieth Century

What that short paragraph highlights is how quickly and profoundly empirical Science has altered our notions of time and how relatively briefly the scientific method has been employed in the study of our environment. An inescapable collateral conclusion is that until very recently, our human ancestors were relatively uninformed.

Nevertheless, we still to cling tenaciously to the contrary, but pervasisve, notion that humans who lived anywhere from centuries to millennia ago were, somehow wiser than ourselves; a notion long honored by the phrase "wisdom of the ancients." Just as pervasive, and equally unlikely, is belief that the scientifically derived information now being accumulated and utilized more rapidly with each passing week, represents “progress” of humanity toward a better life.

As pointed out in the last entry, daily television news reports are enough to challenge those assumptions and should also be raising questions our world leaders seem stubbornly unwilling to address. Will we (finally) come to grips with abundant evidence that as the only species capable of abstract thought, it’s precisely that capability, and the competitive disagreement it generates, that have been responsible for our now-unsustainable global environment?

Until then, will we be able to even conceive of workable solutions; let alone move in the required direction? That the same national leaders we rely on for solutions to those existential problems continue to endorse a failing American drug policy as the preferred global model inspires neither confidence nor optimism.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 04:18 PM | Comments (0)

May 18, 2008

Emotions, Cognition, Belief and Denial (Personal)

Although, strictly speaking, we late-arriving humans may not be the only cognitive species, our thinking and language capabilities evolved so rapidly that even before we could write, we were probably exerting a significant impact on the survival of other species.

Learning to write (about six thousand years ago) was the first preqequisite for today’s instantaneous global communication capability. Meanwhile, the subsequent pace of cultural evolution and distribution of the wealth it creates have become important determinants of both the planet’s human population and its role as habitat for other life forms. Because time isn’t reversible and our  cultural evolution can only be understood in retrospect, it seems more important than ever for us to study our knowledge and belief systems as quickly, accurately, and impartially as possible.

Unfortunately, it appears that denial is still our preferred mode for thinking about the world; while the extent to which that may have already exposed us to danger can’t be known, there are several indicators it could be worse than we think.

One is how quickly perceptions of looming oil, water, and food shortages are dampening enthusiasm for the future in the still-young Twenty-First Century. Paradoxically, there’s also little evidence of an effective global response to the threat posed by rapid climate change.

In addition, two recent disasters in a vlunerable and densely populated part of the world have exposed, once again, how repressive governments can exploit captive populations while “civilized’ nations wring their hands on the sidelines. A short video clip is all it takes to see the callous disregard of the Burmese military government;  although the exploitative mechanisms in China have been more subtle, predictable outrage over building standards is already being voiced and a moment’s thought is all Americans should require to realize that Burma and Sichuan both have much in common with New Orleans.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 08:02 PM | Comments (0)

May 11, 2008

More on Nargis

The callousness of the Burmese government continues to shock, but today’s description of bloated bodies being ignored by both the government and dazed survivors creates a grim picture. It also confirms that how many were killed by the storm surge will probably never be accurately known,  thus it will be impossible to separate them from those still alive, but soon to die of preventable disease or starvation.

The “civilized” world has additional problems: how long should the fig-leaf of national sovereignty continue to protect a government that has kept its nation’s last properly elected chief executive under house arrest for over fifteen years and is devoting more of its resources to a referndum than to desperately needed disaster relief? What is the proper role of world government (the UN) in such dire situations?

Come to think of it, what will it take for our world leaders to finally understand that the dangers now facing our species are unprecedented; if for no other reason than the planet has never been so crowded with at-risk humans.

Do they have a plan?

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 04:25 PM | Comments (0)

Cyclone Nargis; some unasked questions...

It’s been a week since Cyclone Nargis surged ashore in Burma’s Irawaddy Delta and, by some accounts, rushed as far inland as twenty-five miles through densely populated, but desperately poor, areas with few reinforced buildings and generally primitive transportation facilities. News coverage has (slowly and hesitatingly) revealed that the shadowy military junta running that nation is responding with the same remarkable combination of incompetence, suspicion, and resentment that has typified every Burmese government since1962 when a military coup ended the fledgling nation’s first attempt at democracy. Military dictatorships have retained power ever since, albeit under several changes of name and organization. The SPDC is merely the most recent, having replaced SLORC, its similarly named predecessor (with many of the same principals)  in 1997.

By whatever name they have been known, the military juntas holding power in Burma for well over fifty years have protected the opium growers of the Golden Triangle while successfully shrouding their nation’s internal affairs in nearly impenetrable silence. As usual, press coverage of Cyclone Nargis has assisted them by ignoring logical, but potentially embarrassing connections with American drug policy, Andean Nations, Plan Colombia or Hurricane Katrina. One wonders if the credibility of Burma’s military government, can withstand their current exposure.  Five decades of recent history suggest, like the drug war itself, it probably can.

But one can always hope...

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 02:36 AM | Comments (0)

May 09, 2008

Seeking Perspective in a Confused World (Personal)

I began blogging in the Summer of 2005 when I finally tumbled to the hostility my three year old ad-hoc study of pot applicants was generating among presumed allies in the Drug Policy Reform movement. Although no longer as overt, that hostility has continued. Ironically, so has the media and electorate indifference towards drug policy issues that the movement has been trying to overcome for years. Just as ironic has been the remarkable global acceptance of drug enforcement failures experienced by UN agencies and nearly all “sovereign” governments attempting to enforce what originally started as a domestic US policy.

In essence, the world and America seem to agree on two “drug-related” issues: some drugs are so “bad” they should be kept illegal; yet the policy's inevitable failures should never even be admitted; let alone frankly discussed.

Back in California, also in 2005, there was an unexpected surge in the number of “pot docs,” some of whom hadn't  even started medical school when Proposition 215 passed in 1996. Nevertheless my study has continued, aided to a considerable extent, by a “renewal” provision added when dispensaries were known as “buyers clubs” and their owners wanted to convince skeptical  police they were playing by the rules. Of course, the cops soon began using the  "requirement" to arrest medical users who were even a week out of compliance; especially after SB 420 passed in 2004.

In fact, the most prominent feature of Proposition  215 since California voters surprised the world by passing it in 1996 has been confusion; mostly as a result of foot-dragging by state and local governments. First the state police bureaucracies required for its implementation wouldn't cooperate with the legislature in creating the usual "enabling" legislation and the California and US Supreme Courts have declined to deal with the glaring jurisdictional conflict produced when the initiative was approved.

 All of which has led me to a gradual realization: the chaotic and deteriorating state of the world on the eve of the Bush Administration’s scheduled departure from power is entirely consistent with several of the unexpected revelations about human behavior Proposition 215 had also afforded me. While I’m no longer naive enough to think those revelations are ready for prime time, having had them published and being able to continue the study should help me to further understand them, and perhaps do the same for others.

That's because the one thing that most people can agree on is precisely what they are still afraid to say out loud: the war on drugs has been a total failure. Just imagine what will happen when self-appointed policy "experts" finally accept the superiority of  pot in treating  the same conditions for which anxiolytics and antidepressants are now being prescribed...

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 01:51 AM | Comments (0)

May 07, 2008

Sorry State of the World (Personal)

It’s been a while since I’ve had time to post a new entry; not because there’s been nothing worthy of comment, but because, like everyone else, I’ve been too busy keeping up with the absurd pace of modern life. We humans seem so committed to seeing life as a struggle that we are literally unable to live in harmony with either ourselves or other species. That’s been our history since we began keeping records, but now that we’ve  crowded the planet with more of our progeny than ever and are still busy plundering its riches as if there were no tomorrow, it’s starting to catch up with us in a remarkable cascade of bad news that we pretend not to notice.

One hardly knows where to begin, but a good illustration of our inconsistency is that while furor over Jeremiah Wright was whipped into a frenzy  by repeatedly airing  some of his more inflammatory out-of-context remarks, the less rational maundering of a Texas bible thumper were gratefully welcomed by John McCain in March and seem hardly to have been noticed.  

It doesn’t stop there; I was shocked the other day when an acquaintance whose judgement in other matters I’d always respected expressed outrage with Obama over the incident and then became testy with me for pointing out that everything I’d read and heard attributed to Wright had been factually correct. On the narrow issue of 9/11, I agree with Wright: Osama bin Laden had received what amounted to carte blanche from the Taliban to operate training facilities in Afghanistan, a country we’d assisted during the Eighties by encouraging the production of opium that was being turned into heroin for the European market, a transition that had quickly propelled Afghanistan from also ran in illegal opium production into world leadership.

Since 1970, Nixon’s drug war, backed by every subsequent administration, has functioned as price support for the world’s criminal drug markets and led to the installation of corrupt governments in both drug producing and drug transporting nations. Has our drug policy been successful in either Colombia or Mexico?  Given our role in creation of the world’s illegal drug markets, just raising the subject of Burma should be painful to us, but since we don’t know the relevant history, it goes right over our head

My original interest in the drug war arose from simple curiosity: why was such a grotesque policy failure being endorsed by all the political leaders of the one nation I was (then) confident was the world’s best hope for leading the way to a sane and sustainable way of life based on fairness? What I have learned in the intervening twelve years has replaced that naive belief with the relative certainty that our species has been tragically hobbled by an evolutionary process that has left greed and fear dominant over our emotional centers and thus in control our cognition.

We can both see and feel the power of fellowship and generosity, but at the last minute, it seems, our worst instincts dominate. It’s amazing to me that simple pursuit of curiosity about the drug war should have led to what can only be understood as vindication of suspicions raised eloquently, albeit with a Victorian flair, by R. L. Stevenson in 1868.

Perhaps mid-Fifties cartoonist Walt Kelly said it best when he had one of his characters in Pogo say, “we have met the enemy and he is us.”

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 04:45 PM | Comments (0)

May 01, 2008

Neuroscience 2 (Personal)

Among the many scientific issues attracting attention after World War Two, those concerned with the brain’s role in human behavior stand out. That curiosity now seems more appropriate than ever, given that our numbers quadrupled in last century and are estimated to have since increased another 10%.  We are also in a weather-related crisis because of petroleum consumption, the world’s poorest nations are experiencing food riots, and terrorism is increasing in the Middle East in what is essentially a reprise of the Crusades.

What is in doubt is the ability of our scientific institutions to take an unbiased look human behavior, a subject long obscured by religious thinking. Beyond that lurks a second question: can global political leaders respond effectively to lessons that will probably have to be learned under duress in the midst of multiple crises ?

Among the most respected students of the brain and behavior is Portuguese neurologist Antonio Damasio. Following medical and specialty training in his native Portugal, Damasio distinguished himself in academic appointments in Iowa and San Diego, and was recently chosen Director of USC’s Brain and Creativity Institute. He came to national prominence after publication of two books on consciousness, Decartes' Error (1994 )and The Feeling of What Happens. I read the latter shortly after its publication in 1999 when I wasn’t nearly as focused on the subject as my subsequent encounters with cannabis users would lead me to become. Thus, while greatly impressed by his lucid prose and thinking I’d grasped his message, I now realize I'd missed a lot because I still didn’t know what pot smokers would be telling me between then and now.

I recently began reading Feeling again and  was pleased to discover a greater degree of concordance than I would have guessed. At the same time, I was also forced to admit I  hadn’t appreciated the complexity of the process Damasio was describing in his unique dissection of consciousness, or the significance of his statement that  before we can come to grips with emotions, we must first understand how we experience them. To quote Damasio,  consciousness can be thought of as a “movie (with)in the brain.” A wide variety of things— physical objects, people, animals, states of mind, or scenes from our past— in short, anything we are able to remember— can be stored for later recall as what he sometimes calls “images” and other times “objects.” The important concept is that three separate entities are intrinsic to the process: the organism (observer), the memory itself (image/object) and the phenomenon by which it's recalled. Time doesn't permit a complete exposition of these concepts; nor could I do Damasio justice at this point. But I can recognize clearly how his formulation and my clinical input compliment each other. His is a  a neutral, incisive description which is completely biological, based on solid clinical experience, and seemingly  free of the usual religious preconceptions. As fellow neuroscientist William Calvin says in his review, "Damasio’s 'autobiographical self' is always under reconstruction."

Even so, it resonates with what I have learned about “human nature” by treating thousands of admitted cannabis users as patients who had been self-medicating for a mix of somatic and emotional symptoms, rather than considering them to be criminals because of the demands of a silly policy or in the preferred NORML/ASA/MPP mold of "valid" medical users (former recreational users with a "legitimate" ilness).

When Damasio’s and my narratives are combined, they portray a species that is quite different from the long accepted default image of divinely created beings aspiring to a heavenly afterlife. Rather, we are more easily seen as highly evolved mammals whose unique cognitive abilities encourage us to engage, often unfairly, in certain competitive behaviors which are, in turn,  greatly influenced by conflicting functions located separately in our brains, probably by virtue of their asynchronous evolution.

Ironically, most of the conflicts driving the events of our modern world can be more readily understood by invoking a more realistic view of “human nature.”  We should also become both safer as a species and more content as individuals if we can use our knowledge to change certain established behavior patterns that are clearly detrimental to our well being.

More later...

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 07:17 PM | Comments (0)

April 30, 2008

What is “Human Nature?” And how did we get into this mess? (Personal)

The burning questions with which we humans have been grappling since different clusters of our ancestors hit independently on writing are: what does it mean to be human and why are we here? Recent studies of various “higher” mammals, most notably primates, elephants, and certain marine mammals may have cast doubt on whether humans are the only species with a language function, but that we are the only ones to record our abstract thoughts in writing now seems well established. Certainly we are the only species to use literacy to effectively manipulate the global environment.

Yet for all that cognitive prowess, we have recently been kept as busy with problems that seem to have resulted from our scientific triumphs as we are adding more triumphs. We are also shockingly far from consensus about how to manage the problems. In fact, a case can be made that despite our unprecedented ability to communicate, we are furthest from agreement at the very time global cooperation is most urgently needed.

What, you may ask, does this line of thinking have to do with pot use? The connection is really quite basic, although it requires a willingness to think further outside the box than most are willing to venture. For all our cognitive abilities, we humans are also highly evolved mammals with similar survival and emotional needs. We may now have reached a point in our cultural evolution (itself enabled only by our cognitive abilities) where it’s possible to analyze how we got here. But, ironically, because analytic ability for its own sake is rarely welcomed within established human hierarchies, correct analyses are usually  dismissed as nonsense or heresy long before they are taken seriously.

Even then, the ones that are finally acknowledged and responded to are usually watered down at first. A convenient example, one very much in the news, is how America has dealt with slavery, a national  tragedy produced by the implicit repudiation of its stirring revolutionary manifesto by those who wrote its Constitution a mere eleven years later.

In fact, it may be precisely because acceptance by whatever group we aspire to be part of is such a dominant human need that individual inductive (bottom up) reasoning is usually discouraged by human societies. In other words, a highly unlikely, but reassuringly omniscient, anthropoid “god” is still our preferred source of truth. Until we are able to shed the millstone of religion from our cognition, our ability to think ourselves into trouble may continue to overwhelm our ability to think ourselves out of it.

Do I really need add that the drug war is a nearly perfect example of top-down deductive (religious) logic? That it has survived so long as policy is a disgrace to all who have had a hand in protecting it.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 07:46 PM | Comments (0)

April 29, 2008

How Much Longer Will this Embarrassing Lttle Twerp be Taken Seriously?

As this is written, I'm watching CNN’s usual melange of ads for advertisers mixed in with their own self promoting ads for coming programs mixed with a dollop of “news.” One of the events being awaited is a brief press conference with the nation’s prez who will allegedly report to a beleaguered nation on urgent plans to alleviate our unprecedented housing debacle. Since it’s all interspersed with even more urgent weather news from all over, but in a setting of the unprecedented tornados that struck Virginia overnight, I’m forced to wonder when the polity will finally notice the  disastrous record of his administration.

Oh, I see; it’s all been the fault of Congress and will be solved by finding more oil and building more refrineries... unfortunately, I don’t have time to stick around for the usual softball questions and the inevitably fatuous answers.

More later...

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 03:43 PM | Comments (0)

April 24, 2008

Neuroscience and Drug Policy 1 (Personal)

A measure of the success of humans as a species is that we now number somewhere around six an a half billion individuals and have, collectively, accumulated more knowledge of our universe than ever.  Ironically, the dangers now confronting us: economic catastrophe, rapid climate change, epidemic disease, and famine are also quite real to a majority that has yet to include the current US President and many in his political party.

That the list of his potential replacements has now been whittled down to three is of some concern; who they are should be of even more, and the (familiar) direction of political rhetoric as we approach important deadlines does little to inspire confidence.

That we humans are qualitatively different than other species must have been apparent to our shadowy first ancestors, but we will never know for sure because they had yet to discover writing and it would be thousands of years before decipherable messages were left for posterity. They would also have probably been too preoccupied with mere survival to do much abstract thinking. Most of what we know about early humans and their immediate ancestors has come from systematic explorations undertaken in the past three hundred years with the aid of scientific technology. So new is our ability to explore both our own recent past as a species and the more distant past of our planet and galaxy, we are still uncertain of their physical and chronological limits.

All of which makes our brain, the highly evolved organ with which we think, and one once called the most complicated machine in the Universe,  the most important determinant of our future as a species. Literally, how we are able to think collectively over the next several years is likely to play a huge role in our future and that of our planet.

The new scientific buzz word for studies of the brain is “neuroscience.” Like many such neologisms, it lumps together some very strange bedfellows. That many neuroscientists are playing an active role in drug policy both accounts for the drift of this entry and marks another subject I hope to return to.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 04:19 PM | Comments (0)

April 23, 2008

Can Amazon’s Kindle influence Drug Policy?

It now seems likely the Kindle or some close relative will soon be pushing Book Publishing in the same direction that file sharing software and less expensive recording technology have already pushed the Music Industry. By breaking up lucrative monopolies at the top of established industries the revolution now known familiarly as IT and first anticipated by Claude Shannon’s Communication Theory is forcing a rapid restructuring of established markets.

With respect to books, the new format, one that should allow rapid and inexpensive (even free) dissemination of copyrighted intellectual content,  could revolutionize both how authors are paid and ideas are exchanged. If we look to recent history, we can anticipate that established publishers will fight the diminution of their influence for a while, but will eventually end up competing to to buy up (and control) the new platform to the extent possible. Meanwhile, the challenge to Jeff Bezos and his staff at Amazon will be to develop their new idea as responsibly as possible; hopefully, they will do so in an evolutionary (as opposed to gimmicky) direction.

What my study of pot smokers does is document the existence of a large population of self-identified pot smokers; it’s unique because it provides information that couldn’t have become available until Proposition 215 had passed in California. It’s important because, when followed to a logical conclusion, it is further evidence that our species is at a  cross roads: to an uncanny degree, today's headlines confirm that our modern Age of Anxiety coincides with the most important existential challenge humanity has faced since narrowly (and unwittingly) avoiding Nuclear Winter in the October 1962 missile crisis.

Over the next few weeks, I hope to point out that the dense relationship between corporate greed and political irresponsibility that Douglas Cay Johnston has so brilliantly documented in Free Lunch becomes even more understandable when one realizes the degree to which our still-evolving Behavioral Sciences have been co-opted by the imposition of a morality-based, pseudo-scientific policy like Nixon’s Drug War.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 06:35 PM | Comments (0)

April 17, 2008

Intelligent Opposition Requires Accurate Knowledge (Personal)

 It's axiomatic in Medicine that if one’s diagnosis is wrong, one’s treatment is unlikely to be successful. Proposition 215 provided the first-ever chance for unbiased clinical studies of the impact of the drug war on admitted drug users; however “reform” (in company with most other elements of society) has been so slow to grasp the implications of that statement as to suggest denial may be so basic and prevalent a human behavioral characteristic as to have its own serious implications.

In any event, in the twelfth year since  215 passed,  reform is still without a coherent strategy for obtaining the rights won by the initiative for the policy victims reform claims to represent.  On a larger scale, we humans are also still in massive denial about climate change, and "overpopulation" is a word not used very often.

Closer to home: the opportunistic guerrilla war being waged against patients by California law enforcement; there’s still no mechanism  for tabulating,  tracking, and assisting at the trials being generated by (usually outrageous) patient arrests.

 I’ve now been a witness in such trials at both state and federal levels and the difference was profound.  In federal court, a judge backing the policy easily prevented the jury from hearing relevant medical testimony. In state court, the rules would permit knowledgeable defense lawyers and physician experts to educate both judge and jury. The catch is that the relevant information has to be effectively presented. Before that can happen, it has to be known, understood, and  believed.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 07:17 PM | Comments (0)

April 15, 2008

Lessons from State Court (Personal)

Although originally intended to better define “medical” use of cannabis, both the ad-hoc study of applicants I began in 2001 and the blog I started in 2005 to describe it have continued evolving as new information has been acquired. The first requirement of the study was deciding what questions to ask of those requesting medical status; the second was how best to record the data. The blog was motivated by the unexpected response to my attempt to share preliminary findings and solicit suggestions on two e-mail discussion lists (one state and one national) I’d become involved shortly after joining the drug policy “reform” movement in 1995. It was a shock to discover that many presumed colleagues held very different opinions. Some were militantly opposed to any discussion and let me know it either publicly or in private; the majority just refused all attempts at discussion, a pattern of denial entirely consistent with the way pressing world problems like war in the Middle East and rapid climate change are (not) being dealt with at the moment.

 Meanwhile, my unique access to applicants (essentially granted patient status by the new law) was providing me with direct evidence that the opinions being aired on the lists were, to be charitable, simplistic and seriously mistaken. In a nutshell, patient histories were providing powerful evidence that American drug policy is not only as deeply rooted in error as most had suspected, but actually worse than realized. To a degree few had imagined, cannabis has remained popular because it’s been safe and effective self-medication for many of the conditions government sponsored research blames it for aggravating.

Such apparent heresy becomes understandable with the realization that  Psychiatry and Psychology have embraced a system of classification in which symptoms and behavioral tendencies are considered diseases and assumed to require specific treatment by one (or more) of the of the new psychotropic agents produced by an increasingly profitable Pharmaceutical Industry. One obvious result has been recent spectacular increases in the frequency with which various mood and behavioral “disorders” are being diagnosed.

Demographic information supplied by applicants also clearly shows that today’s huge illegal marijuana market began when the first Baby Boomers began trying pot in the early Sixties and has grown steadily ever since; primarily because each new cohort of  adolescents has been trying (initiating) marijuana in defiance of advice to the contrary from both the drug war bureaucracy and their ideological opponents in NORML.

That both the federal government and “reform” have continued to ignore data supplied by a population of illegal drug users is now abundantly clear. I certainly understand why the federal government is unlikely to call attention to a study that directly challenges key policy assumptions, but it strikes me as absurd is that NORML and other reform organizations still cling to notions of “recreational” use.

My courtroom experience last last week demonstrated the impact of that denial so vividly that over the next few days, I hope to illustrate its cost and suggest some practical steps to reverse the deteriorating legal situation that’s been developed in California since the Raich decision was handed down in June of 2005.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 02:57 PM | Comments (0)

April 11, 2008

A Day in Court 2 (Personal)

During the (typically prolonged) lunch break between sessions, my wife prevailed on me to stop trying to argue with the prosecutor (nicknamed “Lumpy” by other lawyers present) and just answer his questions. A child of the Fifties,  she also explained the nickname. It had gone completely over my head because I’d been a little too old when the cast of “Leave it to Beaver” were Baby Boom icons.

When the questioning resumed, I soon adjusted my pace to Lumpy’s and was able to exploit his ignorance of cannabinoid pharmacology and clinical medicine, a tactic the judge warmed up to because I was now following his instructions. With the focus shifted, I soon scored a series of small victories with the net effect of demonstrating the inadequacy of his DEA scenario;  also how systematically questioning pot smokers had both educated me and uncovered findings hidden by treating them as criminals.

The day still ended on a note of uncertainty. Because the matter of the new (and newly injured) prosecution expert still has to be resolved, I may have to return before a verdict is rendered, but I would at least have a further opportunity to educate the judge— my original goal after I had been forced to accept the power of his subpoena.

All of which leads me to a new insight: the brain trust of reform, by (blindly) limiting their concept of “valid” medical use to the “sick and dying,” has been doing even more damage to its cause than I’d realized. Instead of focusing on areas where they have little chance of winning, they should have been spending more of their limited resources educating juries and the public in California

Unfortunately, before one can educate, one must know the truth; more on that later...

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 04:19 PM | Comments (0)

April 10, 2008

A Day in Court: Part 1 (Personal)

A while back, I described how an unwisely rejected December 2007 subpoena ordering my appearance as witness in a pot trial in a nearby county had eventually turned into a waste of my time in February when the judge called in sick on a Monday morning. The trial was then rescheduled at a conference held a month later and yesterday’s procedure appeared on the docket  a full month after that. An additional detail, gleaned yesterday, was that a third (rebuttal) expert, had been added by the prosecution and was promptly injured in an auto accident; thus threatening further delay. Although I had experienced the frustration of an (incredibly unjust) federal pot trial first hand, it had been over quickly. This would be my first experience with the State of California’s far more leisurely routine for dealing with medical cannabis defendants charged with violations of its own medical use law. 

What I participated in yesterday was a shocking exercise that I suspect is being replicated at considerable expense and in relative obscurity in courtrooms all over California.

The defendants are two young men now in their late twenties. They have been out on bail, but can’t work at the skilled jobs they once had because of the charges against them. They have also been prevented from taking jobs outside the state for the same reason. Both have lost houses they once owned.  I’d provided both with pot recommendations on the same day in January 2004 and they’d been arrested together in June of that year with a trivial number of plants, resulting in the usual “intent to sell” additional (felony) charge. I have never been provided with the details of the case by their public defender, who seems to be functioning more as an agent of the judge than as their defense attorney, but apparently their trial has been in progress since 2006. (as I revisit this  item at odd intervals, I plan to supply additional details as they become known).

 I didn’t hear that many new facts yesterday either; when I arrived at the negotiated time of 10:00 AM, the en banc (no jury) trial was already underway and the other medical witness, a well known “pot doc” with a very large practice (he had “renewed” my recommendation for one of the defendants in 2006), was being questioned by an earnest, but woefully ignorant assistant DA, who seemed to think reading a modicum of DEA propaganda had turned him into an expert on cannabinoid therapeutics. The doctor, someone I know from personal experience to be nearly as ignorant of cannabis as the DA, proved competent enough at warding off bumbling questions, but his testimony could be summarized as defensive, and  not very enlightening about pot’s medical benefits, most of which seemed to have been supplied by satisfied users via questionnaire.  In other words, his standard evaluation, designed to comply with Medical Board of California guidelines, is more analogous to a tape recording than to a searching medical history.

When I took the stand sometime after 11AM, I was a more than a bit angry and flustered by both the ordeal of getting there on time, and the testimony I’d just heard; thus my first impatient answers quickly drew admonitions from the judge and persuaded the prosecutor that he would be spending the afternoon making mince meat of (yet another) fraudulent pot doc.

I can’t say it was planned; but a decent lunch and listening to the advice of cooler “heads” allowed me to turn the tables on the overconfident DA, a minor, but potentially important victory I hope soon to report

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 04:29 PM | Comments (0)

April 08, 2008

Annals of Addiction: how cannabis initiation became an adolescent rite of passage.

Of the several unexpected (and to many, unwelcome) discoveries uncovered by questioning pot smokers over the past several years, two stand out. The first is that in the early Sixties, well before its existence had been clearly recognized by society at large, the generation we now know as the Baby Boom was just starting to discover the unique anxiolytic properties of cannabis (but only when inhaled).

Ironically, the term “anxiolytic” was coined at about the same time to describe the then-unique effect of benzodiazipines, of which Valium (1963) became the best known. The second discovery referred to above is more subtle because it involves a negative: very few have realized that because delivery by inhalation allows even more rapid onset than the IV route and more precise user control of the effective dose, inhaled pot (the "reefer" demonized in 1937) became the preferred anxiolytic of the youthful counterculture then beginning to emerge.

Thus from a historical and sociological point of view, what has ensued since the Sixties has been a result of the