Web Log of Dr. Tom O'Connell

January 31, 2012

On the Impportance of Theories and Differences of Opinion

Theories are essential to the scientific investigation of unknowns because they provide tentative narratives which then act as vehicles for the examination of relationships between new observations and information that's been accepted with considerable certainty. Thus areas requiring clarification are readily identified and questions still requiring answers are exposed in ways that facilitate the design of needed experiments.

In other words, quests for new information are not foreclosed as they are by Dogma, the very antithesis of any scientific approach to knowledge. Dogma assumes that a particular world view is absolutely correct and that any questioning of it may require punishment. Not very long ago, those even suspected of questioning dogmatic religious beliefs were systematically prosecuted by their governments. The ultimate expression of that belief, practiced on a mass scale as recently as the last century, was the mass murder of people whose “race” was considered a presumption of guilt.

To return to the subject of theories, one of the best examples of their utility may be Charles Darwin, who as a young naturalist on a long voyage noted some interesting facts about local birds and their apparent adaptation to the different habitats extant on islands in the same archipelago. His hypothesis was subsequently refined into the theory of Evolution following publication of the book that introduced it to a mass audience.

Although both Darwin and his theory have had an enormous impact on Science (the theory anticipated the discovery of DNA and its role in biological reproduction) many still denounce both him and his theory; apparently because they have threatened the grip of both organized religion and other dogmatic beliefs on human thought.

Of great interest to me is that some recent Google searches related to Darwin have turned up evidence that both he and FitzRoy, the captain who was essential to the voyage that made him famous, suffered from symptoms modern Americans have been relieving with in illegal cannabis, the use of which is opposed by a militantly dogmatic policy.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 07:23 PM | Comments (0)

January 23, 2012

With Friends Like This...

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

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

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

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

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

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

Doctor Tom

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

January 13, 2012

Error Correction

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

Doctor Tom

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

January 11, 2012

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Doctor Tom

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

January 07, 2012

Federal Duplicity and Chronic Pain

The last entry pointed out that important differences between the clinical effects of smoked versus orally ingested cannabis have remained unrecognized by both the federal agencies responsible for our policy of imposed ignorance and opponents of that policy. Nor, apparently have the bases for those differences been explained by either academic or pharmaceutical researchers despite the enormous volume of peer-reviewed research that has been published in the two decades since the endocannabinoid system (ECS) was discovered.

To return to the issue of edibles, I was about to explain that they are recognized by many chronic users as far superior to inhaled products for their antinocioceptive (pain releiving) effects, another difference that has apparently escaped notice by the army of cannabis researchers.

As I was preparing to get into the subject of edibles and enhanced relief of chronic pain, I came across a sad item in the news: Siobahn Reynolds, a courageous activist who had long opposed the scandalous federal persecution of pain specialists who disagreed with them died in a plane crash last week. The accompanying news stories also reported details of how Reynolds had been deliberately persecuted by the feds in ways I hadn't previously been aware of.

Less well known than their mindless harassment of pot users, has been the federal penchant for literally destroying pain specialists for the "crime" of prescribing adequate doses of legal opioids for a small, but specific group of patients with chronic pain who apparently require larger than usual doses to function. When carried to extremes, this cruel and inhumane policy has produced two victims, a patient driven to suicide and an physician imprisoned for disagreeing with a federal bureaucracy. Thus are medically untrained prosecutors empowered by our drug war to prosecute both a physician they disagree with and the patient they claim to be to "protecting."

Such enlightened "public health" will undoubtedly be retained as part of "Obamacare." Don't Obama's Republicans critics recognize realize faithfully Richard Nixon's public health concerns are being honored by the federal medical bureaucracy he left behind?

On a more realistic note, I'm forced to ask somewhat rhetorically: just how will long the citizens of nation continue to endorse our cruel and hypocritical drug policy to survive? What ever happened to common sense and normal human decency?

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 05:33 PM | Comments (0)

January 05, 2012

Annals of Ingestion: the “Head” versus the “Body” High

Experienced users know there are two different cannabis highs; a head high from smoking and a body high following oral ingestion. However, neither the popular nor the professional branches of the voluminous modern literature devoted to “marijuana” since California's Proposition 215 passed in 1996 demonstrate more than cursory interest in those differences; let alone the basis for them or the possibility they could have important therapeutic implications. In fact, I didn't begin focusing on them myself until I'd been questioning applicants for a few years, and it has only been since I began analyzing their answers that I have been able to come up with a logical explanation. Interestingly, once understood, the reasons for the differences noted by users are not obscure; indeed, they are rooted in basic anatomy and physiology to an extent that suggests they have been literally hiding in plain sight since 1970 or before. Why that should be the case thus becomes a question requiring an answer. Perhaps, like so much other information now coming to light about a subject that's been off limits to honest research for over seven decades, the right questions were slow in coming because not enough was known about the forbidden drug to pose them.

Cannabis was being used medically in Asia long before its benefits were reported to Western Physicians around 1840 by William O'Shaughnessy, an Irish Physician who had been working for the British Raj in India. As far as we can tell, most of the therapeutic applications of Ganja investigated and popularized by O'Shaughnessy were either oral or topical. In that connection, it's interesting that O'Shaughnessy himself considered its use by inhalation "depraved." At about the same time, on the other side of the English Channel, French Romantic authors began gathering for informal experiments using hashhish as an intoxicant. What is immediately evident from the description quoted from Baudelaire, is that they were focused of what would now be called "recreation" and were indiscriminately mixing alcohol, smoked cannabis and edibles. That some might have found such experiences unpleasant is not at all surprising.

Technical Details

The introduction of drugs into the body is technically referred to as ingestion; it may be oral, by injection, or by inhalation, either directly as a gas or by smoking. Agents amenable to inhalation rapidly enter the pulmonary (lung) circulation and are delivered almost immediately to the heart and then pumped to the brain and other parts of the body. In the case of cannabis, the experienced user senses a characteristic, and almost immediate, elevation in mood which is interesting because that mood change is only experienced by those able to get "high." A little known fact is that at least half the applicants I've interviewed did not get high the first time they tried "weed," and many failed several times before it happened. The first (and only) public recognition of that phenomenon I'm aware of is Dr. Lester Grinspoon's frank description of his own initial failures and later success. I now ask all applicants if they got high the first time. At least half didn't, and many required several attempts. To my knowledge, cannabis is the only illegal drug that gives prospective users such a test: anyone unable to get high will almost certainly not become a chronic user. Such people do exist (I have met only one), but they would have little reason to seek a recommendation.

We know cannabis was legally prescribed by American physicians from the Nineteenth Century on and can safely assume that most of its early medical use was oral, but we have relatively little information about its "recreational" use by inhalation during that same interval, nor about its commercial production for those purposes. We do know from other sources that several states passed laws against it when alcohol Prohibition passed. Why? Because they assumed that banning booze would make "muggles" more attractive! Never underestimate the malevolence of moralistic control freaks...

In any event, at least one well known historical figure experienced several of the same benefits from his use of inhaled cannabis that were reported by my patients. Louis Armstrong was a musical genius who played a critical role in shaping jazz into a unique American cultural contribution. There's also little doubt that his lifelong use of inhaled cannabis played a critical role in helping him overcome a childhood spent in an orphanage. Armstrong also had to overcome poverty, racial prejudice, and the perils of a criminal "justice" system that ironically, wasn't as tough on him in 1930 when he was arrested for possession of "gage" as it would have been today.

In another entry, I'll discuss the key differences between edibles and smoke, the reasons for them, and how that clinical evidence impeaches federal dogma as so much imaginative nonsense.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 07:38 PM | Comments (0)

January 03, 2012

Marijuana’s Unsuspected "Daddy" Factor

In a recent entry, I promised to ”tackle what may be the most important question of all: why cannabis became a smash hit with boomers in the Sixties and what that portends for the future.”

When Steve Jobs died in October, I already knew he’d been adopted just after birth; also that the fact of his adoption had played a major role in his subsequent behavior. That intuition was based on a series of unexpected findings from my study of marijuana users: as a group they had experienced an uncanny degree of paternal neglect during childhood; an unrecognized fact that had clearly influenced their decision to try pot as adolescents. Finally; although only 1% of all applicants had been adopted, it was a closely related issue that seemed to affect them with particular intensity.

Thus, I was quite sure that Steve Jobs, who had been born in San Francisco in the “leading edge” of the Baby Boom and raised in the Bay Area by adoptive parents, had almost certainly tried marijuana and used it for at least a while; probably other psychedelics as well. Those suspicions were quickly confirmed by a quick search of Walter Isaacson’s biography. As hinted at in my first Jobs entry I hope residual interest in his remarkable career will provoke the level of intelligent evaluation that will be required to start reversing that most malignant of all American policies: the “War” on drugs.

Examined in a relatively unbiased historical context, American's drug policy can be seen as a close relative of chattel slavery, itself a mind-boggling contradiction of Jefferson's exalted prose in the Declaration of Independence that came about in 1787 when he and other Founders agreed to retain Slavery as the price of retaining states from the Lower South within the Union. The device was to count each slave as 60% of a human being, a compromise that would lead to Civil War in less than a Century and which, as W.E.B. Dubois pointed out in 1896, the nation was lucky to survive.

Based entirely on ignorant assumptions about addiction in the early 20th Century, and protected against scientific scrutiny through the Second World War, American drug policy was greatly intensified under Nixon in 1970 and then quickly forced on the rest of of the world by UN treaty as a “Drug War.” Most importantly, its acceptance by the rest humanity since the Seventies shows it was not just an unfortunate American error; it’s really an indictment of the vaunted cognitive function we humans have long assumed entitles our us to dominance over living things.

If that thought isn’t provocative enough in this "information age," I’ll add another: Barack Obama, like Steve Jobs, was obviously brighter than most of his peers throughout childhood and adolescence. He is also the most improbable of all 44 American Presidents, precisely because of his biracial origins. In addition, he shares two characteristics exhibited by most of the 6600 cannabis applicants I’ve interviewed to date: he tried the forbidden weed by inhaling it, was able to get “high,” and then used it for an undisclosed interval. That he wasn't a long term "head" is implied by the fact that he survived vetting for both the Senate and the Presidency.

With respect to paternal contact, Obama met his biological father only once, an event described in considerable detail by John Meacham in 2008; the occasion was the senior Obama's departure for Kenya, a trip from which he would never return. Comparing two accounts of the impact of absent fathers on famous sons is obviously a stretch; however the additional perspective provided by our detailed study of pot users in searching for similar evidence lends considerable weight to the idea that fathers are far more important to the emotional health of their offspring than is commonly realized.

For me, the implications for American "marijuana" policy are grotesque: we have created a law enforcement industry based on punishing people for the "sin" of self medicating safely and effectively for symptoms unwittingly inflicted on them; often by the circumstances they were born into.

If someone could explain to me why that is a good idea, I'd be happy to listen. Another grotesque irony is that in October, the DEA, a federal agency nominally under Presidential control, just announced a new crack-down on California "dispensaries" based on the federal dictum that cannabis can't possibly be medicine because John Mitchell and Richard Nixon said so.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 09:28 PM | Comments (0)

January 01, 2012

What Pot Smokers Have Taught Me

When I began screening cannabis applicants in late 2001, I didn't realize I was starting a research project that would last more than 9 years and still be in progress in 2012. Nor that such a simple clinical study could answer so many important questions about the policy we have been calling a drug “war” since Nixon pushed the CSA past Congress without anyone in government really understanding it, or how such a grotesque perennial failure could gradually become so untouchable as to become literally beyond criticism. The answers to those questions turn out to be more credible and coherent than either the federal policy minders or many of their political opponents in "Reform” can bring themselves to believe

In truth, the study I've been engaged in reveals far more than just the drug war’s failures; it exposes the critical human weaknesses: fear, greed, and dishonesty, that are most responsible for the many crises now threatening our species, but which our denial won’t allow us to address.

As it turned out, the simplest way to understand the drug war was by studying a large group of pot smokers and then comparing their behavior patterns with the laughably inaccurate explanations being offered by the DEA. That's because the drug war's federal guardians had never performed (or even allowed) an unbiased clinical study of the very complex drug they have been attempting so unsuccessfully to ban since the Nixon Presidency. They have thus been forced to rely on their own mistaken beliefs and have yet to learn the truth.

Meanwhile, the “reform” movement has had some problems of its own. It has been listening to doctors, who despite having tumbled to many DEA errors, are still taking others seriously, usually by misidentifying pot's most important psychotropic benefits as "recreational." Seemingly not a big mistake, but it still gives hard line DEA supporters reason to sneer, and to arrest. In the next entry, I’ll tackle what may be the most important finding of all: why cannabis became a smash hit with boomers in the Sixties and what that portends for the future.

Happy New Year,

Doctor Tom

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

December 29, 2011

Is Mexico our Future?

Laws banning alcohol had been passed repeatedly in Midwestern “bible belt” states during the Nineteenth Century, but all were soon undermined by smuggling from other states and eventually repealed. Rather than blame it on a basic flaw in the concept of prohibition, the Anti-Saloon League opted for a national law in 1892, a campaign that finally led to ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment in 1918. Unfortunately, it proved another mistake; national Prohibition encouraged smuggling from overseas and alcohol was produced by stills in the US that were already operating when Prohibition went into effect at midnight on January 16, 1920.

In other words, Prohibition began failing immediately, something that could have been predicted in advance; nevertheless the three different Republican Administrations that inherited the policy all gave it a try: Harding, who died in office in 1923, Coolidge, his Vice President and successor, and Herbert Hoover, whose term in office would be blighted by the Great Depression, all tried to make the Prohibition work. It would take the unforeseen strategy of a “Repeal” Amendment, the Great Depression itself, and the election of FDR, a Democrat, to provide a way out.

The good news was that Prohibition ended; the bad news was that little was learned from its failure, which had come at a high price: crime became "organized," was enriched with illegal profits, and provided with a flexible business plan applicable to other ventures: labor racketeering, illegal gambling, and "protection." Yet there was little formal recognition of either Prohibition's failure or the consequences of that failure.

Nor apparently, was there any recognition that the expensive alcohol mistake was being replicated with "drugs." Even as Repeal was being ratified, Harry Anslinger was settling in as Director of the FBN created for him by his wife's uncle. Whether Andrew Mellon had intended his nephew to deflect attention from the resemblance of the two policies can't be known, but Harry carefully avoided all use of the P word throughout his long career.

Today, nearly eight decades after Repeal, we are still saddled with a failing prohibition policy, one that's become bigger and more costly because humans are just as dishonest, but far more numerous. In addition, we can see that criminal markets only reach their full potential to do harm when demand for their products has been increased to the maximum. In the case of "drugs," that demand has been critically enhanced by a deadly combination; population growth, greater ambient anxiety, and a punitive law that undermines all America claims to stand for. The final twist of the knife is that the federal agencies created by Richard Nixon to enforce and protect his CSA were made dependent on it and have learned to share in the obscene profits it enables.

Thus America’s drug war can’t end until the DEA, NIDA, and the FDA can be shamed out of profiting from the failing policy they either enforce or protect. If that doesn’t happen, we have only to look at Mexico to see our own future.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 01:42 AM | Comments (0)

December 24, 2011

Steve Jobs and the Blight of Adoption

I had several compelling reasons for wanting to read Walter Isaacson’s lengthy biography of Steve Jobs ASAP when I first saw it prominently displayed at my local Barnes & Noble the other day; I didn’t hesitate to buy a copy and have been engrossed in it ever since.

Parenthetically, the book would not have been available this soon after Jobs' death had his subject not invited Isaacson to be his biographer in the Summer of 2004, a fact immediately related in the book’s Introduction. That Jobs had been adopted is something I'd known for quite some time; it had become important to me as a result of several other unexpected findings derived from my ongoing study of cannabis use. For example, biological fathers are far more important to the long term emotional health of their offspring than is commonly realized, a circumstance that can convert their physical or emotional absence from a child’s life into an important cause of lifelong emotional distress. One manifestation of that distress seems to a form of PTSD diagnosed variously as ADD, bipolar disorder, and other entities on the so-called "Autism Spectrum;" all of which may be associated with aggressive drug initiation at the first available opportunity. For most modern adolescents that's the interval between sixth and tenth grades (ages 12 to 16) depending on several other variables, the most important of which seem to be: when they were born, where they went to school, and what drugs were available in the school yard when they reached the age of initiation.

If that’s generally true, then it follows that the drugs most available in the schoolyard during Middle School (Junior High) will be the first ones tried. Indeed, that's exactly what my study reveals to have been the case since the Sixties. 100% of all applicants had tried cannabis (no surprise), all had tried alcohol, and only 4% had not tried cigarettes.

Beyond that, another important facet of the study is that if fathers are that important, adopted children could well be the most troubled of all. Indeed, that turns out to be true of my applicant population; and to an uncanny degree. Although they represent only 78 of the 6637 applicants in my data base (1.12%) they stand out like sore thumbs because of the intensity of their histories.

That was one of several phenomena I was unable to quantify until I could enter data in a relational data base around 2005. I have not blogged about adopted applicants all that much because their numbers are so small; but, as with several other findings in the study, I'm sure that if other "pot docs" had been examining their own applicant populations with the same issues in mind, we might have had have had more definitive data long before now.

In other words, I've been a lonely voice in a wilderness of cannabis uncertainty, which is one of the important reasons I believe a policy as dishonest and stupidly destructive as the drug war is still being taken seriously on a planet where the most clever hominids ever to have evolved may be poised on the brink of self-destruction

Sorry to sound so apocalyptic at a time when everyone is supposed to be infused with "Christmas Spirit," but hey, someone has to be realistic. More on Steve Jobs and adoption when I can tear myself away from X-mas.

By the way, although I think his biography of Jobs is first-rate, I think Isaacson may have missed the importance of his subject's adoption.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 05:23 PM | Comments (0)

December 23, 2011

A Search for Coherence

A relatively unnoticed characteristic of America’s “drug war” is its incoherence. It simply does not make any sense. I would defy anyone to propose a brief, coherent explanation of how the features allegedly linking all the various "substances of abuse" that have been added to “Schedule 1” under the Controlled Substances Act since 1970 qualify under the terms stated in the legislation itself. Three specific requirements were set by Congress at the behest of John Mitchell and Richard Nixon, neither of whom are remembered for their personal integrity or medical scholarship. Thus, at its very core, the drug war can be recognized as a doctrine of incoherent nonsense, the dubious legacy of medically ignorant scoundrels. Yet because it's been enforced globally by UN treaty for over 40 years, it has been expanded into a significant cause of avoidable mortality and morbidity. If ever there were a better example of our species' desperate current plight, I'm hard pressed to think of it.

Nevertheless, a considerable fraction of influential people tacitly endorse the drug war by their reluctance to either criticize it openly or even acknowledge its disastrous effects. A good, but by no means unique, example is Ken Burns, the talented producer of several uniquely American documentaries for PBS including The Civil War, Baseball, and Prohibition.

Born in 1953, the boyish, intelligent, Burns was a Baby Boomer who must certainly have become aware of the social turmoil developing around him in the late Sixties and early Seventies: Nixon’s election, Watergate, and the war in Vietnam. My interest was evoked by learning he had avoided the relevance of the drug war to Prohibition when specifically questioned about it. After a further search, Google found the evidence. His weaseling response confirms a remarkably common phenomenon: undue respect for a destructive policy that, once we understand another human behavior, is all too characteristic of our species.

The message is clear: until we can overcome our own collective hypocrisy, fear and greed, we will be stuck with a perpetually losing War on Drugs and all the destructive behavior it encourages.

Doctor Tom

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

December 20, 2011

Is "Legalization" even a viable option?

Many Americans know the Drug War is a rank failure, but most don't know why- and are afraid to say so. The good news is that criticism is now considerably more open than when Proposition 215 passed in 1996. The bad news is that it is still poorly coordinated, the rate of change has been slow, and it rarely equates with a preference for "legalization."

Our study of cannabis applicants is the only attempt to profile pot smoking as a behavior I've been able to find. One of several characteristics shared by many (but not all) in the larger cannabis community is a desire for "legalization." Unfortunately, they also have great difficulty agreeing on just how that should be accomplished. Finally, I'm becoming convinced, by an unscientific straw poll of applicants seen since November 19th 2010, that if all pot users in the state had voted "yes," Prop 19 would likely have passed easily. In other words, a segment of the "industry" is profiting from the status quo. Duh.

What I've also learned from studying them for 10 years, is that over 96% of applicants were born in 1946 or later, a similar fraction had tried it before age 18, and many were troubled by behaviors now diagnosed as ADD or other conditions on the "Autism Spectrum." However, none of that information could possibly have been made known to them, the Scientific Community, or the public at large; let alone the now-deceased characters most responsible for today's "War on Drugs." That's because Hamilton Wright MD, Harry Anslinger, and Richard Nixon were all opportunists who were unknown to each other and, in any event, could not possibly have foreseen where their political power plays would lead.

More generally; "behavioral" scientists are the most dependent on NIDA and DEA approval for funding. They are understandably loathe to criticize the policy that feeds them; thus it's no surprise that our findings, which implicitly contradict drug war dogma on "marijuana," are rarely quoted and usually misconstrued when they are. However the study itself would have been impossible had it not been for the initiative, simply because declaring any "substance" illegal effectively blocked unbiased clinical research after 1970 (vanishingly rare before then). The public might even be shocked at how quickly, and in what numbers, the "scientific" literature on "drugs of abuse" began dancing to the tune of the federal agencies created by Nixon to implement and defend the CSA. The basic story of the drug war is how rules contrived by a few well placed historical characters have evolved into a policy monster that could hardly have been more wasteful or destructive had it all been planned by a single evil genius (a fact no Congress would dare admit) which is why I think "legalization" is so unlikely.

One would think that, by now, everyone should know that the criminal prohibition of popular products is a public policy loser because it creates illegal markets that become short term bonanzas for criminals by enabling them to sell cheap unreliable products at exorbitant prices. That's exactly what happened under alcohol Prohibition, a mistake the US federal government has never formally admitted and was quick to back away from after "Repeal" and the election of FDR in the darkest days of the Great Depression...

Unfortunately the same mistake was already being repeated with "drugs" and has, improbably, been intensified into today's "War". The Harrison Act, a clumsy federal attempt to restrict the use of two drugs in 1914 has subsequently evolved into today's "Drug War" through an irregular series of expansions, each with at least the tacit approval of all three federal branches of government at each stage. The single exception was when the Supreme Court declared the Marijuana Tax Act unconstitutional shortly after Nixon's election and the trickster quickly seized the opportunity to transform what had been a sputtering, incoherent policy into coherent dogma-driven monster that soon became a full-fledged War. Nixon had invaluable help from John Mitchell. Perhaps the least appreciated facet of the CSA is how soon it opened the door for lobbyists working on behalf of the Prison Industry, Big Pharma and Law Enforcement, all of which soon became powerful allies.

The very ease by which the right catalyst could transform a bad law and a failing policy into a destructive "drug war" is what makes its "repeal" by Congress so unlikely and its non-legislative destruction so attractive. What's needed is an end- around tactic at to use against a federal government that has been so historically unwilling to admit past screw-ups and so guilty of intensifying its serial prohibition failures that a law contrived by the only AG who ever served time at the behest of the only President ever forced to resign because of personal dishonesty. The same reluctance would inhibit a Supreme Court that has upheld John Mitchell's CSA on every occasion it could have been questioned. Not to mention the Presidency itself: every chief executive since FDR has backed our drug policy; not one has even suggested a timid revision.

Thus it may be that some form of cognitive judo, which could use the failures of the Drug War to render it politically incorrect might be the most efficient way to neutralize it.

The Drug war has evolved into the most destructive sacred cow in American politics, one predictably beyond legislative repeal in the foreseeable future. The next entry will outline a simple, viable strategy for its neutralization, one that should be both possible and affordable.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 09:11 PM | Comments (0)

December 13, 2011

Bad Ideas and their Consequences

The “War on Drugs.” is a monumental failure, yet it remains one of the few policies nearly all the squabbling nations of our divided and overcrowded planet can agree upon. Not that it's being rigorously observed. Rather; it's openly violated by a variety of rogue nations: for example Somalia, which has become a pirate haven because it lacks a functional government, North Korea, a family-operated dictatorship masquerading as a nation, Mexico and Colombia, both poor nations claiming to support UN drug policy while turning blind eyes to illegal drug production and extensive smuggling operations from within their borders. In Asia, both Myanmar, and Afghanistan have been well known sources of heroin for decades. The list goes on.

One of the themes of this blog has been that for the only surviving cognitive species to perpetuate such obvious folly while also failing to agree on a plethora of existential threats (global warming is just one) is a sign of serious trouble. Not that I claim to have a solution; only that when serious problems are ignored, they are unlikely to be solved.

On Sunday, Rupert Murdoch’s NAT GEO aired hours of unwitting evidence in support of that contention: several propaganda videos featuring drug war failures in which all were portrayed as valiant attempts by law enforcement agencies to identify and arrest drug criminals or-at the very least- keep their products "off the street." All included glaring, but time-honored lies and exaggerated claims about the dangerous products produced by drug criminals. Because I've spent the last fifteen years gathering evidence exposing the underlying hoax NAT GEO supports, I was disappointed that such claims could still be aired and angry that they are still widely believed.

I quickly realized, however, I was the one out of step; the drug war is more supported than ever, precisely because a majority of living humans have no other choice and many of those who do are either too frightened to speak up or too busy participating in the bonanza the drug war creates. In other words, America's 40 year drug folly, has evolved along the lines of the basic Nazi model, but has thus far avoided the fatal errors that brought down the Third Reich and its Japanese allies in 1945. Perhaps the most important reason it is still tolerated is that it claims to oppose an idea rather than a human population. Originally, the idea was "addiction;" later the designated enemy was morphed into the drugs themselves. When the CSA was passed in 1970, it went beyond Hitler's infamous Nuremberg laws by giving the US Attorney General sole authority to add new "drugs of abuse" (thus victimizing their users) to the list of absolutely forbidden items.

Despite the support- verbal and monetary- of national governments, organized religions, and most "leading" human institutions, the drug war rests on one enormous vulnerability: its implicit contention that a policy of criminal prohibition can succeed.

If that notion were to be exposed for the failure it has always been, the drug war could come crashing down at least as quickly as Joe Paterno's public image.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 06:16 PM | Comments (0)

December 07, 2011

How the CSA Became Omnibus Drug Prohibition

A friend sent me the URL of an article in Monday’s Huffington Post: its author, drug policy wonk Kevin Sabet, is an outspoken opponent of medical marijuana. He had cited our paper on pot applicants in a piece criticizing the CMA’s recent decision to endorse legalization of marijuana. My immediate response was that Sabet was being dishonest; as a drug policy “expert,” he certainly should have recognized that my position was very different from his simply from reading our paper, yet he cited us as supporting his position. Had he really read ours? Or was he simply padding his bibliography?

With respect to the CMA decision; although justified by a curiously self-protective logic, it is welcome, correct, and long overdue. I've only had time to skim the summary, but it clearly recognizes the lack of appropriate studies before "marijuana" was made illegal. That the conservative CMA has been the first state association to do so is also important.

15 years spent studying drug policy issues, the last 10 of which included recording histories from over 6000 applicants, have convinced me that the Controlled Substances Act of 1970 was the critical error that converted a failing and mistaken, but relatively tolerable federal drug policy into the expensive, punitive and dogma-driven tragedy now known as the “War on Drugs.”

The CSA's key elements were Richard Nixon’s desire to intensify the punishment of cannabis use after the Marijuans Tax Act had been nullified in 1969 by the Supreme Court in the Leary case. Another essential element was Attorney General John Mitchell's articulation of a Constitutional justification for the CSA now known as Schedule one. Apparently, because the Congressional drafting committee had its own concerns about cannabis, Nixon was prevailed upon to appoint the blue-ribbon Shafer Commission to study its potential medical benefits. However, when the Shafer Commission finally reported in March, 1972, its unexpected recommendation that cannabis be studied irritated Nixon so much that he buried their report and the studies were never done. I doubt Dr. Sabet even realizes the irony of his position: he's urging delay of research a medical organization has belatedly realized should have been done before the CSA was passed over forty years ago. The final irony is that his reasons are the same as the ones that troubled the original Congressmen: there is still not enough known about the purported medicinal benefits of cannabis.

Beyond that convoluted irony, Sabet ignores (or is unaware of) two additional realities: Most importantly, the Nixon-Mitchell CSA (which has evolved into drug-by-drug prohibitions imposed administratively by attorneys general) passed easily in 1970 and was later implemented in the worst possible way: by executive orders; the DEA in 1973, and NIDA in 1974. Because the global criminal drug markets created and protected by the CSA have been expanding steadily, so have the budgets, political power, and economic influence of the Agencies created to implement and defend the law.

Since becoming aware of Dr.Sabet, I have learned much more about him through his web site; he appears to be younger version of the academic drug policy analysts identified in an earlier entry. They are important for reformers to now about precisely because they provide academic cover for the drug war by treating it with undeserved respect.

I'll have much more to say about related issues in the near future.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 01:33 AM | Comments (0)

December 03, 2011

New Documentary on Medical Use; and a Question about Party Affiliations

The first episode of Weed Wars, a four part documentary on California's emergent medical marijuana “industry” aired December first on the Discovery Channel. Because I was already tired, I set the recorder and watched it, commercial free, the next morning. For advocates of medical marijuana and cannabis “legalization,” (not always exactly the same goals) the results are a mixed bag. Although the film focuses on a few very interesting individuals caught up in a grim struggle for economic survival, the details that make their story interesting may be so far removed from some cherished beliefs of mainstream American culture as to make them easy targets for Fox News and Bill O’Reilly to portray as dangerously deviant; especially to the Right Wing morons dominating their audience. In fact, that process had already begun, before the first episode aired.

To back up a bit, Harborside, the Oakland cannabis dispensary created by the DeAngelo brothers and their associates, is simply the latest and most sophisticated example of the surprisingly robust medical marijuana industry that began emerging slowly and fitfully after Proposition 215 passed in California fifteen years ago.

Five years later, I would discover, as an unusually naive "pot doc," that a vigorous underground "pot culture" had existed for some time. When I began taking searching medical histories from representatives of that culture, time-lines for both them and their political opponents in law enforcement began to emerge. That led to the discovery that neither side had an accurate take on the other, a situation largely attributable to the secrecy, shame and distrust engendered by the medically uninformed policy that had been imposed on American society by a relatively few ignorant officials over an extended interval and suddenly blossomed into a "war" in the late Sixties.

Whether one considers the drug war as originating with the limited form of drug prohibition created by the Harrison Act of 1914 or the even more complete ban on cannabis imposed by the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937, the policy wasn't intensified into a "War" until after passage of the Controlled Substances Act of 1970 authored by John Mitchell at the behest of Richard Nixon.

Thus has a failing policy, one globally endorsed under UN Treaty, been created on the basis of another failure: the Eighteenth (Prohibition) Amendment to the US Constitution, an idea that had to be scrapped after a mere fourteen years of futility. Perhaps the most compelling reason for that grotesque development is denial, the well demonstrated failure of human institutions to admit to their own mistakes; especially when of long standing and great magnitude. Perhaps the best example of the recently enunciated concept of "path dependence" is America's Drug War. One particularly revealing feature is the insistence of its federal minders that it's is really one of "control" and their careful avoidance of the more accurate "prohibition."

As I would eventually also discover, the evolution of pot culture provides an excellent metaphor for an understanding what is usually referred to as "human nature," which itself could be described as that which we (still) do not understood about our own behavior. Although our scientifically informed species has learned a lot about the cosmos, its solar system, and the planet we live on, our own behavior clearly remains mysterious to those who compete for the job of leading us through the perils of modern existence.

If you don't believe that, just look at the sorry group of Republicans now competing for their party's nomination. The one I especially can't figure out is Ron Paul. Why is a man who asks such sensible questions and is a known cannabis advocate trying to win the Republican nomination?

Isn't he in he wrong party?

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 05:29 PM | Comments (0)

November 20, 2011

Culpable Ignorance; How Bureaucratic Solidarity gave rise to a Policy Disaster

The US federal government began using the then-rare term, “marihuana” for cannabis in concert with FBN Director Harry Anslinger’s first hearings on his proposed Marijuana Tax Act in 1937. Although his lurid claims implied an urgent need for such legislation and his assertion that its use by young people was increasing were supported by the Hearst Newspaper chain, they were not corroborated by other sources, nor were they supported by medical literature. The only AMA representative at the hearings complained that he had not been consulted in a timely manner, and characterized the proposed legislation as unnecessary and probably mistaken.

Nonetheless, Anslinger’s poorly drafted MTA (a clumsy attempt to replicate the transfer tax ploy behind the 1914 Harrison Act) was dutifully approved by a bored Congress on a voice vote later that year (the Congressmen were also told the AMA had endorsed the new law). However,"marijuana” use- youthful or otherwise- remained infreqent over the next thirty years (an interval that included World War Two and Korea). It wasn’t until the mid-Sixties that “marijuana” use by teens suddenly became a national phenomenon. Predictably, neither its vaguely defined pharmacology nor that sudden surge in popularity provoked much interest from the FBN, which, in any event, would soon be replaced by the alphabet soup of contesting agencies that emerged following Anslinger's forced retirement in 1962.

After Richard Nixon and John Mitchell salvaged marijuana prohibition with the CSA in 1969, a supportive claque of academic researchers began to thrive on NIDA funding. Its focus, naturally enough, was defense of the policy, and did not include any possible benefits to the "kids" who were using marijuana. Instead, their concomitant interest in both alcohol and cigarettes were quickly identified as a “Gateway" effect, thus reinforcing the need for pot prohibition and generating hundreds of futile studies attempting to demonstrate "causality" between cannabis and heroin addiction.

Some linkage between psychedelics and the emergent popularity of inhaled cannabis could have been inferred from the arrest of LSD guru Timothy Leary for minor possession at the Mexican border in 1965. He was soon sentenced to an amazing 30 years. Four years later, and even more amazingly, his appeal led the MTA to be overturned by the Supreme Court, the same institution that rescued Harrison with several uninformed rulings on “addiction” before 1920, and then reversed themselves in 1925. The 1969 ruling against the MTA posed a dire threat to the makeshift US drug policy because of its reliance on dissimilar transfer taxes (Harrison was actually regulation because it allowed prescriptive use of the targeted agents. However Schedule one, as written for John Mitchell’s CSA allowed no such option for “marijuana,” thus setting the stage for the numerous administrative appeals (as allowed by the law) that eventually convinced Judge Young to make his famous ruling. In an uncanny continuation of the herb’s unfortunate timing, Young would die shortly after being overruled by his DEA administrator (another Mitchell “gotcha”). It would thus take eight more years before Proposition 215 was passed by California voters; meanwhile, both the feds and the “reform movement” would remain mired in mutual ignorance while the criminal market for cannabis continued to thrive and its hippie customers continued to age.

In essence, during the forty years that John Michell's CSA has been the law of the land, the (illegal) use of cannabis has been evolving, both as an "edible" and in its more familiar inhaled form. The opportunity provided by Prop 215 to interview chronic users systematically and repeatedly has provided an unparalleled opportunity to gather data from a large sample of chronic users for whom the chance to become “legal” was important enough to undergo the risk, trouble, and expense of buying what have eventually evolved into one-year renewable licenses grudgingly recognized by state law enforcement on the basis of local rules formulated by loose affiliations of officials in each of California’s 58 counties. The fifteen year evolution of Proposition 215 has also been vigorously contested by federal agencies, thus providing a largely unexpected look at the arrogance, ignorance, and duplicity now rampant in American (and global) society. That a chance to assess how Americans have responded to 4 decades of rigorously enforced drug prohibition would play out against a panoply of worrisome national and global events driven by the same behavioral characteristics as those being palliated by cannabis users may provides an opportunity for the species to recognize (and deal with) some intrinsic flaws it seems to have been in denial about for untold millennia.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 06:07 PM | Comments (0)

November 17, 2011

Is Humanization a threat to life on Planet Earth?

Homo sapiens is the formal taxonomic name for modern humans. We are considered, at least by the scientifically literate, to be a single species that evolved in Africa about 200 thousand years ago and subsequently spread over most of the world in a series of diasporas thought to have begun about 140,000 years later. Those time estimates are considered relatively recent on the deep (geologic) time scale known to Charles Darwin and now accepted by most scientists (but still denied by some organized religions). Indeed, marked differences between religious and political opinions-often bitterly stated- are among the many important issues dividing our species into separate camps in a world being rocked by violent revolutions, engaged in a feckless war on "terror" and now mired in a deepening global economic crisis.

Against that backdrop, one might think that Darwin's hypothesis, since independently confirmed to an unusual degee by Mendelian Genetics, the structure of the DNA molecule (and the fact that it provides a mechanism for inheritance in all known life forms) should be beyond dispute; but such is obviously not the case.

Indeed, we humans, the only cognitive species that is also literate and scientifically knowledgeable, are remarkably prone to irrational disagreements on a scale that, when combined with our technological prowess, pose a unique existential challenge to both our own species and other living things.

In other words the current degree of humanization of Planet Earth may have become the single most immediate threat to both its human population and life in general.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 01:14 PM | Comments (0)

November 13, 2011

Drug War Elephants and Saturday Night Speculation

Any public policy that fails as predictably as our "drug war" (forty years and counting) requires some mechanism to distract attention from those failures while carefully avoiding pointed questions and frank discussion. In the case of the drug war those protections are helped considerably by the widely accepted notion that the designated enemy, drug addiction- especially if it threatens children- is so heinous that any relaxation in the fight against it is unacceptable. Thus has a false doctrine come to rely on an equally false moral imperative. The facile deduction then becomes that anyone criticizing American drug policy must be either a fuzzy headed idealist or a would-be drug dealer who wants to sell drugs to "kids" (defined since by the Reagan Administration as anyone under the age of 21).

As the drug war has evolved since passage of the Controlled Substances Act, its prime objective has became "taking down" evil drug networks and incarcerating (or killing) their "kingpins." Numerous failures to do so have been either glossed over by supportive media or portrayed as partial successes: i.e., keeping bad drugs “off the street,” without acknowledging that what put them there was our stubborn faith to prohibition, a policy of proven failure. The huge tax-free profits produced by illegal markets are only possible under prohibition law (despite its classification as a policy of “control”). They are made available to violent criminals competing in an industry with no rule but survival. The most successful are able to bribe corrupt public officials (never in short supply) and hire the most skilled attorneys to represent them. Eventually, all kingpins are replaced by someone luckier or more unscrupulous than they are. In other words, the prohibition law that has underpinned American drug policy since 1970 really protects a criminal industry that has nurtured some of the worst people in contemporary society.

Another effective drug war tactic has been to refer to any "substance" the US Attorney General lists on “Schedule One” as a (presumably addictive) "drug of abuse” without acknowledging that a) “addiction” has never been precisely defined, b) lacks the characteristics that permit accurate medical diagnosis, c) none of the drugs on Schedule One are as addictive or harmful as cigarettes, and d) the clinical outcomes of illegal drug users under the purview of law enforcement are impeded by unrealistic demands that they remain “drug free;” in other words, the limited success of methadone and nicotine maintenance programs suggest that people with problematic drug habits could become (and remain) productive citizens if they had unfettered access to a safe form of their problem drug and appropriate medical help.

I must admit to having been taken in myself by the steady stream of drug war propaganda that began emanating from the DEA and NIDA, the two federal agencies created in the Seventies to enforce and defend the CSA as policy. Even then, I found it easy to remember that alcohol Prohibition had been an poorly conceived social disaster; thus I retained very skeptical of Richard Nixon as President, which may explain why I remember exactly where I was when I first heard about the the Saturday Night Massacre on my car radio (I was returning home from an emergency hospital visit) and realized immediately that it could lead to impeachment.

In retrospect, it's clear that Nixon brought about his own downfall; the break-in probably wouldn't have been regarded as that serious had he not elevated it with his own hubris and refusal to admit a mistake. From October 20, 1973, until his announced departure on August 9, 1974, my car radio and attention remained tuned in to Watergate. I’ve not followed any evolving news story any more avidly and still see its outcome as a rare “win” for the good guys.

What I've also learned about Nixon's drug war in ten years spent interviewing cannabis users is that while it had been a human disaster, it was probably motivated by his unhappy childhood. Even more ironically its circumstances are uncannily similar to those documented in the histories of patients seeking a recommendation to use it legally.

The tragic irony is that had Nixon been born fifty years later, he could well have become a marijuana user himself; an event that would probably have prevented his political success, but would also have made him a lot happier and the rest of us a lot better off.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 04:55 AM | Comments (0)

November 12, 2011

Presidential Debates, Ripple Effects, and Unintended Consequences

The first decisive TV moment in a presidential campaign took place in 1960 when Richard Nixon’s inattention to make-up and other details made him look untrustworthy. There is now general agreement that the then-unfamiliar debate format portrayed John Kennedy as more youthful and confident and thus helped him win a close decision over a more experienced opponent who was probably in better health. Because Kennedy was assassinated near the end of his first term,we will never know how long he might have lived (or how he might have handled Vietnam); but Nixon survived to the relatively ripe old age of eighty-one.

It's also likely that an innate distrust of the electorate intensified by that narrow 1960 defeat helped persuade Nixon to gamble on the risky Watergate caper that would blight his second term and ultimately force his resignation; the only president ever to endure such disgrace. It's also probable that his fear of being judged by history as the "loser" of the intrinsically hopeless Vietnam war he'd inherited from his predecessors is what motivated his ploy of "Vietnamization:" the gradual withdrawal of American ground troops while compensating for their lost firepower by bombing (and destabilizing) Laos and Cambodia.

We can now appreciate that Nixon’s poor decisions and subsequent fall from grace had enormous consequences for both America and the world at large. For one thing, thousands of avoidable deaths and injuries of Laotians and Cambodians are still beinginflcted by unexploded ordnance forty years later. Beyond that, there has been a loss of trust engendered by our continuing refusal to sign on to an international ban on land mines.

Even more delayed ripple effects and unforeseen international consequences have been produced by the gradual evolution of an ill-considered domestic policy that started when the Harrison Narcotic Act was signed by one Democratic President (Woodrow Wilson) in 1914 and further complicated by another (Franklin Roosevelt) who signed the Marijuana Tax Act in 1937. Although always a failure, America's policy of drug prohibition had remained relatively affordable because the illegal markets it gave rise to remained small until the Sixties when the largest generation in history suddenly developed an unprecedented enthusiasm for "marijuana" and several newly discovered psychedelics within a few years.

Unfortunately that youthful discovery also coincided with Nixon's first term in office. After the Marijuana Tax Act was declared unconstitutional, his immediate response was to persuade fellow Watergate conspirator John Mitchell to draft the far more punitive Controlled substances Act, thus converting a relatively minor policy error into a costly global folly, one still actively pursued by the US Federal Government and the United Nations forty years later. That it's still taken seriously and aggressively enforced despite its enormous expense total lack of success is incomprehensible. It's also a sad commentary on the quality of human political thinking.

The Beat Generation was a small literary movement that gained sudden notoriety in the Fifties. What make the Beats critical to the expansion of a silly drug policy into a catastrophic drug war is that they were were the first whites to try both cannabis and psychedelics and write about their experiences in positive terms. Although those descriptions were largely ignored or discounted by the establishment, they had an huge impact on youthful baby boomers who became so turned on that they frightened Nixon's silent Majority into declaring a "war on drugs" that had even less likelihood of success than his strategy in Vietnami.

To compound the folly, it's now quite clear (although not yet understood) that cannabis, in both its inhaled and edible forms, is so uniquely potent and safe that the greatest damage done by the war against it may not be the millions of arrests and the expansion of our prison system it produced, but the prolonged denial of its benefits to mankind.

A big hint about those benefits: there may be no better palliative than inhaled cannabis for the symptoms of PTSD now attracting increasing attention in our over-crowded and relentlessly competitive modern world.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 11:44 PM | Comments (0)

November 06, 2011

An Important Anniversary and a Belated Lamentation

Yesterday was the fifteenth anniversary of California’s Proposition 215, which allowed use of cannabis (“marijuana”) as medicine, provided it was formally "recommended" by a licensed physician or osteopath. Controversial from the moment it qualified for the ballot, the successful proposition was promptly attacked by Clinton’s drug czar before it could take effect; however his ploy was invalidated by the Ninth Circuit of the Supreme Court on First Amendment grounds. Their ruling was promptly challenged by the incoming Bush Administration at its first opportunity. Fortunately, the senior Court, as it was constituted in 2000, allowed the Ninth Circuit’s ruling to stand. Fortunately that was was long enough before arch conservative justices Roberts and Alito, were added to the court. Thus the first successful voter challenge to the Nixon-Mitchell drug war has been allowed to evolve within California. Even so; it still faces formidable opposition from Law Enforcement at every level as confirmed by recent threats of forfeiture aimed at landlords and the refusal of the IRS to allow deductions for a product voters have declared legal.

Whether the present Supreme Court (which appears to have been configured by Republican Presidents intent on overturning Roe v Wade) would have allowed the state initiative process to stand is probably moot, particularly since a spate of medical marijuana laws been passed; some by initiative and others by state legislatures

Now in its forty-first year, the drug war does not want for vigorous federal backing, but it has also been weakened further by the passage of medical cannabis laws in fifteen additional states and the District of Columbia. With similar legislation now being actively supported in six more, including populous New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, a tipping point may be imminent. That medical use legislation has been supported almost exclusively by youthful Democrats sends its own message; it also attests to the power of the black market created, however inadvertently, by the drug war. Beyond that, it confirms the ability of cannabis to attract loyal long term users despite the extreme legal and social risks imposed by its illegality. The underlying message should be clear to anyone with the capacity to decipher it, a growing population that will hopefully include our first biracial President who happens to fit the profile established by an ongoing study of California applicants to an uncanny degree (that he had negligible contact with his biological father, tried cannabis, was able to get “high,” and also had extreme difficulty becoming abstinent from cigarettes are matters of public record).

To return to this entry’s anniversary theme: the real genius of Proposition 215 may have been a Psychiatrist who became a lifelong cannabis user, Tod Mikuriya, who, as brilliant as he was, undoubtedly experienced its benefits on a personal level long before appreciating them intellectually. Whatever the truth of that speculation, I have no doubt that his critical contribution to Prop 215’s wording was what gave me, as a pot neophyte, the courage to recommend it for the “mood disorders” I soon recognized from and the accumulated family and drug initiation histories I began collecting from applicants in November, 2001.

Although there is far from universal agreement among chronic users, I am convinced that most were attracted by the unique anxiolytic benefits of cannabis (especially when when it is inhaled). It was that intuition that gave me the courage to proceed in the face of skepticism from both political opponents and supporters of "medical marijuana."

My profound regret is that although I’d enjoyed limited access to Tod; it was late in his career and mainly during the short remission before he died; thus we had no opportunity for the relaxed, collegial discussion I now miss acutely. Nevertheless, I appreciate the life-long courage and sagacity he demonstrated in such abundance.

Without those qualities and the contributions of a few other prime movers, we might not have had Prop 215 and be still at square one, rather than well on our way to what promises to be ultimate “legalization.” It may not come as soon as many would wish, but the demographics of current medical users and the absence of competitive products among the offerings of Big Pharma make it a very safe long-term bet.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 03:55 PM | Comments (0)

November 02, 2011

A Revealing Handbook

The more I study American drug policy, the more I consider the new specialty of Addiction Medicine to be its creature, the very existence of which depends on mistaken policy beliefs about "addiction." That view was strengthened by reading a publication intended as a Handbook for the practice of Addiction Medicine. I freely admit to my own bias; since I decided US policy was seriously flawed many years ago and have had no reason to change that opinion, I had become more interested in understanding just how such a bad policy had survived for so long. What I learned from reading Addiction Medicine didn’t change my opinion of the policy, but it did enhance my understanding of its acceptance. Although its sub title asserts that it’s “evidence based,” the Addiction Medicine Handbook is an archetypal policy-friendly exercise of the type that began accumulating rapidly in Psychiatric and Behavioral Science literature shortly after passage of the Controlled Substances Act in 1970. The CSA can best be understood as a homologue of the infamous 1937 Nuremberg laws used by Adolph Hitler to arrogate total control of society in a nation made resentful enough by the Treaty of Versailles to accept his preferred assessment of its malaise (betrayal by the Jews) and its necessary therapy (the Final Solution), which, amazingly, was still being implemented in April 1945; even as Germany was being gobbled up from the East by the Russians and from the West by the Allies .

To pursue that analogy a bit further, the drug war’s bureaucracies (The DEA and NIDA) have been permitted to wage the expensive war that sustains them despite its record of failure because it is mostly metaphorical; whereas Germany’s 1945 enemies were using live ammunition. Beyond that, the nuclear weapons we were motivated to produce by Japan’s threat of mass suicide, has yet led to lead our species into nuclear winter (although there have been at least 2 close calls).

As for the Addiction Medicine handbook, its support of our failing policy is disclosed more by what is not explained than by what is, a tactic that has been been critical to the drug war's durability as policy. Once drugs were made illegal, users were placed beyond the reach of unbiased study, whereas self-interested policy supporters within government were given total control of the agenda on the basis of their largely unsupported claims about “drugs” and their noxious effects. Worse; those opposing the policy could be tarred with the same brush as clueless hippies at best and criminals, at worst. That our media simply amplified those claims by accepting them at face value from 1972 on is a matter of record, as is the proliferation of policy-friendly "studies" purporting to show that cannabis functioned as a "gateway" drug.

John Mitchell’s Controlled Substances Act was the legislative master stroke that brought that situation about. By rolling the Harrison and Marijuana Tax Acts into one package, it provided the policy with a single plausible enemy (the addiction of children) and gave the nation enough time time in which to forget the fiasco of (alcohol) Prohibition. Not only had another world war intervened between the criminalization of “marijuana,” and the start of our drug war, but America had rediscovered its taste for booze while women were entering the work force and a new youthful demographic (the Baby Boom) were discovering the blandishments of alcohol and tobacco. In other words, generational amnesia had set in between passage of the the MTA in 1937 and the discovery of “weed” by young “hippies” in the Vietnam-Nixon era.

Rastegar and Fingerhood’s short chapter (11 of 17) on marijuana is especially revealing; both for its brevity- 6 pages of a 295 page book- and for the issues it does not try to address: the history of cannabis prohibition, its sudden popularity with youth, its user demographics, and the claimed medical benefits that have led to medical marijuana laws in 16 states. That both authors are prominent in the new specialty of “Addiction Medicine” and on the Hopkins faculty is both revealing and discouraging.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 04:08 AM | Comments (0)

October 26, 2011

Et tu, SCIAM?

15 years after California’s Proposition 215 barely survived a determined effort by the drug czar to frustrate the spirit of the initiative, a respected Science magazine has finally mustered enough courage to suggest that herbal cannabis may have some medical benefits after all. Even that grudging admission was obscured by the inexplicable reluctance of the author (along with many reformers) to understand that “prohibition” is very different from “control;” also that continued confusion of the two only perpetuates the bureaucratic mess the initiative was intended to clear up.

The short article promptly addressed "Medical" marijuana's main problem: “marijuana's" listing (on Schedule 1 as having a “high potential for abuse," and “no currently accepted medical use in treatment in the U.S” limits research by making it “difficult for investigators to obtain.” Bravo. But not merely “difficult,” say rather, “impossible.” It's a classic Catch 22, because changing a bad law written by medically ignorant Watergate Maestro John Mitchell in 1970 well before he went to prison for perjury, would require a similarly ignorant Congress to admit its own mistake in passing the fanciful Controlled Substances Act and later intensifying its penalties repeatedly in the absence of any objective data that cannabis is "harmful," either when inhaled or eaten.

As our (now) 10-year study of California applicants suggests, the reason millions of American teens stubbornly try (“initiate”) “weed” between the ages of 12 and 18 year after year are similar to those that impel them to also try (forbidden) alcohol and cigarettes at about the same age: insecurity. Not only that, those who eventually make marijuana their drug of choice drink a lot less dangerously than they did before and the ones who became hooked on cigarettes start trying to quit; (even when they can't, they smoke a lot less). Over the long haul, cannabis has performed as a gateway out of trouble with “harder” drugs, rather than as a gateway into them. The initial researchers who studied young drug users in the Seventies were too eager to please policy makers and had not followed their young subjects long enough to see what patterns would emerge with extended use. We have now had four decades of pot prohibition and its results are far more discernible to focused questioning.

The drug war would not be the first time America got an important policy wrong (Slavery and Segregation come to mind); but- given the number of people arrested for felonies and the human damage produced by their imprisonment- it would be one of the most inhumane and destructive... shame on The Scientific American for remaining contentedly with the herd.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 11:31 PM | Comments (0)

October 14, 2011

Euphemism as Blatant Dishonesty; “Nat Geo,” Rupert Murdoch & Mexican Cartels

Although the policy they are paid to enforce is one of drug prohibition, the bureaucracy prosecuting America’s “war on drugs" stubbornly insists their aim is one of control, while assiduously avoiding any use of the long-discredited “P” word. Such flagrant intellectual dishonesty on behalf of a destructive policy raises euphemism to the equivalent of a war crime and tarnishes the American mainstream media that have been so loathe to question it since Richard Nixon was allowed to bury the Shafer report back in March, 1972.

Nixon's escalation of a failing policy into a metaphorical war was empowered by John Mitchell's Controlled Substances Act just over four decades ago; the DEA and NIDA, the agencies created to wage it, are an overlooked legacy of Nixon's truncated second term; they were created by Executive Order shortly before his forced resignation. That the agencies themselves, and the failures of the DEA have escaped critical scrutiny by our Fourth Estate is an enduring irony, given the media's role in Watergate. One would think the drug war's dubious intellectual origins might have prompted more searching scrutiny than they have received so far from our "free press."

A pertinent contemporary example of both Drug War duplicity and its dishonest media support can be found in Rupert Murdoch's "Nat Geo," which produces a "documentary" series entitled Border Wars. It's shot entirely from the standpoint of our "heroic" Border Patrol without regard to the plight of the desperately poor Mexicans they chase across the Sonoran desert with Blackhawk helicopters, or the horrific cartel violence now threatening Mexican society with implosion. Nor does it factor in the murder an estimated 10,000 Mexicans per year since 2006, when the Bush-Cheney White House requested that newly elected Mexican President Calderon "clean up" cross border smuggling.

I had a small measure of satisfaction this morning upon hearing over the car radio that Murdoch was heckled off a podium in San Francisco he had probably paid good money for .

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 04:16 PM | Comments (0)

October 08, 2011

Yet Another Example of Federal Drug Insanity

Nearly fifteen years after a comfortable majority of Californians voted to allow a long-overdue study of the medical attributes of cannabis (“marijuana”), the federal government Department of Justice, is still adamant that it must remain an illegal drug without any recognized medical use. Yesterday morning Melinda Haag, US Attorney for Northern California, announced a new campaign against the thriving medical marijuana market that has followed California's example since 1998 and now numbers a total of 16 states, despite the best efforts of Clinton’s drug czar to nip it in the bud; before 1996 had even ended.

At some point, one is forced to wonder when the American Public will finally understand that federal drug policy may be the best example of a popular definition of insanity one could imagine.

Haag’s cliche-laden announcement also reveals that federal policy under Obama’s DEA is just as intellectually dishonest and cognitively incompetent as it was under Bush and Clinton. In other words, the Controlled Substances Act authored by jailbird Attorney General John Mitchell in 1969 at the behest of then-President Nixon, still relies on threats and fear over science and ordinary common sense to impose its benighted “marijuana” doctrine. Shades of Harry Anslinger.

It may be that the American Public, long beguiled by federal dishonesty on the subject of drugs and blinded to our expensive efforts to enforce a failing prohibition, will finally wake up. Or it may not. In any event, the popular response to their latest insanity in the nation with the world’s largest (and least affordable) prison system should be interesting, to say the least.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 05:27 PM | Comments (0)

October 03, 2011

A Realistic Historical Perspective

Our own history is what most humans remain focused on because of the way our brains have evolved. Although those of other vertebrates are very similar, the brightest primate can’t match either the conceptual power or capacity for learning possessed by Homo sapiens. In the final analysis, it's the unique ability to conceptualize- and then test various “what if?” scenarios- that gave our species the degree of control of our planetary environment we now possess. However, as that planet's current state now reveals, it hasn't been smooth sailing; especially since we began acquiring scientific competence a few hundred years ago.

That's because of the alarming overpopulation and an attendant environmental degradation that have accompanied our scientific prowess. We now face a series of existential problems as grave as any that threatened us with extinction in earlier times; however, our present numbers and shrinking natural resources, to say nothing of anthropogenic climate problems, are clearly more serious than we care to admit. Beyond that, years of extraordinary greed may have just poisoned our global economy to an unprecedented degree.

Before these serious problems can be addressed effectively, they will first have to be recognized by world leaders. Assuming that’s even possible, dealing with them constructively will require honest deliberations and the imposition of fair rules. Another lesson history teaches us about ourselves is that exploitation and repression do not succeed over the long term; rather, they breed opposition that eventually defeats oppressors one way or another; not because of Divine intervention on behalf of the righteous (the traditional explanation), but because human emotions inevitably lead apparent “winners” to overreach and "losers" to seek revenge.

Alternatively, we are now also learning- almost on a daily basis- how seriously our small planet’s Geology can affect living populations. Given the relative brevity of primates' time on earth and how quickly it could all be over, planning may not matter.

Before giving in to despair, however; it's also very human to remain optimistic and look for solutions. Where there's a will, there (may be) a way.

Doctor Tom

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

September 30, 2011

Time to Revisit the Shafer Report?

March 22, 2012 will mark the 40th anniversary of Richard Nixon's summary rejection of the timidly worded Shafer Commission's two year study simply because he didn't agree with its recommendations. Originally mandated in 1970 by a Congressional committee struggling with the wording of John Mitchell's Controlled Substances Act because of their concern that although little was known about "marijuana's" effects on chronic users, it had already been chosen for listing on the highly restrictive Schedule One, by Roger Egeberg, the Assistant Secretary of Health, presumably at Nixon's insistence.

Thus one result of Nixon's summary rejection of the commission's recommendation was that the ban on a drug his own Committee had taken great pains to point out was unsupported by scientific evidence in 1970 would continue to tarnish it with the same stigma Harry Anslinger had smeared it with in 1937 for three more decades before growing agitation by its (underground) medical users finally produced California's unique "medical marijuana" initiative in 1996.

Parenthetically, it must also be added that until passage of the Draconian CSA (and the speedy creation, by Executive Order, of its supportive bureaucracies, the DEA and NIDA) no research supporting "marijuana" prohibition had ever been done. Anyone reasonably familiar with ordinary medical research should have been able to recognize the flood of "Gateway" studies that began in the early Seventies for what it was: post hoc, policy-compliant "research" filling a void that had existed, both before and after Anslinger's ludicrous 1937 MTA. In other words, three decades of disinterest in illegal "reefer" by the behavioral sciences were quickly followed by a plethora of studies seeking to explain the explosive youthful cannabis interest of the Sixties without ever recognizing that it had been unique to that era or asking why it had occurred when it did. Instead; the CSA itself had generated a bonanza of DEA and NIDA funding for policy-friendly "research" by Psychiatry and the Behavioral Sciences.

Nixon's summary burial of the timidly-worded Shafer Report was high-handed, even for him; but the media let it pass, almost without comment in March 1972. In that connection, it should also be remembered that particular time was probably the high-water mark of his entire Administration. He had just scored an unlikely foreign policy coup by driving a wedge between China and its Russian allies (while also insuring a benign Chinese response to "Vietnamization").

Ironically, although Nixon's re-election may have seemed almost certain in March 1972, it would be his own insecurity that would goad his supporters into the ludicrous Watergate break-in that eventually destroyed his Presidency. It's also not surprising that the press failed to notice his brush-off of Shafer in March '72; given the context, they probably spent little time reading it themselves.

In that connection, and considering that we now have 4 decades of expensive Drug War failure by which to evaluate the CSA, perhaps we should finally read the long-neglected Shafer report. My own study, still ongoing, suggests that it made some very good points about cannabis; in fact, we might be a lot better off today if it had received a modicum of intelligent, unbiased scrutiny before the nation (and the UN) foolishly committed themselves to a scientifically vacuous policy based on little more than Harry Anslinger's vivid imagination, Richard Nixon's paranoid resentment, and John Mitchell's seductive rhetoric.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 10:29 PM | Comments (0)

September 28, 2011

Wrestling with Anslinger’s Ghost

In 1937 Harry Anslinger justified his request that Congress pass the Marijuana Tax Act with claims that use of "Reefer" by American adolescents had been increasing alarmingly. He also dismissed its importance as medicine, claiming that “Indian hemp” had seen its day and would not be missed by physicians.

It's now possible, over 74 years later and almost 15 years after proposition 215 passed in California to state unequivocally that the Marijuana Tax Act- through a chain of unfortunate circumstances- not only facilitated the election of Richard Nixon in 1968 but also materially assisted passage of the even more destructive Controlled Substances Act of 1970. The CSA, which was quickly accepted as reasonable by jurists who lacked both the knowledge and credentials to question its completely unproven assertions, quickly became the lynchpin of a (global) war on drugs. It is thus now possible to nominate Anslinger for a very dubious honor: the most destructive government bureaucrat in human history.

Ironically, because marijuana prohibition (inevitably described as “drug control” in federal documents) is still an indispensable tenet of drug war dogma, neither its “medicinal,” nor its “recreational” use can be recognized by a federal agency. Nevertheless, because a measure of common sense has gradually been revealed in 16 states and the District of Columbia, “medical marijuana" laws now permit the disputed production and distribution of cannabis to an indeterminate number of successful applicants, all of whom have satisfied disputed criteria and been recognized as “legitimate” patients within their home states.

Over the past 10 years, I have been collecting data from cannabis applicants in California attempting to determine 2 things: were their claims of medical use believable? Second, given the obvious affirmative answer to that question, what accounts for the reluctance of the federal government to consider the possibility Anslinger may have been wrong and they have been pursuing a ridiculous policy for over 40 years?

In fact, cannabis, although federally illegal, is potent medicine in both its inhaled and edible forms and may become the source of even more valuable therapeutic agents, now that its genome has been sequenced.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 09:03 PM | Comments (0)

September 25, 2011

A Species Threatened by its own Cleverness

Understanding the genesis of humanity's modern dilemma isn’t that difficult. All it requires is the right perspective and a willingness to question traditional religious beliefs. If we accept empirical science as having started around the time of Galileo, we can see that as the basic sciences began evolving into information-sharing disciplines in the 18th-century, technologic progress became even more rapid and the nascent Industrial Revolution began gaining headway from about 1800 on. Generally, the more spectacular and profitable the science, the more firmly its direction and control remained with conservative religious and political leaders who tended to favor using it for weapons, colonization, economic exploitation, and wars of conquest.

The North American experiment in representative government that gave rise to the United States was an interesting opportunity for change, but the secret retention of chattel slavery by its founders inflicted a social and economic wound from which recovery has been difficult.

In any event, the net result for Planet Earth has been its rapid human overpopulation and environmental degradation, even as we are still learning about rare natural disasters that impacted animal populations in the past and have not disappeared. Current examples are the recently discovered presence of a Yellowstone mega volcano and the disputed evidence of rapid climate change now adding to our financial and emotional woes, even as they are being ignored or minimized by a majority of conservative politicians and media outlets.

As these problems have progressed in both their scope and the difficulty of finding timely solutions, the facility with which we seem able to ignore them has also increased. Examples abound; take the brisk illegal trade in both drugs and immigrants along our southern border with Mexico: both governments have been attempting to suppress those activities with a similar lack of success, but at quite different costs: for Americans it’s the financially expensive enforcement bureaucracy, but for Mexico, it has been thousands of cartel murders and the even more anonymous deaths of border crossing job seekers from exposure and dehydration. Nevertheless, both governments apparently regard their efforts as rational and worthwhile because they are continuing.

What it might take just to reconsider the drug war and admit its multiple failures in the present political climate is simply beyond comprehension.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 07:06 PM | Comments (0)

September 11, 2011

Reflections on 9/11: Wars that can't be won.

Despite the recent patriotic hoopla on the 10th anniversary of 9/11 and the assassination of its principal architect on May 2, it must be admitted that 10 years ago, Osama bin Laden scored an enormous victory with a small investment; one that has continued to grow because his perceived enemies are now mired in a financial catastrophe with no end in sight. Joblessness in the United States is at levels not seen since the Great Depression, and neither political party has a clue about how to reverse it. Difficult as it may be to remember now, the Clinton Administration had somehow left Bush and Cheney with a balanced budget just nine months before the attacks.

As Dana Priest's series confirms, the US response was to spend so much money on intelligence gathering, futile nation building, and two disastrous wars leaning heavily on contractors, that we still can't measure their total cost, turn them off, or pay for them; primarily because global financial markets were thrown into a crisis of confidence in 2008. Not to mention that a majority of the world’s humans are failing to acknowledge serious problems with human overpopulation, critical resource shortages, rapid climate change, and growing political instability.

Until about five years ago, I was foolish enough to think that simply exposing some of the more blatant failures of our drug policy might hasten its political defeat, but recent developments, together with what I've learned about human nature from the study itself have convinced me otherwise. It will take far more than a few lonely voices; particularly in a world preoccupied by fear.

Nevertheless, we may also be close to a point in history where our species will have to choose between its own survival and continued exploitation of the global environment in pursuit of wealth. How such a choice might be recognized, let alone be made, is of course impossible to know at this moment. However if we do nothing, our problems seems almost certain to become worse. Thus continuing to rely on denial, will likely continue our present downward spiral.

As usual with things I blog about, there's a drug war connection here. It is also an expensive policy disaster based on greed and fear. It has already been failing expensively in plain sight for four decades (as opposed to just ten years for the 'War on Terror").

Go figure.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 07:15 PM | Comments (0)

September 10, 2011

Annals of Moral Pharmacology

On May 19, 1969, the US Supreme Court surprised everyone by striking down the Marijuana Tax Act in a case involving notorious LSD guru Timothy Leary, an erstwhile Harvard professor who had been sentenced to 30 years in prison in 1965 following his arrest for possession of marijuana after he was barred as a tourist by Mexican authorities; not because of the marijuana, but because of his personal notoriety. Be that as it may, the high court's reversal of the 1937 MTA also threatened the more venerable (1914) Harrison Narcotic Act which had also awarded police powers to the same federal agency on the basis of a similar tax ploy. In other words, the Leary decision was a clear threat to the viability of American drug policy just as the size and popularity of a nascent youthful drug culture were alarming older adults.

Clearly, something would have to be done.

By October, 1970, that “something” had become the Controlled Substances Act, the brain child of none other than John Newton Mitchell, Nixon's 1968 campaign manager, whose reward for a narrow election victory had been his appointment as Attorney General. There is no evidence that Mitchell sought any outside help from experts in Pharmacology or Medicine in drafting the CSA's key Schedule One, which articulates the rationale for "control" (not prohibition) of certain designated "substances" (not drugs) and invests final authority for deciding the "substances" to be listed (banned) in the AG. Three of the first were heroin, marijuana, and LSD, a grouping that underscores both Mitchell's Pharmacologic ignorance and that of those who would later endorse it: initially, the Congress of the United States, and later, on numerous occasions, the Supreme Court. Nor has the dubious logic of Schedule 1 been challenged by any sitting president since Nixon. That such a patently absurd set of assertions is the basis for arresting travelers in most ports of entry of UN member nations does not auger well for our contentious species, which finds similar agreement on other issues so difficult.

From a purely logical perspective, Mitchell’s postulates are coherent. Unfortunately, they are also mere supposition, none of which can be substantiated by experience; especially the second: "The drug or other substance has no currently accepted medical use in treatment in the United States." That notion is now so ludicrously untrue that it requires an almost total suspension of belief to endorse it; it's the kind of “logic” that characterizes Tea Party stalwarts on most issues and people who believe rapid climate change is a hoax, even after their towns were flooded by tropical depressions on successive week ends.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 05:15 PM | Comments (0)

August 19, 2011

One Bright Spot in a Failing Economy

It's difficult to remember that the world hasn't always been this miserable. It seems that every day this summer brings its own quotient of bad news; today it's a resumption of open warfare between Israel and the Palestinians in Gaza; for comic relief we have the latest inanities of Michele Bachmann to remind us that she's still being taken seriously as a presidential candidate, with no evidence the people supporting her realize how silly her public statements really are or the role that the Tea Party played in triggering the recent global sell-off.

As we try to muddle through our current economic insanity, we discover new pitfalls every day: students can no longer afford the fees and tuitions colleges are forced to charge, defense contractors are forced to lay off workers because the government can no longer afford our outrageously expensive (and ill-advised) programs with their huge cost overruns. It now appears there are many ways a failing economy can cause more pain than we ever suspected back in '08 after the initial shock. Each new discovery simply spreads the pain and heightens our sense of futility.

in the midst of the misery there is at least one economic bright spot: so long as ambient anxiety levels continue to rise, the demand for pot is sure to follow. Recent indications that California has become a favored destination for growers from other states. together with the normal mechanisms of supply and demand should guarantee high quality and lower prices for the foreseeable future.

As for "legalization," not to worry. Congress will predictably be very slow to admit that the Nixon-Mitchell drug war was a huge mistake. That probably or won't happen until hell freezes over, or some equally unlikely event.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 04:17 PM | Comments (0)

August 07, 2011

“Legalization” is a safe bet, but could still be a long wait

Pot is even better medicine than many of its ardent supporters realize, but Congress will have to be persuaded to admit to a huge mistake before it can become legal.

America’s war on drugs has been such an abject policy failure that the steadfast refusal of our federal bureaucracy to consider even the slightest change in its prohibition of “marijuana” should raise serious questions about both America’s intellectual competence and the relevance of our federal system of government. Beyond that, the fact that travelers caught with even a small amount of cannabis in any international port of entry face certain arrest reflects badly on our whole species.

I can make such sweeping statements with considerable confidence because I’ve been engaged for ten years in the first-ever objective study of marijuana use, a project made possible when California voters passed proposition 215 in 1996. However I didn’t tumble to the opportunity myself until I had been screening applicants for several months. The study was enabled by the requirement that applicants be evaluated by a licensed physician, but it also required that the physician be willing to seek pertinent information and that applicants be willing to supply it.

Only in retrospect has it been possible to understand that the aggregated histories of thousands of users could create a body of information against which the policy could be measured. Then the information had to be sought and analyzed. Perhaps what inspired me most was a statement by former San Jose Police Chief Joe McNamara, “the drug war is a policy that can’t stand scrutiny.” True enough, but the problem then became getting people to pay attention to the data.

The policy turns out to be based on even more egregiously false assumptions than either Chief McNamara or I could have guessed when he made that statement in 1995. What we also could not have guessed was the role played by fear in protecting a failing and destructive policy.

To restate the problem from a somewhat different perspective: before cannabis can be legalized, the same two legislative bodies that just disgraced themselves in the debt ceiling debate will have to admit that a policy both houses of Congress and both major political parties have staunchly supported since 1937 was a profound mistake. We have only to extrapolate from the cable news broadcasts being aired as this is written to understand how how daunting the problem may become.

All is not lost however; the demographics of cannabis applicants disclose the pivotal role of the Baby Boom in establishing the current marijuana market; also as more medical users age into senior citizenship with each passing year, their voices must eventually be heard. If nothing else, the past 14 years have demonstrated the economic power of America’s most popular illegal drug. If cannabis is addictive at all, it's far less so than cigarettes, the degree of consumer loyalty demonstrated by each birth cohort of initiates is far greater than mere "recreation" can account for.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 05:33 PM | Comments (0)

August 04, 2011

Morning-after Thoughts

Now that the waiting is over, we are seeing that the initial response to US avoidance of its politically generated debt crisis was a sharp drop in financial markets; ironically, worse overseas than here in the United States. Just how that will play out over the next several weeks or months remains to be seen but it should not come as a surprise that the obviously political (and childish) initiative of know-nothing tea party members of Congress should have provoked it. Rather, what should have been evident since (at least) 2008 was that interdependent world markets have been seriously oversold for years, if for no other reason than the almost universal failure of global media to pay close attention to the two biggest problems faced by our species: continuing growth of the human population and its failure to act on the undeniable effect of human energy consumption on our global climate. That the two problems have existed has long been obvious. Less obvious, but of more importance to the day-to-day lives of most people, were how soon and how drastically key financial markets would react to that denial.

In that connection, it is probable that there will be false rallies followed by dips before a bottom is reached; thus how does an ordinary investor with bills to pay and children to educate know when to buy or sell? It’s at moments like this that people can be badly hurt financially because doing nothing can be as expensive as buying the wrong “asset.” Furthermore, it appears that we may finally be bumping up against the fundamental questions that have intrigued cosmologists for thousands of years, with the ultimate answer most likely to be a continuation of the present uncertainty rather than any crisp explanation of who we are, where we came from, or why we are here.

A final consideration is that problems we have remained unaware of (or unwilling to face) usually turn out to be the most costly.

A drug policy related footnote is that one of the more obvious effects of the much-maligned marijuana "high" is that it allows users to be comfortable in the "now," particularly after smoking (when consumed by mouth, it's far more effective against severe physical pain). Thus today's news would seem more bullish for weed than for the war on drugs.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 07:05 PM | Comments (0)

August 03, 2011

The Price of Scientific Ignorance and Denial

Even though our modern world is becoming more dependent on science and scientific technology with each passing day, modern humans continue to exhibit an amazing degree of scientific ignorance. For example, a Gallup poll conducted in conjunction with the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth in 2009 revealed that only 40% of Americans believe in Evolution, the scientific theory that has arguably been the most useful at integrating what we now know about the inorganic universe we exist in and the still-mysterious life process we are so clearly a part of. Beyond those basic considerations, Darwin’s intuition was independently verified by the work of Alfred Russel Wallace, another British naturalist working in South America who had arrived at nearly identical conclusions. Finally, it has been abundantly supported by the work of multiple others. For example, Gregor Mendel, the Austrian monk whose work provided a remarkable prescient theoretical structure for modern Genetics, and Albert Wegener whose intuition about continental drift was scoffed at by contemporaries, but ultimately became the basis of Plate tectonics theory which is now the cornerstone of modern Earth Sciences.

At the center of any discussion of science is the role of “theory” in arriving at “truth.” Briefly stated, a theory can be thought of as a coherent explanation linking a series of observations to each other and also fitting in with the concept of uniformitarianism as originally expressed by James Hutton, widely acknowledged to be the father of modern Geology.

If one looks at the array of sciences and scientists mentioned above, one must be struck by their temporal relationships to each other; all were born within the short span of a few hundred years; some knew each other personally, several others corresponded, and all except Darwin and Mendel left behind references to each others' work. In other words, we have abundant evidence of their mutual influence. Thus many of our most important scientific theories took root during a relatively brief interval in European history between the early Eighteenth and early Twentieth Centuries.

If we compare the collegial atmosphere that existed then to the one that exists today, we are struck by their differences; we are now literally swimming in a sea of scientific and technical information that grows larger and deeper by the minute. Without modern electronic communication devices and search engines, sorting it out would be nearly impossible; so much so that without access to the fastest devices for searching and gathering current knowledge in a plethora of technical fields, one would risk missing key insights while simultaneously being exposed to numerous false trails running a gamut from honest mistakes to deliberate hoaxes.

If we turn to government for help, we find that it has long since fallen prey to the blandishments of wealth and power American Democracy was once once intended to save us from. Ironically, that process began as we were becoming independent of Britain, the Industrial Revolution was just getting underway, and the Enlightenment was flourishing; especially in England.

Equally ironically, that was also when an Anglican churchman named Thomas Malthus was publishing a series of papers that would make him famous.

Although based more on intuition than on careful observation and not amenable to experimentation, Malthus' concern has proven both durable and influential. One of the more disquieting aspects of modern thought is that despite the historic Twentieth Century explosion in human population, there is so little modern discussion of our numbers or Malthusian theory.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 04:46 PM | Comments (0)

July 30, 2011

Another Take on the Debt Crisis

Thursday night, I happened to catch a remark by Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan, in which she gleefully reported that she had labeled President Obama a “loser" in her Friday column. Given the potentially dire context of our looming financial crisis, I considered such a personal attack on our president irresponsible at best. Sure enough, there it was in Friday’s WSJ. In fact, the whole column was even more scurrilous than her flip remarks on TV had suggested. What Noonan's arch analysis missed completely is that if we default, the federal government would be incapable of prioritizing which recipients to pay and which to stiff; let alone improvising how to get checks or bank credits out to the lucky ones. The ripple effect of unpaid obligations throughout a nation in which millions of individuals and small businesses are hovering on the brink of bankruptcy seems not to have occurred to Ms Noonan or the Tea Party morons she attempts to cast as modern heroes.

It's becoming increasingly clear as the debt ceiling deadline approaches that those who hate Obama for whatever reason are so determined to defeat him on a major issue they will take extraordinary risks to do so. It's also clear they have so comprehension of what those risks are, or even how much their financial brinksmanship may have already cost the nation (or the world).

What's also clear is that Tea Party extremists are so focused on the 2012 general election and their goal of limiting the Obama Presidency to one term, they have chosen the financial equivalent of a nuclear weapon. That they may have succeeded in exposing Obama's innate timidity seems likely, but the cost of that "victory" may be the long-term eclipse of their own party.

Given the abysmal quality of their presidential candidates and Congressional "leadership," let us devoutly hope so.

Doctor Tom

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

July 28, 2011

Is denial humanity's' most dangerous characteristc?

Homo sapiens, as we have come to call ourselves, could be at a tipping point in terms of popular belief about both our origins and ultimate destination as a species. I say that because we seem particularly blind to the threat represented by America's debt crisis, a global event that has been building for years, if not decades or even centuries. Yet at the eleventh hour, those with the authority- some would say responsibility- to resolve it seemed peculiarly incapable of doing so.

Given the unprecedented increase in human numbers that occurred in the 20th century (and yet seems of such little concern to modern politicians and world leaders) the very complex global economy that has been both the enabler and a consequence of that population explosion should be an entity responsible leaders would seek to protect at all costs. However, as anyone reading American newspapers or watching cable news knows very well; such is not the case. With less than five days remaining before default, a workable solution seems further off than ever.

As someone who remembers the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in real time (it was the Summer between 8th and 9th grades) I am only too mindful of the fact that scientists involved in the Trinity test carried out less than 3 weeks before the actual bombing of Hiroshima were divided as to what might happen; some thought it could be a dud and a few feared a runaway chain reaction with catastrophic consequences. The similarity of the uncertainty of nuclear experts in 1945 and the extreme range of possibilities anticipated by economists resulting from our unresolved debt crisis next Tuesday could hardly be more ironic.

Assuming that neither extreme is realized, the overwhelming weight of responsible predictions seems to be that Americans will be hurt financially in the short term by (avoidable) loss of global confidence in our ability to pay our debts; yet that logic seems lost on the Tea Party minority in the House. Such behavior is not unusual for humans harboring powerful resentments. Indeed, responsible group behavior in the face of potentially dire consequences may the exception rather than the rule. One can make the argument that if we humans really did learn from our mistakes, there wouldn't be as many as history has recorded. On the other hand, we're still here...

In a similar vein, because I have acquired specific knowledge of how destructive our policy of drug prohibition has been with respect to cannabis, and how blind both American and International political leaders have remained to its shortcomings, I've also been forced to understand just how such anomalous circumstance could have come about.

The best answer at present seems to be our (human) capacity for denial, seems to be keeping pace with our equally strong capacity for self-destructive behavior. So far, at least, we've stopped short of total destruction. Let's hope that record continues; at least long enough to come up with an exit strategy.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 11:42 PM | Comments (0)

July 23, 2011

The Drug War's Origins

The American government's concern over "addiction" began early in the 20th century with the (TR) Roosevelt Administration's participation in two international conferences on the opium trade. Our acquisition of the Philippines, following the Spanish-American war played a key role because Episcopal Bishop Charles Henry Brent, a respected missionary, came to believe that opium from China had become both a serious problem in the islands and an American responsibility through conquest. He was able to make that case effectively through his friendship with newly appointed US Administrator for the Philippines (and future President) William Howard Taft,aboard ship as they traveled to the islands after the war.

Closer to home, Heroin, a morphine derivative patented by Bayer in 1898 amidst claims it was non-addictive, proved to be just the opposite, becoming a favorite of addicts and raising the public's fear of “addiction” to new heights. It was in that context that Hamilton Wright MD, one of the more energetic members of the Roosevelt Administration began lobbying Francis Burton Harrison, a Brooklyn Congressman with close ties to the Philippines and his own aversion to addiction. Wright's ultimate success was the Harrison Narcotic Act of 1914, which Woodrow Wilson signed into law in December. Harrison eventually became the vehicle that established a policy of de facto drug prohibition until it was replaced by the even more devious and repressive Controlled Substances Act in 1970.

Whether those who had used deceptive transfer taxes as cover for Harrison and the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937 fully intended a policy that would mature into harsh, criminal prohibition can't be determined with certainty, but that's exactly what happened after Attorney General John Mitchell replaced both with the Controlled Substances Act he drafted almost single-handedly in 1969. His party then passed the CSA with little debate (and even less medical input) in 1970. Given the adverse changes in American education, incarceration, and healthcare that have occurred since, one would have to admit that the CSA's unintended consequences have been severe.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 03:12 AM | Comments (0)

July 14, 2011

OBama’s Drift to the Right; and some notes on getting high.

Wouldn't it be ironic if Barack Obama, the first nominally black American president were also the first real Manchurian candidate in history? In the last entry, I was decidedly critical of his presidency; and that was before his offer to put cuts in Medicare on the table. Before going any further I should admit there is no precise definition of " Manchurian Candidate," a character appearing in Richard Condon's 1959 novel, and first brought to the screen in a film made in 1962, but not released for several years because of the political scruples of one of its stars. For those interested in more detail, the lengthy review by Roger Ebert is a good place to start. Briefly stated, a Manchurian candidate is a "sleeper"programmed to gain political office and then lead the country in an entirely different direction than his supporters expected. The general idea has been brought to the screen twice, once in 1962 and again in 2004 by talented directors and very different casts of talented actors.

In any event I'm using the term because I cannot conceive of any more improbable turnaround for a president than the one Obama seems to be in the midst of. Given the intellectual dishonesty and irresponsibility of his political enemies on the other side of the aisle, his latest ploy has outraged many loyal supporters and left them stunned. In retrospect however, given the laundry list of earlier improbabilities starting with the DEA raid on pot clubs in January 2009, this latest move could be seen more as further progression in a coherent plan to betray all the principles candidate Obama once claimed to stand for.

There is another possibility; It could still turn out that Obama is simply taking a leaf from Clinton's '94 playbook in which he snookered the Republicans into shutting down the government over their “Contract with America,” much to the disadvantage of then-Speaker Gingrich, who has yet to recover and is now spinning his wheels as a minor presidential candidate.

This particular political theater is distressing to me because of my interest in medical cannabis and the witless war on drugs. Obama was the first presidential candidate to admit his own adolescent initiation of cannabis and cocaine and also the first to admit inhaling and getting high. Beyond that, his remark, “that was the point,” in response to a reporter's question gave me some hope that he might be the first politician capable of (publicly) understanding the appeal of cannabis to adolescents.

It may be progress of a sort for our third Boomer president just to admit trying illegal drugs and actually getting high. One of several bits of generally unknown cannabis culture I've picked up from my extensive profiling of applicants is that not everybody gets high the first time they try pot; indeed the failure rate may be over 50%. It's a phenomenon fairly well known to the cognoscenti and has been well described by Lester Grinspoon.

Why it happens is generally unknown; in essence, inhaled cannabis is the only illegal drug which gives prospective users a test to see if they qualify to use it, for I can’t imagine anyone who hadn't been able to get high seeking a recommendation. Pot is also used as an “edible,” but the two routes of administration produce notoriously different effects, and as a practical matter, virtually every prospective initiate tries it by inhalation the first time.

Which bring up another bit of lore: the "body high" produced by edibles is so different than the "head high" produced by inhalation that they may as well be different drugs. Almost every user learns that sooner or later but almost none know the reason, which is that when inhaled as smoke, the active agents are delivered to he brain almost immediately and experienced just that soon. In essence, each toke is an incremental addition to the dose, allowing the user to "titrate," the effect very accurately from memory and thus avoid overdose.

Edibles, on the other hand, belong to the gastrointestinal tract when swallowed and thus are digested, a totally different process. The digestion products then gain access to the Hepatic Portal Circulation and are processed a second time by the liver. Thus what the brain "sees" after an edible is processed is entirely different than smoke; also significantly different from simple decarboxylation, which is the usual explanation. Furthermore, the details of what happens in the liver have never been studied, or- if they have- have yet to be published.

The silence of the literature on this key difference speaks volumes about the enforced ignorance of both the policy and the policy makers, who still insist that all legal cannabis for research must come from the Federal Marijuana farm in Mississippi and approved by the DEA (which always says no). It's another catch 22 in John Mitchell's maddening Controlled Substances Act.

The edible "high" is dramatically different; it lasts a minimum of three hours, sometimes longer. It is associated with a feeling or weakness in the arms and legs which is pleasant, but rules out hard work or a visit to the gym after eating a brownie. The bonus is markedly enhanced antinociception (pain relief) which is especially welcome to patients with severe pain syndromes. The such as sciatica, traumatic arthritis or various neuropathies. the relief also lasts the whole three hours. Unfortunately, unlike smoke, the potency of edibles can't be easily titrated, thus unintentional overdose is common However, most have learned to cope with that by making their own or by cautious testing of each new batch from a known vendor.

That one can't find these phenomena in the literature speaks volumes about a policy of enforced ignorance based on the imaginings of medically ignorant policeman, judges and lawyers.

What it says about clinically ignorant activists I will simply leave to the imagination. It's important because it points out the importance of clinical inquiry in determining what questions need to be asked and answered- the difference between science in search of truth or in defense of empty dogma.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 05:34 PM | Comments (0)

July 07, 2011

Change you Can’t Believe In; in a world having problems with reality

I‘d only been screening applicants hoping to use “marijuana” legally for a few months before their clinical histories convinced me that many time-honored beliefs about cannabis are simply either untrue or based on serious misconceptions. After nearly ten years spent studying that heretofore hidden population, I think I've gained an understanding of how it has been evolving for the past 40 years and how America's drug war had been damaging both our own society and those of other nations well before that.

The best place to begin may be with the Harrison Narcotic Act of 1914, a law prompted by developing awareness of drug problems falling under the rubric of “addiction” in the late 19th Century, especially the injection of heroin. Preceded by New York Times specials earlier that year and reflecting ambient racist fears, Harrison was an early attempt to establish “control” over a targeted drug by means of a transfer tax. The new law quickly led to several test cases generated by the arrests of physicians for prescribing drugs (as it required). Through a series of narrow (5 to 4) decisions, the Supreme Court ruled that prescribing for addicts in amounts not in accord with federal policy was illegal. Thus did an ignorant Congress, with a critical assist from an equally ignorant Supreme Court, define “addiction” and specify its optimal treatment long before Medicine had been able to study the phenomenon clinically- or even to describe it coherently.

By establishing rigid rules specifying what the goal of treatment must be (abstinence), also by authorizing criminal punishment for recidivism, a manifestly ignorant Court enabled a policy that would ultimately give America the dubious honor of leading the world in the incarceration of its own citizens.

Yet for some reason, the “drug war” has become a sacred cow; even mild public criticism of our drug policy courts strident denunciation and risks political destruction of the critic. Now globally enforced by UN treaty, the Drug War has the potential to become one of our species’ epic mistakes. A good example was a recent memo from the Obama Justice Department threatening criminal prosecution of officials in states with medical marijuana laws for daring to comply with them.

That memo reinforces the ambivalence Obama's Administration has been exhibiting toward the issue since January 2009. It has also oscillated in other key areas: it bailed out the same banks that helped create our economic collapse, it's now using Predator drones to kill suspected terrorists in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Also our rejoicing at the assassination of a notorious terrorist being protected there, reminds us that Pakistan had also been sheltering one of its citizens who had grown rich from the delivery of nuclear technology to them, and probably shopping it to rogue nations around the world.

Given the shaky US economy, our crumbling infrastructure, the cascade of weather disasters like Joplin and the record heat and flooding now being experienced in parts of the US. Also, given the international failure to plan for the increasing probability of adverse climate change, the new Obama Administration may be better suited for life with the hypocritical world we humans have created than we realized.

If anyone has a more optimistic description of our present prospects, I’d be happy to listen.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 01:27 AM | Comments (0)

June 26, 2011

A Clinical Study as Accidental History

Both American drug policy and its current iteration as a “war” on drugs are historical phenomena that should be amenable to study. One of several impediments to any study of an activity that’s been declared illegal is identification of those who engage in it because of their risk of prosecution or other adverse consequences. In essence, Proposition 215, which had been bitterly opposed by all federal and state agencies charged with drug law enforcement, was (and still is) a plea for reconsideration of the 1970 Controlled Substances Act, authored by AG John Mitchell in 1969 and signed into law by President Nixon in 1970. Thus did the initiative implicitly immunize those applying to use cannabis against prosecution for its prior use, and implicitly protect the application process with the same guarantee of confidentiality widely understood to exist in both medical and legal client-professional relationships.

In the turbulent historical context of Nixon's 1968 election, older Americans were being shocked by the behavior of adolescents and young adults who were rejecting traditional social norms, openly using “marijuana” and other drugs, and refusing to fight in a controversial war in Vietnam that was claiming the lives of more draftees every month. A dramatic example of the division between youth and their elders was the general lack of protest over the savage beating of young “hippies” by Chicago Police during the 1968 Democratic National Convention.

The drug policy hippies were flouting had been based on two deceptive pieces of legislation (prohibitions cloaked as transfer taxes). The older one (Harrison, 1914), authorized the arrest of physicians for prescribing unapproved amounts of certain drugs for "addicts;" while the the more recent MTA, (1937), targeted possession by individuals. In 1969, shortly after Nixon took office, the Supreme Court rather unexpectedly declared the MTA unconstitutional because it allegedly violated the Fifth Amendment. Because of its similarity to Harrison, the decision jeopardized our entire policy, , thus providing the new administration with an opportunity to write an new omnibus legislation.

What emerged was Mitchell's Draconian CSA, a law embracing the same muddled notions on “addiction” as before without any discernible Medical input, despite a newly asserted Public Health imperative and enabling severe punishment. Adding insult to injury, sole authority for listing new agents (“substances”) as categorically illegal ("Schedule One") was given to the Attorney General. Thus did a flagrant tautology become a Draconian, yet medically uninformed policy by legislative fiat.

Interestingly enough, after Nixon’s own commission went against his express wishes by recommending that marijuana be studied for its medical benefits, Nixon summarily rejected their recommendation with the same tautology. An uncritical press let him get away with it and he went on to defeat George McGovern by a landslide later that year. Ironically it wasn’t until the Watergate break-in eventually led to the unraveling of his Presidency that Nixon an his AG were held accountable for their lies; but not for the MTA.

Most disappointing is that tapes revealing Nixon’s complicity in the scandal would end up being sealed for another thirty years. In the meantime the CSA has done great damage through the agencies Nixon managed to create by separate Executive Orders issued shortly before his resignation in 1974: the DEA and NIDA. Both have evolved into high-profile agencies, each with a vested interest in expanding its influence with propaganda that portrays "addiction" as a dreaded “disease” for the only permissible therapeutic goal is abstinence, to be coerced by criminal sanctions if need be.

Among several things my limited study of pot users has made clear is that not only has the drug war failed, those who insist on its necessity lack the most basic understanding of marijuana, the "substance" they seem most determined to keep illegal. That pot will ultimately become legal is all but certain, but how long that will take is itself unclear because the repudiation of such a major policy error would require Congress to acknowledge a major mistake.

However, now that the first Boomers are aging into Medicare; I’m confident that enough current and former users will, as Senior Citizens, eventually persuade their Senators and Congressmen to do the right thing.

That the stakes are high is also clear from our national history: the last time similar repudiation of a long-standing policy was called for, Fort Sumter was bombarded by those who refused to go along.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 09:21 PM | Comments (0)

June 20, 2011

More on Mitchell

The discovery that John Mitchell had been the author of the CSA was an important milestone on my journey toward understanding how a policy as invidious as the War on Drugs could have become so dominant in a nation (and World) that had struggled through a two World Wars to make it “Safe for Democracy.” I had also come to see the drug war in a larger context: as metaphor for understanding how various follies have been diverting our species from what should have been its main goal for at least several decades: survival.

Unfortunately there’s no way to sugar coat the main message of the drug war: it’s a cruel anomaly that began with a bad idea in the early Twentieth Century: namely, that criminal prohibitions should function as good public policy. That idea has somehow survived its many historical failures and is now accepted and enforced as global policy in a world that seems to be tearing itself apart at an ever-accelerating rate. As my own interest in the drug war has evolved since becoming an activist in 1995, its focus inevitably began changing as new evidence (information) has been gathered from applicants seeking to use cannabis legally.

Mitchell is important because of his role in critically shaping the course and direction of American drug policy while making it virtually impossible to change within a time frame that might allow its worst effects to be mitigated. In that respect, it is even worse than the fascist evil that led us into World War Two, a war in which Mitchell fought on the “right” side and was decorated for valor. Afterward, he became a successful lawyer specializing in municipal bonds, which is what he was doing when he met a bitterly insecure colleague named Richard Nixon who ended up at the same Wall Street firm after soaring close to the heights of national power as Vice President under a popular war hero only to be defeated in two close elections: first a cliffhanger for the Presidency in 1960 and then by a wider margin for Governor of California in 1962.

Ironically, the friendship that soon developed between the two lawyers would lead both to improbable success: the unsuccessful candidate would reach the heights of political power that had eluded him in 1960 and the municipal bond specialist would embark on an improbable journey from respectability to unsought political power as US Attorney General. Then he would resign as AG to head the new president’s re-election effort. Almost as an afterthought, he would persuade Nixon to focus on drug policy as the vehicle most likely to create the tough on crime image he so desired.

Tragically, the unexpected success that crowned their budding friendship would soon be undone when the insecurity-based hubris of the new president asserted itself in the form of twin ambitions; first to guarantee his re-election and second to avoid being labeled as the first American President to “lose” a war, thus setting the stage for the events that would characterize his unique tenure in the Oval Office: Watergate, the Drug War, Vietnamization, and Resignation. He would be critically assisted in seeking his devious goals by many; but none were more pivotal than two cabinet members he’d met only recently: John Mitchell and Henry Kissinger.

I now see Mitchell as most responsible for writing the opportunistic drug legislation that capitalized brilliantly on fears then just being aroused in the parents of Baby Boomers by their children's drug use and other shocking behaviors. Its rationale and wording would somehow endow the underlying policy with the powerful appeal it still retains four decades later: fear of addiction.

Whether Mitchell even realized the full implications of the CSA, let alone its long term impact, is unknown, More likely he saw it as one of the many favors he later may have regretted doing for his new friend. What is known is that both men suffered professional disgrace that would tarnish their memories years before they died.

We don't know what Mitchell thought of Nixon, but we do have a quote from his wife, Martha: "He (Nixon) bleeds people. He draws every drop of blood and then drops them from a cliff. He'll blame any person he can put his foot on."

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 06:47 PM | Comments (0)

June 19, 2011

How Schedule One became the Drug War’s Catch 22

A major stumbling block for opponents of the drug war has been the wording of the Controlled Substances Act passed by Congress in 1970 shortly after the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937 had been struck down by the Supreme Court in the Leary case.

Entirely consistent with the medical ignorance displayed in its earlier deliberations on Harrison, the Court ruled that because the MTA required those wishing to use cannabis to purchase non-existent tax stamps, the law was tantamount to self incrimination! Because the Harrison Act had relied on a similar deceptive transfer tax in limiting prescriptions for coca products and opiates, the striking down of the MTA placed all US federal drug policy in jeopardy- but not for long.

Through a truly unfortunate coincidence of judicial, legislative, and electoral timing, the High Court’s finding in Leary presented the fledgling Nixon Administration with both a clean slate and a mandate to completely rewrite domestic American drug policy. The result was the highly creative CSA, which not only rolled Harrison and the MTA into one Draconian package, it armed the US Attorney General with sole authority to decide which new substances should be listed on “Schedule 1” (as absolutely prohibited). Indeed, LSD and Marijuana were among the first to be named.

In other words, an official who would always be a medically untutored lawyer was armed with questionable and never-validated criteria by which to decide what "substances" could be manufactured, prescribed or sold legally as "medicine." The converse is that any effective medicine erroneously ruled illegal, could become a lucrative product sold by criminals. Add a touch of misplaced morality and you have the modern story Dan Baum subtitled "The Politics of Failure in 1996 and Mike Gray described in Drug Crazy" 2 years later.

The world has now been struggling, without success, to implement the CSA through UN treaty because, by another malign coincidence, Harry Jacob Anslnger was appointed as the first UN High Commissioner of Narcotics in 1962. In that capacity, he successfully championed the Single Convention Treaty of New York which, by virtue of some arcane diplomatic prestidigitation somehow retroactively became responsible for enforcing the failing prohibitions of the CSA as current UN Policy.

Anslinger may have inspired the CSA, but he didn't write it; its impenetrable wording, which has protected it from revision despite four decades of expensive domestic and international failure, was almost certainly a product of the fertile imagination of the one true heavyweight in the Nixon Administration, the only US Attorney General ever to do time: John Newton Mitchell.

Details to follow...

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 05:34 PM | Comments (0)

June 01, 2011

Why Norman Zinberg is one of my Heroes

As noted in previous entries, America’s national drug policy began when the deceptive Harrison Act was signed into law by Woodrow Wilson in December 1914. Controversial from the start, Harrison generated a series of affirmative 5-4 Supreme Court decisions based on erroneous assumptions about “addiction,” an entity with which the medical profession of that day was just starting to grapple and still had little experience. Unfortunately, the premature intrusion of the criminal justice system into what should have remained a medical problem would politicize it and severely hamper its unbiased assessment from that point forward. Thus was a new facet of human behavior eventually misidentified as a “disease;” an error that can now be recognized as much more than merely semantic; one which has had tragic consequences for victims of a destructive policy still rigorously enforced the world over.

Ironically, politicization of addiction eventually led to its criminalization, even before it could be understood; thus effectively placing it beyond of the reach of unbiased medical scrutiny. That anomaly couldn’t be addressed until similar “Medical Marijuana” initiatives were passed in California and Arizona in 1996. Even then, the dead judicial hand of the past was quickly invoked to strike down Arizona’s law simply because its use of the word, “prescription” was interpreted as violating the letter of the 1970 federal law its sponsors had hoped to clarify and either modify or overturn.

Thus did ninety-two years elapse after the Harrison Act before Prop 215 finally provided opponents of drug prohibition with their first real opportunity to gather the kind of clinical information needed to scrutinize the basic assumptions underpinning our “War on Drugs.” That such an irrational policy could have avoided critical scrutiny and been accepted as necessary by so many for so long is, in my opinion, compelling evidence of a serious flaw in the vaunted cognitive process that has allowed our species to dominate other life forms while also creating so many of our planet’s serious environmental problems. Thus it’s also the main reason I think cannabis prohibition deserves far more attention than it is receiving.

Norman Zinberg MD was a Harvard Psychiatrist who took an unfashionably courageous and intelligent position on the emerging problems of drug use and addiction shortly after the CSA became the law of the land in 1970. His report on that experience, Drug, Set, and Setting, The Basis for Controlled Intoxicant Use, (1984) is available online. His cogent description of the thought process he went through in 1972 before opting to make drug users his research subjects was so remarkably parallel to my own in 2001 that I’m quoting it here: “Only after a long period of clinical investigation, historical study, and cogitation did I realize that in order to understand how and why certain users had lost control I would have to tackle the all-important question of how and why many others had managed to achieve control and maintain it.”

The study Dr. Zinberg describes in that book began before either the DEA or NIDA were created (1973 and 1974 respectively) but his results were compared to similar NIDA-sponsored studies. Sadly, the most important principle his study exemplifies: the need for impartiality in “drug research” has long been ignored. It’s a problem he had also devoted considerable attention to, but not now. Under the influence of drug war inspired fear, most of the drug "research" that’s been done since 1975 mimics the repetitive "Monitoring the Future" studies of youthful initiation that have became the industry standard since 1975 and are intended to show that cannabis initiation by adolescents is "associated" with pejorative outcomes.

That's a technique popularized Joe McCarthy; it was exposed as blatantly dishonest in the early Fifties...

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 08:35 PM | Comments (0)

May 24, 2011

Annals of Predictable Nonsense

I must admit I’m still an optimist because I continue to hope the current crop of humans will, if presented with enough evidence, finally learn to think rationally about their current predicament. Silly me. A case in point is the disgusted essay I e-mailed to a colleague on Sunday a few hours after he begged off listening to me ventilate about what has become the dominant mantra of my old age: we humans are our own worst enemies:

What’s the best fix? A New Economy, a New UN, or a Somewhat Larger and Cooler Home Planet?

I’ve been following world affairs since shortly before Germany invaded Poland in 1939 (I was born in 1932) and can’t remember when the Earth’s human population was larger or more divided. One thing that huge population makes us more vulnerable to is all forms of natural and man-made disasters. Do the Insurance Companies (or their policy holders) really believe they can cover the floods, tornadoes, earthquakes, and tsunamis we’ve already experienced in this most turbulent of centuries?  Beyond that, there are several seemingly intractable political disputes (Israel vs the PLO, India vs Pakistan) for which any “solution” seems out of the question. Then there’s the grotesque Drug War. My own nation continues to endorse it and seems utterly committed to it, even as its failure directly threatens the political and economic stability of Mexico. But hey, both nations are still pretending it doesn’t even exist (or could still be “won”).

That’s just for starters; I’m also personally aware of multiple behavioral anomalies that help reduce “stress” (Obesity, & Hoarding) which have become prevalent, but are never discussed realistically in the media, which, despite their childish partisan squabbling, seem firmly committed to denial of the world’s most pressing social problems (overpopulation, global warming, lack of medical care, rip-off student loans, etc.) while continuing to pay inordinate attention to individual foibles like shameless sexual behavior, especially when exhibited by celebrities or politicians. 

Meanwhile state and federal budgets have become largely fanciful, but the rich are somehow getting richer while being taxed less; even as the middle class is being forced out of their homes by the same banks that sold them fraudulent mortgages while repackaging them as incomprehensible “derivatives” they then sold to the National Banks of smaller, even more gullible nations (which American taxpayers, the most indebted of all, may yet have to bail out).

On both the international stage and here a home, the “rule of law" has become a sick joke best understood as whatever rogue cops and crooked corporations can get away with. Oh, yes. We just heroically avenged 9/11 by invading a "sovereign" nation that's also hysterically religious in order to kill the chief 9/11 architect they were sheltering. Then we disposed of his corpse in a way that's guaranteed to maintain a level of Muslim hatred that could keep the FBI & other federal "protection" agencies busy for another decade or more.

So what’s the best option for coping with this bad behavior? Is it really possible to replace an economy in which people have lost all faith with a system they "can believe in?" Or would a new UN be a better choice? That may be a more logical place to start because it might control its member nations for at least few years before failing. In the meantime, everyone could get a fresh financial start.

As I was posting the bitter lamentation above, I heard the first TV reports of devastation in Joplin, a city what used to be Route 66 and may soon join Fukushima, as a prime example of the human complacency that is our biggest problem.

This morning (Tuesday) it’s even worse. I quickly found a bitterly sarcastic piece by Bill McKibben, well known advocate of the idea of Global Climate Change and was hardly surprised at the angry stupidity it provoked.

Perhaps there’s hope for me yet… now if I could only accept the even better-known and more contemptible stupidity of the drug war…

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 04:37 PM | Comments (0)

May 21, 2011

Annals of Disagreement

The World’s human population has never been larger, more knowledgeable, nor more contentious. Ironically, those three qualities are closely related. The size of the human population is a direct consequence of scientific progress which has enabled a greater life expectancy through better sanitation and medical care at all stages of the life cycle. Life expectancy increased first in more developed (richer) nations, but was experienced relatively quickly in the less developed “second” and “third” worlds. In addition to improved Public Health, food production and distribution were also greatly enhanced by technological progress. As the health and wealth of humans increased, so did their education and general level of knowledge and communication; we have never been better informed. Electronic books, newspapers, and scientific journals are now accessible in most countries and the internet makes much of it available without the need to travel.

However scientific progress has not made us happier, more peaceful, or less contentious; in fact, quite the opposite. The more we know, the more we disagree over what is “true,” what our major problems are, and how they should be dealt with. What has also become progressively more obvious throughout the last two centuries is that the resources of the planet will not sustain what a vast majority of humans now seem to want: a lifestyle comparable to that which had become available to the more privileged segments of society in virtually every nation by the third quarter of the Twentieth Century. Typically, recognition of that reality has been neither uniform nor complete because it, like just about everything else humans can disagree about, has depended on consensus which is never uniform nor peacefully arrived at. In fact, disagreement, by and among humans, has been the cause of theft, assault, murder and war throughout our known history.

A quick look at the most prominent news items of the past week is enough to confirm the above generalizations. Obama’s well crafted speech on recent events in the Middle East provoked agreement from many, but screams of outrage from many right wingers who accused him of “throwing Israel under the bus,” a sentiment that is probably shared by the soon-to-arrive Israeli prime minister whose older brother was the sole casualty of the daring raid on Entebbe in 1976.

And so on; I have a personal perspective on medical care and our generally dishonest Insurance industry that’s clearly not shared by many, but I remember when medicine and surgery were not as high tech nor expensive as they have become. Unfortunately, as medical “miracles” have become more routine, they have prolonged the lives of people who may require expensive supportive care for years for severe residual handicaps, but have little potential for independent living. Clearly, one’s opinion on whether such expenses are “worthwhile" (or affordable) for society will reflect several variables including one's medical knowledge and religious beliefs.

To bring that home dramatically from current news: the killings of student demonstrators at Kent state in May, 1970 had a profound effect on world and American public opinion. Compare that with the current response to the wholesale shootings of anti-government demonstrators in Arab and Muslim nations that have become a part of the world's daily news since January.

One doesn’t have to be a genius to understand that the contemporary human world faces serious existential problems and that recent history is not at all reassuring; particularly in light of the fact that overpopulation can’t even be a part of the discussion because of contrary religious beliefs.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 04:54 PM | Comments (0)

May 19, 2011

Annals of Misinterpretation

As noted in previous entries, America’s national drug policy began when the deceptive Harrison Act was signed into law by Woodrow Wilson in December 1914. Controversial from the start, it generated a series of affirmative 5-4 Supreme Court decisions based on erroneous assumptions about “addiction,” an entity with which the medical profession of that day was just beginning to grapple and still had little experience. Unfortunately, the premature intrusion of the criminal justice system into what should ideally have remained a medical problem politicized it and prevented its unbiased assessment. Addiction was actually a new facet of human behavior that was misidentified as a disease, an error which is more than just semantic and persists to this day.

Politicizing addiction placed it just beyond the reach of scientific scrutiny, a defect that couldn’t be remedied until California and Arizona passed similar “Medical Marijuana” initiatives in 1996. Even then, the dead judicial hand of the past was invoked by modern politicians to strike down Arizona’s initiative because its use of the word, "prescription” was deemed to violate existing law (the good news is that 14 years later, Arizonans barely managed to make their state the fifteenth with a medical marijuana law; the bad news is that the 2010 margin was much closer than in '96).

Thus had ninety-two years elapsed between the Harrison Act and Proposition 215, the first real opportunity to gather clinical information with which to scrutinize the bogus assumptions of the “War on Drugs.” That such an irrational policy could have survived and prospered to the extent it has is compelling evidence of a serious flaw in human cognition, the critical function that has allowed our species to dominate other life forms and now, it is argued, poses a grave existential threat to its own welfare.

That sad theme will be explored in a future entry.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 05:17 PM | Comments (0)

May 11, 2011

Blame it on the Brain

We humans are a unique mammalian species. Gifted through what is now (grudgingly) conceded to be “Darwinian” evolution with unique brains; we have cooperated in scientific endeavors to accumulate and exploit new information at an astonishing rate.

Sadly, because of dense connections that have been retained between its separately evolving emotional and cognitive centers, our marvelous brains exhibit a flaw that now threatens the entire species. Beyond inspiring love, art, poetry, and music, our emotional centers also impel our most destructive impulses; lust, fear, and rage. Thus every early human civilization we’ve yet been able to study contains evidence, either implicit or explicit, of assault, murder and/or the systematic victimization of others for profit.

In general, such impulses, when endorsed by governments or religions, have to be justified as in the best interests of the group itself or humanity in general; most often on the basis of shared values or beliefs. World War Two, which included the mass murder of civilians by both winners and losers under color of the need to survive, may be the most extreme recent example. However, equally murderous local wars have been fought almost continuously somewhere in the world ever since 1945. For an increasingly imperial US, the fading communist threat after the Cold War was not accompanied by a “peace dividend” as hoped; rather it led somewhat unexpectedly to an old fashioned religious war justified by a typically cynical misrepresentation of basic facts. The results have been a protracted misadventure in South Asia, the avoidable deaths of tens (or hundreds) of thousands and a global financial crisis. Beyond those calamities are two pending threats: the probable disruption of long established climatic patterns and, ironically, a critical shortage of the fossil fuels thought to be responsible most responsible.

Needless to say, the many special interests with a stake in how these issues will be addressed are also in profound disagreement over the details; a situation that threatens cooperative human behavior at a time the stakes may never have been higher.

One of the reasons for my heightened interest in such issues is that the passage of Proposition 215 in California in 1996 provided me with a completely unexpected opportunity to study a population of humans in which the same destructive impulses mentioned earlier had clearly been unintentionally fostered during childhood but had been suppressed effectively through use of a safe herbal medicine- which through a series of almost diabolical misadventures- has been (and still is) also being prohibited with religious fervor on the basis of an illogical drug policy that’s so willfully ignorant of basic facts and bereft compassion as to be criminally culpable.

In fact, the parallels between our most recent overseas wars and the invidious war on drugs are truly uncanny...

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 07:41 PM | Comments (0)

May 10, 2011

The Drug War: 1/3 of the Nixon Trifecta

In November 1996, California voters passed Proposition 215, a controversial initiative authorizing the use of marijuana for medical purposes, as defined by a licensed physician. Before the new law could take effect, then-federal Drug Czar, Barry McCaffrey went on national TV to threaten any physician who dared to discuss marijuana with a patient with loss of their federal DEA license. That move signaled two things: that the old issue of states rights versus federal power which had bedeviled American government since the Constitution went into effect in 1789 was still a huge bone of contention; also that implementation of the new law was still very much in doubt. The issue of implementation was resolved quickly when the Ninth Circuit US Court of Appeals ruled that the general’s edict was an unconstitutional breach of the First Amendment.

Rather than resolving the issue, that ruling simply marked the beginning of a controversy now in its fifteenth year and still marked by serious disagreement over multiple issues, but perhaps the one remaining stubbornly at the center and still unrecognized by most Americans is whether Medicine should be practiced by physicians or by the legal profession and- through them- by law enforcement agencies.

When one looks closely at the history of drug prohibition in the United States, it’s quite clear that it began with the Harrison Act of 1914, itself so controversial that it quickly generated several cases requiring Supreme Court adjudication within five years of its passage (Harrison was unanimously repudiated by Linder in 1925, but tragically that case was never cited). Unfortunately, the key decisions that ultimately controlled federal policy (all 5-4) were monumental mistakes that placed what should have been medical decisions firmly in the the hands of the judiciary and through them, law enforcement agencies. The process was continued by Harry Anslinger’s fanciful Marijuana Tax Act of 1937 and ultimately completed by Richard Nixon’s Controlled Substances Act of 1970 after it was fleshed out by his executive orders creating the DEA (1973) and NIDA (1974).

Thus ironically, did the most destructive president ever to occupy the White House complete the unwholesome trifecta (Watergate, extension of the Vietnam war to Laos and Cambodia, and the War on drugs) that became his legacy. He did so in the record time of six years before yielding to a hand-picked successor who would dutifully grant him a Presidential Pardon for the two that were actually crimes.

The Nixon legacy didn’t end there; time doesn’t permit a full recounting of the invidious influence of the drug war on subsequent administrations, including that of the present incumbent. To assume that it's merely a sideline, an affordable exercise in quasi-religious hyperbole, would be to miss its far greater significance.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 03:44 PM | Comments (0)

May 05, 2011

A New Obama Unveiled

The rate of change in human culture continues to increase, fueled mostly by forces few seem fully aware of. Indeed, it’s questionable if any one human could even be aware of all the relevant forces, let alone devise a coherent model explaining their current integration. The culprit is change itself: not only do we live in a constantly changing universe, the more we learn about it, the less comprehensible it becomes. Not that we haven’t realized great technological success from Science- our most effective tool of inquiry to date- it’s just that Science under control of the contentious leadership represented by the current UN model is more likely to create new existential problems than to solve them.

Shifting to the more mundane arena of domestic politics, every newly elected American President with a desire to be remembered favorably by history (and they all do) faces an immediate problem: how to assure a second term. To put that into context, Barack Obama has had forty two individual predecessors since George Washington set a 2 term precedent that was hardened into a Constitutional Amendment after FDR. Only ten presidents since Washington were elected to a second term in the next election cycle and it is from that select group, plus a few exceptions, from our most honored presidents are selected. Even the exceptions: TR, Truman, and LBJ, all successor Presidents, won election on their own after serving a decedent’s term. Calvin Coolidge, the one exception to that profile is remembered mostly for his inactivity.

The bottom line is that the North American experiment in government launched by a few dissident British colonies on the eve of the Industrial Revolution has succeeded in ways that clearly weren't anticipated by those who signed our Revolutionary manifesto in 1776 or the delegates (including eight holdovers) who wrote a Constitution in Philadelphia eleven years later.

To update to the present, it now appears likely that Barack Obama, despite the enormous twin handicaps of being perceived as “black” and the disastrous fiscal and international legacy of eight Bush-Cheney years, has grabbed a lead in the 2012 White House sweepstakes that will be difficult to overcome. Just how he did that is perhaps the most important facet of his leadership, one which I must admit I had overlooked in my concern over his waffling on drug policy. I now understand that waffling as a normal reluctance to risk taking the lead on a marginal issue. Decisive punishment of Osama bin Laden for the crime of 9/11 was the more obvious choice and Obama has accomplished that with such dispatch and aplomb that his political enemies should be very worried.

It now remains to be seen if the latent impact of the Bush-Cheney disaster on the world's economy and weather patterns can be kept at bay through November 2012; to say nothing of how they will be dealt with in the intermediate future.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 05:29 PM | Comments (0)

May 02, 2011

Humanity’s New Reality?

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

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

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

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

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 04:22 PM | Comments (0)

May 01, 2011

An Abundance of Ironies

In yesterday’s entry (Pimping for Prohibition) I opined that the fledgling organization(s) ostensibly devoted to the idea that cannabis is medicine were already following the lead of Addiction and Pain Medicine “specialists” by preparing to sell out the patients they claim to represent.

To be clear; there is as yet no organization representing cannabis patients comparable to those claiming to speak for patients in chronic pain or people troubled by “addictions.” However, the problem facing the multiple organizations now representing “marijuana” users (as well as the users themselves) is Illegitimacy; primarily because of dogmatic federal insistence that simple possession of “marijuana” is a crime; a policy belied by both logic and the clinical scrutiny of a large number of chronic users who were interviewed systematically as part of their application for a "medical" designation. In essence, there is overwhelming evidence that the majority had initially become repeat users because of cannabis' efficacy as a user controlled anxiolytic.

The registry of just over four thousand patients reported in 2007 has since been expanded to over 6300. Equally helpful has been the enhanced quality of information provided by an increasing number seeking annual "renewals." There is simply no question that, in terms of both its humanitarian and intellectual consequences, "marijuana" prohibition has been a 40 year Public policy disaster on a par with the secret compromise by which chattel slavery became part of our Constitution in 1787.

That I seem to be the only one so far to seek the relevant data from applicants is a problem; but it's one that should be resolved as more qualified observers begin to ask the same questions; a process that should increase as more baby reach Medicare age.

To back up just a bit further, a prime example of the degree to which various "reform" organizations remain behind the reality curve can be understood by parsing the NORML (National Organization for Reform of Marijuana Laws) acronym. The organization was started by Keith Stroup, who was both a recent law school graduate and a “marijuana” smoker in the late Sixties who was so distressed by the wave of pot arrests then in progress that he started the organization with seed money from Hugh Hefner. His story, plus a description of NORML’s formative early years has been told by author and historian, Patrick Anderson: High in America, which can be read on-line in its entirety.

From an historical point of view, NORML was the first-ever full-time opposition to US drug prohibition as policy since its had been endorsed by the Supreme Court (through its Harrison decisions) during the second decade of the Twentieth Century. That becomes ironical once one realizes that a Prohibition Amendment banning commerce in alcohol went into effect in 1920 shortly after Harrison’s de facto prohibition of opiates and coca had been upheld by the Court for a second time following its passage in late 1914. That Harrison was not seen as prohibition by either the Court nor the general public is obvious. The probable reasons are that alcohol had been such a part of America’s social fabric from Colonial times on that it had not been considered a "drug," nor had its excessive use been regarded as sinful.

Most importantly, the same has never been true of agents considered to be addictive “drugs,” particularly when they were injected or smoked.

Stated as directly as possible: the American Public in 1920 seems to have been more likely to see drug use as a sin and drinking, even when excessive, as a variant of normal behavior. One test of the validity of that idea, might be to imagine how likely the election of either an atheist or a "druggie" to the Oval Office would be thought of in 2012.

Parenthetically, that such thoughts should be coming to mind in the present setting of Donald Trump's inane posturing, tragic weather events in the South and Midwest, and long-awaited news of Osama Bin-Laden's fate is nothing short of amazing.

It also seems like a very good time to take a break...

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 11:49 PM | Comments (0)

April 30, 2011

Pimping for Prohibition

Medicine has been overtaken by the technological advances of the Industrial Revolution to a greater extent than most other professions. Perhaps no historical event epitomizes the ignorance that clinical medicine has overcome since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution than the death of George Washington in the last month of the Eighteenth Century. The iconic “father” of his country died suddenly in his 68th year, while still vigorous; probably of epiglottitis a rare specific bacterial infection of the larynx. His demise was undoubtedly hastened by repeated phlebotomies performed by his physicians at a time when Medicine had relatively little but ignorance to offer seriously ill patients. Compare that with today’s modern “miracles,” ranging from the non-invasive imaging of diseased organs to their actual replacement, both of which have been made possible through modern science (but would be unavailable to America’s uninsured).

As medical practice has become increasingly technology dependent, it has also been increasingly divided and subdivided into specialties and sub-specialties, three of which have developed in response to US drug policy. They are “Pain Medicine,” Addiction Medicine,” and “Cannabis Medicine.” The latter is by far the newest and least well organized. So far it exists only in those states with “Medical Marijuana” laws, but the recent popularity of such legislation; to say nothing of the emergent popularity of cannabis itself in the gray markets that pot laws gave rise to, offer abundant evidence that its underground medical use had become far more common than had been either realized or admitted. In other words, passage of California’s Proposition 215 is slowly becoming the Drug War’s Achilles Heel through the legalized (albeit disputed) production and sale of a drug the feds continue to insist must remain absolutely Verboten.

Hopefully, Proposition 215, by also allowing for the first-ever systematic recording of medical histories from chronic users of a “drug of abuse,” has also made possible the ultimate exposure of American (and International) drug policy's intrinsic fatal weakness: it relies on the honesty and integrity of a species that, historically, has been committed to their very opposites.

My personal workshop for arriving at that conclusion has, ironically, been the opportunity I have had to take histories from people seeking to take advantage of Proposition 215. The information they provided me with has disclosed two salient realities: first, it confirms that "herbal" cannabis is an amazingly safe and versatile medicine. Second, many of its chronic users have been confused; primarily because it has been illegal and condemned by society's authority figures, but also because its therapeutic effects vary so much, depending on mode of ingestion, as to have confused both proponents and opponents of "legalization" to the extent that those important differences have not been recognized, let alone systematically investigated.

I will have much more to say about that issue in future entries, but first I'd like to point out that so pervasive is the human dishonesty referred to above, that all three of the medical organizations I mentioned have either sold out the patients they claim to serve (pain and addiction medicine), or are in the early stages of doing so (cannabis medicine).

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 07:57 PM | Comments (0)

April 24, 2011

Follies Based on Invalid Theories

Theories are general concepts used by modern humans to organize various series of facts or observations into a coherent narrative. They are neither intrinsically “true” nor “false,” but probably best thought of as either valid (leading in a helpful direction) or invalid (useless at best, dangerously misleading at worst). What our recent experience with the Axis Powers in World War Two drives home is that invalid theories can mislead entire nations into destructive behaviors able to threaten the welfare of all humans. Ironically, the Cold War that followed World War Two almost immediately became an even greater threat because of the nuclear weaponry developed by (some of) the Allies to shorten the war.

Even more more dangerous, now that we've had at least a reprieve from Nuclear Winter, is the belief that the successful outcomes for “Democracy” in both wars were somehow a result of Divine intervention in favor of a loosely defined political system. In any event, that notion has been actively resisted for over a decade by another heterogeneous supranational alliance based loosely on similarly unlikely religious beliefs. In fact, one of several cautionary revelations of our recent “world” wars and the current “War on Terror” is that people deeply committed to such unfounded beliefs are easily led to commit both suicide and murder to further them.

In that setting, it should not surprise us that we humans, who have also contrived to quadruple our numbers in a little more than one hundred years, may be experiencing- individually and collectively- more species-induced psychological stress than at any time in our short separate existence; also that we are impelled in that direction by intensely competitive mammalian instincts left over from our biological heritage and first pointed out by Darwin, in a disputed theory that, despite its great utility, is probably either denied by, or unknown to, the majority of living humans.

To place these seemingly random observations into perspective, the best scientific evidence is that humans only came into separate existence as a species about two hundred thousand years ago in a universe now considered by Science to be around thirteen and a half billion years old on a comparatively insignificant planet that has only been around for about 4.5 billion years and upon which complex multi-cellular life forms didn’t appear until about five hundred and seventy million years ago.

In other words, the best available evidence, most of which was only uncovered after we developed spoken and written language (essential forerunners of scientific thought) is that our intrinsic insecurity and consequent desire to “control” our environment may be responsible for our current folly.

Thus our amazing cognitive abilities, under the influence of our (even more) powerful emotions, may have seduced us into the headlong pursuit of “control” that now threatens us in so many ways that our powerful need to deny painful reality makes us loathe to even consider.

As has become increasingly apparent through my experience with thousands of the Americans seeking to avoid irrational punishment for their use of a safe and useful (but illegal) “drug of abuse” is that our drug policy is simply one more example of a dangerous human folly based on an invalid theory.

It gets worse: “Addiction” theory is even less coherent than the myths of Bushido, Aryan Supremacy, and Fascist doctrine (best articulated by Mussolini that gave rise to World War Two. or the vague Dialectic of History that sustained International Communism throughout the Cold War.

Can we see through the folly of "Addiction Theory" in time to save ourselves?

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 05:37 PM | Comments (0)

April 21, 2011

Who's in Charge at Justice?

No sooner did I chide the Prez for his mixed signals on “Medical marijuana” than there’s news of federal prosecutors in Washington State coming up a mean-spirited requirement that threatens their state-level counterparts with prosecution if they attempt to implement a recent change in Washington’s state’s medical marijuana law.

Such bare-faced defiance of a Justice Department policy clearly announced by both AG Holder and President Obama in 2009 raises obvious questions about who is running Justice, is it Holder and Obama? Or have the lunatics taken charge of the asylum? The whole point of the medical marijuana initiatives that began appearing on state ballots in 1996 was to express (profound) voter dissatisfaction with a high-handed, medically ignorant federal law, the 1970 CSA, passed entirely without updated medical or clinical evidence and citing “principles” in “Schedule One” which had no more medical, legal, or moral authority than the 1935 Nuremberg laws, by which the Nazis formally converted Germany’s Jews into non-citizens without any rights whatsoever.

The crippling flaw in federal law claiming to "control” “marijuana” is that it was completely fanciful. Originally based on the absurd lies of Harry Anslinger. In contrast, the various state laws challenging federal dogma are conservatively written. In any case, the “debate” has been largely uninformed by reports gleaned from what may well be the most reliable sources available: people willing to risk arrest in order to use cannabis over extended intervals because it provided better relief from serious symptoms than legal pharmaceuticals. The idea that such self-medicating chronic users are all "criminals" looking for a good time is as absurd as it is untrue, mean-spirited, and contrary to established fact. That US government employees of our Department of “Justice” would stoop so low is a disgrace to this nation and what it claims to stand for.

Time to fish or cut bait; if Obama can’t control his federal yahoos, he’s lost my vote in 2012.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)

April 20, 2011

Politics: How did we get stuck here?

Despite the surprising momentum of the "Medical Marijuana" market that has been fitfully unveiled since 1996, cannabis prohibition will almost certainly remain an untouchable federal policy throughout the balance of the Obama Administration and- as now seems likely- he is re-elected; throughout his second term as well. Should his re-election bid fail, it's virtually certain that whatever Republican Administration comes to power would soon try to restrain the momentum of 'Medical' use.

Just how we've reached this impasse is worthy of some discussion; particularly given the hopeful euphoria that followed Obama's 2008 victory. A major reason is that right out of the box, his support for medical use proved much less vigorous than hoped; better described as timid and uncertain. Also, as he settled into his main job of running the country, his obvious desire to create an amicable climate in Washington also worked against him. The GOP has become an extremist Right Wing party and will likely remain that way. Its members tend to see any desire by political enemies to compromise as a weakness to be exploited. Those with a particular interest in drug policy also seem emotionally committed to the idea that a prohibition policy can be made to "work" by the imposition of enough coercive force.

Notwithstanding 2012 election results, the drug war seems assured of enough Congressional support to survive as a protected policy for the indefinite future. Neither does it lack support from a Supreme Court that's been stacked with a Roman Catholic majority by fundamentalist Republicans intent on overturning Roe V Wade.

Then there's key human characteristic we may have underestimated; one well illustrated by both the survival of faith in prohibition as public policy and the dynamics of the modern pot market that also suggests illegal cannabis is likely to remain a protected policy for the predictable future. It's the pervasive role played by our intrinsic dishonesty in virtually all our interactions ranging from marital unions to international treaties: we cheat to the extent possible.

The major reason the Scientific Method emerged as our dominant tool for studying the environment was its insistence on transparency and intellectual honesty. The best way to understand relative lack of success of "civilization" over the last five centuries may be that the humans who retained control of nations somehow avoided extending the standards to Science other endeavors while, at the same time, devoting the lion's share of scientific knowledge to the age-old power struggles that have always divided us.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 05:56 PM | Comments (0)

April 17, 2011

Annals of Enforced Ignorance: 2

The last entry started out as a relatively pedestrian exercise comparing the failure of alcohol prohibition with that of the drug war in order to stress how little we had learned from the former in our pursuit of success for the latter. However, since it was posted, I’ve had some additional insights by combining background research for that item with evidence supplied by the patients I’ve been studying for the past 10 years. Taken together, they suggest that our species may be so far down the road of social and environmental folly that we’ll have trouble saving ourselves from the cascade of major catastrophes now lurking in our intermediate future (the mounting accumulation of unusually severe weather events is an ominous case in point.) Although the underlying causes are still far from certain, an important one appears to be a flaw long present within our brain’s evolutionary trajectory that became more dangerous once human cognitive abilities and numbers reached modern levels.

To begin with the background research: an insight from David Kyvig’s masterful Repealing National Prohibition led me to realize that because the 18th Amendment had been generated by exactly the same flawed human notions as the dug war, the latter was more an upgrade of bad old ideas than a brand new folly. The important understanding is that a significant fraction of all humans has always entertained similar beliefs; namely a preference for “control” by enacting repressive rules and laws to punish new ideas (“heresy”). Beyond that; it’s been so common for so long that the leadership of human institutions is typically top-heavy with “control freaks” who see different ideas as the greatest threat they have to deal with (think Hitler, Rush Limbaugh, and the drug war to see where I’m going). Once repression becomes institutionalized within a society, it becomes both part of accepted belief systems and dangerous to oppose (or even criticize). Right now America’s drug war, which has been policy for four decades, has sponsored entrenched medical, legal, and “correctional” industries dependent on treating (or punishing) “druggies.”

Demonstrating the critical importance of individual actors in the creation of destructive absurdities, the prime movers behind our cannabis (“marijuana”) dogma were Harry Anslinger and Richard Nixon. Anslinger created and nourished the reefer madness myth; Nixon, by rejecting his own committee’s recommendation in March 1972, slammed the door on any possibility of softening the war on cannabis (“marijuana”). Sadly, Anslinger and Nixon had lots of help from the Behavioral Sciences and the Law, both of which literally tripped over themselves to do bogus "studies" in support of the absurd claims of the the CSA's baseless Schedule one.

So efficient has drug war propaganda become that neither the feds nor the pot users they were trying to repress had any idea of how huge the illegal pot market was becoming, let alone its dynamics or the important health benefits it's been providing to its growing population of users. 503 of the 6400 applicants in my registry since have aged into eligibility for a recommendation and taken the trouble to apply since Proposition 215 was passed in November 1996.There are undoubtedly hundreds of others waiting to become eligible or saving the money.

In that connection, once the “initiation” of marijuana by trying to get "high" had become an adolescent rite of passage (probably by 1972) any possibility the CSA could block growth of its market was over. Sadly, The DEA and NIDA, which had yet to be formed, still nourish their belief in the efficacy of punishment, adding further to the trauma produced by a foolish policy.

That seems like quite enough unpleasant realty for one day.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 08:32 PM | Comments (0)

April 15, 2011

Annals of Enforced Ignorance: 1

A question asked frequently by activists opposed to the drug war is why both the federal government and the general public have ignored the most obvious lesson to be learned from our 14 year adventure with alcohol prohibition: that using the criminal justice system to punish commerce in a desired commodity simply creates a lucrative criminal market, corrupts law enforcement, and breeds violent crime. Beyond that the two policy failures are rarely compared because drug prohibition (euphemistically referred to as a policy of "control") is still being actively pursued; thus from a political point of view, analyzing its failures would be tantamount to performing an autopsy on a living patient. In other words, both national populations and their governments seem loathe to acknowledge failures in progress. The most convincing recent example of that phenomenon was the mutual reluctance of Germany and Japan to accept defeat in 1945; its most dire consequence was prolongation of the agony of both nations. First it was necessary that Berlin be occupied by the Russians, following which Hitler's suicide in the bunker finally allowed the Germans to accept an outcome that had become inevitable following their defeat at Stalingrad in the East and the British/American successes after D-Day in the West.

The next requirement was to force Japan, always an unlikely ally of the Nazis, to also surrender. That was accomplished by use of an unprecedented weapon to destroy two Japanese cities, a decision that, while perhaps best under the circumstances extant in 1945, has critically affected the course of subsequent history and the outcome of which still remains unknown.

To return to what was intended as the theme of this essay: the idea that both governments and the nations they rule are loathe to acknowledge obviously losing wars while still in progress: there have been several recent US examples: although Korea remains a standoff, our most costly defeat in a "shooting" war to date was in Viet Nam. However the longest- and perhaps the most costly- has been our largely metaphorical "war on drugs;" which amazingly, also enjoys UN approval and has been waged all over the world since the Sixties; even by our political enemies.

A major reason for that global acceptance is that the drug war is politically correct; thus its very necessity is rarely questioned by the media and its most obvious failures: the carnage on America's southern border and the growing political instability in Mexico, for example may be reported by the media, but are rarely analyzed in depth in either nation.

Parenthetically, all UN treaty signatories have also bought into drug war failure; they are also predictably unwilling to give up an excuse for spying on their own people.

Here in the US, there is also great denial implicit in the way our historical failures are remembered: Nearly a century later, “Prohibition” might conjure up a variety of quaint mental images for three hundred million living Americans, but most would be hard put to recall there was a unique Repeal Amendment in 1933, let alone that it had been necessary to cancel a similarly unique Amendment passed in 1919 on the promise it would be the permanent solution of all society's alcohol problems.

Apart from the difficulties listed above, today's drug war is so complex and shrouded in ignorance as to seriously hamper attempts at intelligent comparison with alcohol prohibition. For one thing, the 18th Amendment only targeted booze. For another, it only prohibited commerce in booze; consumption was never made a crime. In that context, the very idea of a positive drug test would have been outrageous in the free wheeling Twenties; probably even more so in the impoverished Thirties when Hollywood movies often portrayed enviably rich patrons of night clubs as hard-drinking, cigarette-smoking, and "glamorous." Compare those images to modern portrayals of grimy crack houses, meth-cooking trailer trash, or vacuous Cheech and Chong “stoners.”

The drug war targets a wide variety of chemical agents that have little in common other than their designation by the Attorney General as (illegal) “drugs of abuse.” At the same time, we are asked to accept pharmaceutical "uppers" prescribed by pediatricians and psychiatrists as “therapy” for hyperactive third graders and “go pills” dispensed by Air Force flight surgeons to bomber crews as essential to our various war efforts (probably less now that Predator drones attacking Afghanistan are controlled from an Air Force Base near Las Vegas).

In other words, context plays a critical role in how the same behaviors are defined- and how those engaged in them are dealt with.

History also matters. The Prohibition and Drug War eras are thought of very differently by the various generations that grew up under their influence. Prohibition is rarely remembered for giving birth to the modern Mafia. It helped school them in the value of modern business methods while also financing their acquisition of the tools a disciplined ethnic gang would need to compete successfully with both rivals and local police: telephones, trucks automobiles and machine guns. When prohibition ended abruptly in 1933, the criminal organizations it supported were able to segue easily into illegal drugs, labor racketeering, gambling, prostitution, and loan sharking. Their most brilliant organizers, often vicious murderers in real life, became folk heroes while still alive, and later served as models for the fictional heroes of the Godfather series.

But perhaps the biggest reason society has not learned from Prohibition's failure has been how consumers of prohibited contraband were portrayed under the two policies. “Two fisted drinkers” who can “handle their liquor” are still macho heroes on college campuses, but pathetic “druggies” and “junkies” are scorned for their “addictions” In contemporary culture, our drug policy gets a big assist from both Medicine and the Law because both agree that ”addiction:” is a treatable “disease” of celebrities and sports heroes able to afford rehab, but a "crime" requiring prison time when encountered in the poor denizens of rural trailer parks and urban ghettos.

Both medical and criminal "addiction" are now readily diagnosed by mere possession, either "internally" (in urine) or in one's baggage; all that's required is a small quantity of a designated “drug of abuse. As is obvious from current media reports, the disposition of such cases varies greatly, depending on the wealth and social status of the offender/patient.

More on this later.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 05:22 PM | Comments (0)

April 11, 2011

A Species in Trouble; the Quest for "Control"

As noted in recent entries, the pace of human cultural evolution was accelerated when we added writing (literacy) to our cognitive skill-set a few thousand years after the last Ice Age. Of comparable importance was ascendancy of the Scientific Method, the organized beginnings of which can be dated from the lifetimes of Galileo and Newton, which, by a remarkable coincidence, are linked chronologically. Galileo died the year Newton was born, in 1642.

The importance of their combined contributions to knowledge can't be overstated: for the first time, human conceptual abilities were enhanced by a set of rules that, when applied with a modicum of transparency and intellectual honesty, could reliably lead to insights (theories) that could, in turn, serve as both guides to further investigation and bases for organized disciplines with shared vocabularies and methods of measurement. In other words, advances in the basic sciences eventually became commercially valuable in ways that made individual lives easier and more productive, thus rapidly leading to a cascade of effects that stimulated growth of both wealth and the human population. To the extent those disciplines were mutually understood and shared their results, progress was even more rapid, as can be seen by comparing the growth of technology from 1800 on.

Unfortunately, political control of how science is funded and applied has remained in the hands of competitive sovereign governments with quite different cultures and ideologies. The same is true of the multinational corporations that compete almost as intensely as nations in a world, that is being made smaller, more competitive, and more crowded by the same sciences governments are attempting to “control.”

All of which may explain how humanity has arrived at its present impasse; perhaps more accurately described as a plethora of impasses confronting the species all over planet: ideological, climatic, religious, political, and financial.

If we look to the Behavioral Sciences for guidance, we are disappointed because the human competitive impulse still seems to be clearly in control despite the lateness of the hour.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 06:26 PM | Comments (0)

April 06, 2011

More on Cognition, Empiricism and Human Behavior

We humans, collectively humanity (Homo sapiens), are clearly not the only cognitive species, but our cognitive abilities so far exceed those of other surviving Hominidae as to make us unique. Those same abilities have allowed us to develop language and writing, which in combination with our other skills, have enabled us to study both ourselves and our cosmic environment with an increasing degree of precision and accuracy, especially since the advent of empirical science in the Sixteenth Century.

Unfortunately, the process by which we developed those cognitive skills has been neither smooth nor gradual; rather it has been irregular and contentious. That the skills themselves were originally enabled through an extremely slow and irregular process (Biological Evolution), was intuited only recently by Charles Darwin on the basis of observations made during a brief visit to the Galapagos Islands at the age of 26. In retrospect, the history of Science, roughly since the Fifteenth Century on, confirms the key role played by empiricism in the parallel development of its basic disciplines: Physics, Chemistry, and Biology, in enabling the formulation of our most productive scientific theories to date; Deep Time, Evolution, and Continental Drift, to mention but a few.

Appreciation of that relationship led to Uniformitarianism, a concept first suggested by Scottish geologists James Hutton and Charles Lyell and later named by English polymath William Whewell. Its validity now seems accepted, at least implicitly, by most working scientists. Nevertheless, as mentioned earlier, the evolution of Science as an approach to knowledge has been far from smooth, primarily because of the prior existence of long-standing non-empirical religious beliefs based on the deduction that a supreme deity must have created the universe. Such assumptions were well entrenched when Science literally burst upon the scene, thus it’s not surprising that our species remains embroiled in conflicts already in progress when Galileo was born. What is especially ironic is that the technological discoveries (and the information they have allowed us to compile) that most confirm the validity of empiricism are being used by its religious enemies to kill and maim their fellow humans in the name of their (assumed) creator.

The reasons are obvious. the strength of our species comes from our ability to cooperate by sharing both knowledge and physical ability to achieve common goals; behaviors clearly exhibited by other mammalian species, not to mention social insects (although in the latter, such cooperation seems more related to pheromones than to thought). To pursue that idea a bit further, it’s also clear that social insects don’t have to agree on a common goal before sacrificing their lives to achieve it, whereas humans, will not, under most circumstances, commit suicide for an idea.

However, the deliberate use of Kamikazes in the latter stages of WW2 and the currently frequent use of suicide as a weapon by members of the Moslem faith demonstrate that under the right emotional circumstances, such extreme “weaponization” becomes both reasonable and possible for humans, perhaps even for scientists.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 05:56 PM | Comments (0)

April 04, 2011

The Drug War’s Only Victory

American drug policy is an important metaphor for "Democracy" because it represents a significant failure on the part of all three branches of our federal government; yet its witless concepts regarding "addiction" are embraced by every UN signatory nation as manifested by the fact that travelers found in possession of even small amounts of cannabis ("marijuana") are subject to arrest and criminal prosecution in virtually every international port of entry.

American drug policy has evolved on the basis three cardinal pieces of federal legislation: the Harrison Narcotic Act (1914), the Marijuana Tax Act, (1937), and the Controlled Substances Act (1970). Each was initially upheld by the Supreme Court. Although both Harrison and the MTA were eventually struck down by unanimous decisions, there was no significant effect on enforcement practices. Indeed, the repudiation of the MTA in 1969 was unrelated to its most egregious flaws and, ironically, provided the impetus for the policy's Draconian consolidation into a more difficult target for legal attack.

As a practical matter, the Court's bias and scientific ignorance have both been critical to the policy's acceptance because they firmly established the dominance of legal definitions over scientific standards in matters relating to "drugs."

As domestic US policy, our legally dominated approach to drugs has also been an inhumane failure, yet it still seems to retain public approval (itself a questionable assumption because the closest to a national referendum on drug policy have been several state votes on "medical marijuana"). In any event, the continuing dominance of a cruel, obviously failing global drug war should raise serious questions about our species' ability to cope with the enormous cultural stresses engendered by the Scientific Revolution a mere five centuries ago.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 09:41 PM | Comments (0)

March 31, 2011

Empowered by Cognition; Endangered by Emotions

Cognition, which has become the preferred term for what used to be called “thinking;” is as close to an exclusively human brain function as there is. That other complex animals have similarly organized brains with rudimentary cognitive powers is obvious; so is the fact that brains are essential to life in virtually all species possessing them because they serve as visceral and muscular control centers. For completeness, it’s also known that as far as thinking is concerned, octopuses demonstrate remarkable intelligence and capacity for learning; unfortunately their aquatic habitat and remarkably short life spans severely limit their developmental potential.

Also obvious to anyone who has studied anatomy is that the human brain is structurally far more complex than those of other mammals, amply confirming its role with respect to the capabilities that have set us apart from, and allowed us to dominate all others: language, consciousness, memory and emotions. Indeed, it is clearly our brain’s complexity- not its size- that has endowed us with our as-yet unmatched cognitive abilities. There is one important caveat however: to the extent our cognitive skills have enhanced our ability to influence our planetary environment, so has our marginal emotional control become a liability that seriously threatens our well being.

At this point, one might well wonder why a blog nominally devoted to “medical marijuana” should concern itself with such abstruse concepts. The reason is that the more my essentially private investigation of the American phenomenon of cannabis prohibition has revealed, the more it has also become clear that it’s both a national folly and an apt metaphor for our species’ most dangerous vulnerability. Ironically, our emotions, the very qualities that enhance our joy and delight at being human, and have been enriching culture for thousands of years- and literature since we first learned to write- are the same ones that lead us to lie, cheat, steal, rape and kill both ourselves and each other.

Although many would still deny it, cannabis is a complex and effective herbal remedy that moderates emotional excesses to an amazing degree (it also treats a wide range of somatic symptoms more safely and effectively than most pharmaceutical products). Sadly; it also has a disgraceful American (and global) history: one of official lies and distortions almost beyond belief; comparable only to our tragic adventure with chattel slavery. Our witless federal cannabis policy has given comfort and sustenance to a succession of fools, frauds, and mountebanks in law enforcement and the Judiciary while encouraging the destructive punishment of chronic users, most of whom were guilty of nothing more than unwitting self-medication to relieve symptoms produced by childhood emotional trauma.

That it's a story told best told by surviving victims in response to the first unbiased medical questioning of them ever permitted should not come as a surprise; but apparently that’s the case... if you have any doubt that self-appointed "experts" remain hopelessly confused, just click on some recently expressed opinions.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 01:43 AM | Comments (0)

March 21, 2011

Two Evolving Crises; no Solutions in Sight

Eleven days after Japan’s catastrophic tsunami, CNN was informing us that smoke is rising from two of the nuclear reactors thought to have been brought under a measure of control yesterday when electrical power became available at the site (shut-off of electricity by the earthquake itself was blamed for the nuclear crisis). Once again, soothing reassurance was followed by a new alarm; a sequence that's becoming all too familiar to an anxiously waiting world.

Meanwhile, in Libya, there is still no word on the condition of Colonel Gadaffi, that nation’s painfully bipolar autocrat whose HQ was apparently damaged yesterday by aircraft and cruise missiles launched by a hastily assembled coalition representing both the UN and the Arab League. What Libya and Japan have in common, in addition to heightened uncertainty, is their disproportionate importance to both the world’s energy supplies, and its economy, obvious facts that seem to have finally intruded on the consciousness of two wide-eyed CNN news readers who began- spontaneously and perhaps understandably- engaging in their own version of “mission creep” by discussing whether President Obama was guilty of that infraction.

Against that improbable background, we were also told that Minnesota’s governor will explore a run for the Presidency, and Wall Street, having assumed Japan will recover soon from its tsunami and start rebuilding, had just added 200 points to the Dow, a bit of news contrasting oddly with the ubiquitous ads from debt relief companies (which may be more realistic). Another straw in the wind is continued news of unrest in the Arab World, most recently from Yemen.

A quick overview of Col. Gadaffi’s history reveals that he’s been a remarkably versatile opportunist who gained control of a sparsely populated oil rich Arab state at an early age and has managed to retain it for over forty years despite (or perhaps because of) his notorious unpredictability. That he is not without his dark side is signaled by his admission of responsibility for the Lockerbie bombing and later payment of a 2.7 billion dollar indemnity.

Carping at Obama by both his liberal and conservative critics for (finally) taking action against Libya misses the point that Gadaffi is not any old despot and Libya is not Rwanda or the Ivory Coast. The US, as the unfortunate reign of George W. Bush so recently demonstrated, cannot afford to go nation building whenever GOP fat cats have a yen to steal from from the Treasury; however those complaining about its cost so soon after the Bush-Cheney debacle obviously have a very short memory indeed.

All things considered, This still shapes up as a better day for misanthropes than for the species; but I'm still looking for that silver lining...

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 07:42 PM | Comments (0)

March 19, 2011

PTSD in Slo-Mo; the Pending Humanitarian Crisis

The tragedy now unfolding in Japan is literally without precedent; the size of the earthquake itself, together with the orientation and proximity of the culprit fault combined to produce a deadly tsunami that came ashore in less than a half hour, partially negating much of the benefit of the early warning system; but without it, the toll could have been far worse; or imagine if it had been after midnight rather than an afternoon.

Almost from the beginning attention had to be split between the search for survivors and the evolving nuclear threat; with less attention paid to the disaster’s impact on areas that weren’t affected directly. With each passing day however; the mounting disbelief occasioned by obvious denial from Japanese officials, has combined with the cautious uncertainty of overseas nuclear experts to send disturbing mixed signals. Are we not in the last days of petroleum? Were we not counting on nuclear energy to mitigate a painful transition? What about all the reactors in Japan and elsewhere built over the last 40 years? I remember that in the Sixties, so sensitive were the Japanese to nuclear energy, there were protests against the first planned visit by an American nuclear submarine. A more recent update shows how times have changed: annual sub visits, perhaps numbering in the hundreds, are probably still resented by some; but at least 1/3 of Japan's electricity was nuclear when the tsunami struck.

Many additional factors complicate the current situation. First, inclement weather: Northern Honshu and Hokkaido have a climate that’s similar to Michigan’s and those most affected by the tsunami have lost everything down to clothes, personal possessions, and even medications. Which raises another point: Japan’s rapidly changing demogaphics. As it's become more prosperous, Japan's population has aged significantly. When I was there in the Sixties, abortion was literally the cheapest form of birth control; that situation may have changed, but smaller families have clearly been the trend: Japan now has the highest percentage of elderly citizens of any nation. Nevertheless; because it was already overcrowded in the Thirties, it still has a big population, a situation made worse by its topography. As part of a volcanic chain, the Japanese islands typically have mountainous interiors surrounded by relatively narrow coastal plains upon which the population is concentrated.

In short, Japan's geography and topography, which have been affecting human culture and life style from prehistoric times, will influence the present disaster by making the delivery of relief supplies and ultimate relocation of survivors far more difficult than would be the case in Texas or Oklahoma.

Even more important may be the ultimate emotional toll that will be imposed on the psyche of a proud people being forced to simultaneously recover and bury their dead while cleaning up and rebuilding from within the wreckage of their once-proud economy.

Finally; what may well become the most crucial long-term effect of Japan's disaster will be how the rest of the world deals with the sudden impairment of its overall contribution to the densely interconnected global economy that has been evolving to serve our enormous, still-growing (but deeply divided) human population since two of its cities were obliterated in August 1945.

So far, I see no evidence that world "leadership," let alone our most vaunted institutions, have a clue as they struggle to deal with the panoply of problems that existed even before the tsunami struck.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 03:50 PM | Comments (0)

March 17, 2011

The US & Japan; a Uniquely Troubled Relationship

The Japanese Archipelago is the central part of a longer island chain stretching from the Kamchatka peninsula in the North to the Philippines in the South. Its four largest Islands, Hokkaido, Honshu, Shikoku and Kyushu, have a combined population of 127 million people who have continued to speak their own distinct language; one which is grammatically and structurally as different from written and spoken Chinese as one could imagine, yet its dauntingly complex written form was constructed relatively recently (in the first millennium) from a host of structural elements, all based on ideographs, either borrowed or revised from their closest Asian neighbors. Much of the complexity of modern Japanese is based on the diversity of Chinese which was carried over, apparently unwittingly, thus giving modern Japanese a plethora of ways to express the same idea.

Because of its insular geography and abundant natural resources, feudal Japan managed to remain aloof from European influences throughout much of the second millennium until being literally forced open by intimidation in the form of a small flotilla of modern American naval vessels led by Commodore Matthew C. Perry, who had been sent from America on to establish diplomatic and trade relations.

Thus did a very homogeneous ancient country with an inward-looking feudal society come under the influence by a younger, brash nation less than a century old. Their relationship would ultimately have enormous consequences for both and has continued to be troubled by their cultural and language differences (and not a little mutual suspicion).

The first consequence for Japan was its amazingly rapid modernization. Almost simultaneously, the US preserved its its own pathway to eventual global power by resisting the threat of Balkanization implicit in its Civil War.

Despite earnest attempts at understanding by individuals on both sides, the mutual suspicion between Japan and America continued; flaring most decisively in the Nineteen Forties after Japan entered an ill-advised pact with Germany and Italy which was quickly followed by World War 2, Pearl Harbor, and war with America.

Without lingering on its multiple complex causes, the “Great Pacific War,” as it's known in Japan, forced further change in Japan’s economy and relationship with the rest of the world. Following the nuclear destruction of two cities (the cost of averting an historically bloody invasion of the home islands) the Emperor was retained as a symbol, but could no longer provide cover for a cabal of military adventurers.

The post war occupation was an extraordinary period of rapprochement that has endured since I945 despite several stresses. It was my privilege to live in Japan for four years as an Army surgeon at a military hospital about thirty miles from downtown Tokyo between August 1963 and August 1967. When I arrived, JFK was still alive and Tokyo was preparing feverishly to host the first Asian Olympics. My four year tour in Japan is logically divided into two phases: the first two were like a leisurely small town surgical practice, which gave me a chance to learn a good bit about Japanese culture and Asia in general. The last two were frantic, dominated by America's progressive involvement in Vietnam, during which the US Army Medical Corps played an important, but relatively unchronicled role. Fresh battle casualties were air-evacuated from Tan Son Nhut airport near Saigon to Yakota outside Tokyo as early as four days after wounding. The rapidity of the medical preparations made in the wake of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution is indicated by the expansion from 150 functional beds at Zama Hospital where I was stationed to 750. The total in Japan eventually reached over three thousand in four separate facilities of which the last became operational just as I departed in August 1967. The project involved "renovation" of three existing structures into hospitals with little public disclosure, either in Japan or America; a remarkable bit of military history yet to be studied or described in much detail. By the time I returned to the US for further surgical training in San Francisco, both the Summer of Love and the Viet Nam war were in full swing and the game-changing Tet offensive was only five months in the future.

It now appears that the ongoing nuclear crisis in Japan will sustain enough interest to excuse a short break from drug policy issues, but I can't help observing that the crisis is as good a real-time example of denial as a characteristic human behavior.

Anxiety is also mounting: as world's economy skates on thin ice, there seems to be more interest in dismissing the importance of Japan's still-unresolved nuclear crisis than concern over the consequences of losing production from the world's third largest economy and the potential conversion of that nation into an economic cripple.

Doctor Tom

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

March 12, 2011

Annals of Denial

In less than 48 hours since an 8.9 megaquake rocked Japan on Thursday evening (Friday afternoon their time), it has produced a huge tsunami that came ashore about 20 minutes later on the main Japanese Island of Honshu approximately 230 miles NE of Tokyo and nearly obliterated the city of Sendai (population 1 million).

In stark contrast the the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004, this one affected an industrialized high-tech nation with the third largest economy and ninth largest population in the world. Japan is also the nation with the most tsunami experience (it's a unique Japanese word).Therefore it played a key role in developing the Pacific Ocean’s tsunami early warning system, (a system sadly lacking in the Indian Ocean in 2004) thus it had early notice; but, because of the strength of the earthquake and Sendai’s location on a coastal plain on the Pacific side of the Ou mountain range, there was little opportunity to mitigate the worst of the tsunami’s damage. On a more positive note, Japan's world-class earthquake preparedness, whetted by the Kobe disaster of 1995, undoubtedly reduced the mortality and morbidity that would have otherwise been produced by building collapse following such a huge quake.

Also, thanks to Japan’s saturation with video and communication technology, the tsumami was soon being shown by CNN on local Bay Area TV almost in real time. That was likely why I overreacted to the near-certainty of a series trans-Pacific waves, for which arrival times began appearing on the internet shortly after midnight, local time. As it turned out, because the major direction of the energy generated (as determined by the obliquity of the undersea fault) was more to the Southeast than due East, the continental US was spared a major hit.

It now appears that the biggest risk to both Japan and the world may be the combined disaster's as-yet unknown effects on Japan’s nuclear reactors, five of which are overheating and about which officials are being typically close-mouthed (shades of Three Mile Island and Chernobyl). Probably because no government likes admitting mistakes, either in policy or in execution, there is a collateral tendency for all to minimize death and damage reports early on. Hopefully the Japanese authorities responsible for its nuclear program can solve their core overheating problems before too long, but we can't count on it.

Because my research has convinced me that humans tend to favor denial to the extent possible and our failing drug war is a particularly florid example, I tend to be pessimistic.

Doctor Tom

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

March 10, 2011

Annals of Duplicity

Since 1970, a stoutly defended principle of America’s war on drugs has been that no “drug of abuse” listed on Schedule 1 of the CSA, especially marijuana or LSD (the first listed), could possibly be “medical.” In fact, the adamant refusal of the DEA to reschedule cannabis was what eventually led to a series of 15 successful “medical marijuana” initiatives or state laws now allowing a disputed modicum of medical (“medicinal”) use. This blog has been reporting informally on what thousands of Californians have been telling me since 2001 about their own use of pot. Proposition 215, the first such state initiative to pass (1996) is what allowed the necessary access, but first it had to survive determined federal opposition, before becoming operational throughout the state. There is, to be sure, still strong resistance from both local law enforcement and the federal bureaucracy.

In the past 24 hours, I've come across two unusual items relating directly to the medical marijuana controversy; both to the study just referred to and to an interesting facet of the stubborn federal opposition.

Starting with the study: an e-mail alerted me to a report from the Rand Corporation with a title that is uncannily like that of the paper we'd published in 2007, but which, on comparing the full text of the two papers, proved remarkably different.

No sooner had I obtained a pdf of the Rand paper and started comparing those differences than Google led me to a discovery that was even more surprising: The US Patent Office, also a branch of the federal government, has been issuing patents for cannabinoid agonists since at least 2001.

For those unfamiliar with agonists, they are compounds which enhance the action of a drug by acting at receptor sites. No one had the foggiest idea of either agonists or receptor sites when the Marijuana Tax Act was passed in 1937 or when it was intensified by the Controlled substances Act in 1970. In fact, the relevant concepts only became known about the time endorphins were discovered in the mid-Seventies a discovery that quickly led to the formulation of potent opioid agonists such as Fentanyl and Sufenta.

The discovery of a homologous endocannabinoid system (ECS) followed in the late Eighties and early Nineties.

What puzzles me is how different agencies of the same government can become so ensnared in cognitive dissonance that one is busy issuing patents for drugs that two others insist must always remain illegal.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 08:25 PM | Comments (0)

March 02, 2011

Don’t call it “Victory” yet; but it’s probably the beginning of the end.

In a seemingly abrupt change in federal policy: the DEA announced anonymously and sotto voce over the past week-end that it would allow “natural” cannabinoids to be used by designated pharmaceutical companies to manufacture oral medications. That news was greeted with deserved skepticism by “reform” publications and has yet to even be noticed by mainstream media outlets which remain focused on the spectacular dissolutions of authority now taking place around the world from Madison to Mexico and from North Africa to South Asia.

The DEA announcement was nevertheless, very significant because it represents such a radical departure from cherished drug war dogma that it’s almost certainly the beginning of the end of an enduring policy of failure that began during the Presidency of Teddy Roosevelt, was augmented under FDR, reached its legislative peak under Richard Nixon, and has since evolved into a tar baby with the potential to besmirch the memory of every subsequent White House occupant because all supported it. As confirmation that it has been an equal opportunity federal disaster, all three branches of US government have cooperated in protecting the policy from scrutiny and arguing on its behalf at various key occasions. So also, have its false precepts become so institutionalized within US Commerce and Academia that it’s almost impossible to speak out publicly against it.

We are thus at the beginning of a tedious and contentious argument; one filled with enough shame to discredit the cognitive abilities of our entire species. The good news is that it could also be filled with lessons on how to avoid similar traps in the future. As with the related issues of climate change, and population growth, humanity stands at an important crossroads; we can, as a species, follow the time-honored paths of greed, fear, and mysticism; or we can opt to study the past through the more objective lens of scientific empiricism that has, for the last five centuries, demonstrated repeatedly that relative truth, honestly arrived at, is both safer and more reliable than absolute truth by decree.

The choice is ours; but it must be made as a species if we are to significantly alter history's current trajectory. The good news is that total extinction is unlikely; even if we are slow to "get it." In fact, a series of successive disasters could reduce the number of humans required for rational choices to be made.

In future entries I hope to relate exactly why I see the DEA's concession as so significant.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 12:10 AM | Comments (0)

February 27, 2011

Annals of Culpable Ignorance, Denial, & Human Folly

Although Harry Anslinger isn’t as well known to Americans as he once was, his place in history seems secure: he was the federal bureaucrat behind the clumsy “Reefer Madness” campaign that added the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937 to the Harrison Act of 1914, thus compounding the modern drug war’s burden of credibility and testing our contemporary powers of denial. In a world where a sovereign head of state can deny the Holocaust and various assorted autocrats can get away with murdering their own people under color of “sovereignty,” the drug war may seem a minor embarrassment, but its mistaken precepts have ruined countless individual lives and its continued primacy as a favored policy is an indictment of America’s intellectual honesty to anyone with an understanding of clinical Medicine and a modicum of that quality.

Anslinger, by declaring, without credible evidence, that cannabis was a menace to youth, unwittingly set the stage for a youthful drug culture that exploded without warning after millions of Baby Boomers discovered the anxiolytic properties of inhaled “weed,” and the expansion of consciousness enabled by psychedelics in the Sixties. Unfortunately, the American President best positioned to respond to that youthful outburst was the insecure and vindictive Richard Nixon. His administration quickly came up with the CSA, an almost perfect legislative folly which, through an ironic twist of fate had already been promulgated as a UN treaty by none other than the indomitable Mr. Anslinger (thus possession of a small amount of herbal cannabis has been grounds for arrest in every global port of entry since 1964).

Most distressing is that modern variants of the Anslinger-Nixon whopper are still lavishly supported, not only by NIDA, but by other medical agencies of the US federal government. The first example of such gratuitous “mission creep” was the FDA's 2006 statement that just happened to coincide with the NORML convention in April 2006, a coincidence our lap-dog press pretended not to notice.

An unexpected bonus of searching for further FDA malfeasance is evidence confirming both drug warriors and reformers have remained unaware of the difference between inhaled pot and edibles since well before Nixon. A recent press release revealed that both sides endorse edibles without taking any notice of their inherent difficulties (or benefits).

An obvious question becomes, why is "non-smoked” cannabis better? Is smoking a sin? Also, when will pharmacologists get around to designing studies that explain the clinical differences between a joint and a pot brownie? Finally, when will NIDA and the DEA realize they had missed an important clinical detail from well before the Nixon era? Is it because the whole CSA, especially Schedule 1, was simply an exercise in imagination that was simply tacked on to the false assumptions made in Harrison and the MTA?

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 07:30 PM | Comments (0)

February 25, 2011

The Consequences of Drug War Ignorance

Even though it has been unable to prevent half (or more) of all American teens from trying (“initiating") "marijuana" for over four decades, the federal government insists its policy of drug prohibition (always referred to officially as "control") is successful and must be continued. Au contraire, I saw President Obama’s inability to admit the drug war's many failures as a major weakness in his recent State of the Union address.

That opinion is well supported by information gathered since 2001 from over six thousand Californians seeking my "recommendation" to use cannabis medically, but remains largely unknown because other physicians in a position to obtain similar data haven't done so; nor have they published their findings in the medical literature.

In any event, the aggregated histories of my applicant population could not compete with the huge volume of NIDA-approved literature that began to appear shortly after passage of the Controlled Substances Act in 1970 and has increased steadily since. Its thrust is that inhaled cannabis somehow functions as a transitional drug which induces young people to progress from (legal) alcohol and tobacco to "harder" illegal drugs such as cocaine and heroin. Quickly popularized as the "Gateway Theory" (but never confirmed by clinical data) that notion soon dominated "anti-drug" medical literature throughout the Eighties and Nineties and is summarized in a NIDA monograph on the, Gateway Hypothesis in 2002.

The critical points brought out in my interviews that NIDA-sponsored researchers either don't understand, or seem unable to believe, is that the majority had been self-medicating with inhaled cannabinoids for long intervals in stable patterns to relieve distressing emotional symptoms. Beyond that, they have been willing to do so at considerable risk to their economic, social, and legal well-being.

Apparently, most authors of peer-reviewed literature and their federal sponsors remain unaware of the impressive range of physical benefits inhaled cannabis can provide. It is a potent anxiolytic, antidepressant, antinauseant, antidiarrheal, anticonvulsant and antinocioceptive agent.

Just when I thought I'd learned a great deal about the therapeutic uses of cannabinoids, I was amazed to stumble across an untouched area of gross ignorance a few months ago, one with inportant policy implications. Although medical users are generally aware that cannabinoid effects can vary a lot depending on whether they are inhaled (the "head high") or eaten (the "body high") federal experts have remained oblivious to that important detail; thus neither side has focused on it or the mechanism responsible with the net result that a potentially important therapeutic benefit of herbal cannabis has remained nearly unknown and is still completely unstudied. A brief outline of the issue and a description of the pertinent differences follows.

Any psychotropic agent that can be smoked and crosses the blood-brain barrier will have rapid onset (seconds) which is why smoked marijuana can be titrated (measured) so accurately from the first toke. Edibles, because they are swallowed, are digested separately in the gastrointestinal (GI) tract, a process that not only takes longer, but cannot be monitored in real time. The products of digestion are then transported to the liver via the portal vein and broken down on a molecular level thus exposing the brain to very different effects from edibles than from smoke. The "high" lasts three hours or longer, arms and legs become relaxed to a point where physical activity is avoided, but relief of severe pain (neuropathic and arthritic pain in particular) is greatly enhanced.

The bottom line is that if appropriate research were to be done, the benefits of cannabis-based medicines might be further enhanced and more precisely focused; however, before that could happen, Congress would first have to admit a huge mistakes of long duration and then either repeal or change a bad law.

Thus have our species' emotional flaws been leading us into foolish and destructive behavior. By enhancing our ability to both reproduce and kill each other, Science has been a mixed blessing at best. Can this species be saved?

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 08:10 PM | Comments (0)

February 23, 2011

The Libyan Conundrum

Jim Hoagland’s open letter to the daffy, but unfunny clown prince of Libya strikes me as very close to the mark. Given what I now believe about the need for national leaders to retain credibility in the eyes of their polity, it seems unlikely Gadaffy can hang on to power much longer; however, he is not without assets and could still make a bloody fight of it in terms of the number of innocent victims his supporters might kill before he is forced from power, all of which poses a real problem for the issue of sovereignty upon which the “rule of law” ultimately depends. If a sovereign is corrupt, how can the law be worthy of respect? Put another way: who decides when (and how) the king must go? That principle becomes even more troublesome in the United States where federal laws conflict with newly enacted state laws and prosecutors have the option of what amounts to dual prosecution under cover of dual sovereignty.

To return to the problem represented by a rogue government like Libya that has flouted international norms in the service of a tyrannical dictator versus a rogue nation like Somalia which is run by well organized criminals, precisely because there is no effective government. Both present serious problems for which effective policing is the only reasonable long-tern solution. The problem in each case is how obtain control of the problem nation and then impose credible police power which can eventually be turned over to a legitimate government, a process that has often proved far easier to describe than to carry out.

The pressure is now on the UN Security Council which will, if they run true to form, attempt to stall without taking action. In the meantime, there is growing discontent in a broad swath of Moslem countries across North Africa and the Middle East from Tunisia to Iran. Not all are Arab or oil-rich, but what they do have in common is the Moslem faith, autocratic (or ineffective) rule, and a population bulge concentrated in the 18-30 demographic.

In a real sense, the uprisings that have erupted in the Moslem world are youth dominated and were foreshadowed by the counterculture that sprang up without warning in the United States between the mid-Sixties and the end of the Viet Nam War.

Doctor Tom

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

February 18, 2011

How do we correct mistakes we can't admit?

Today there much greater awareness of the connection between economic and emotional depression than existed in the Thirties, but it’s also true that there are well over twice as many people on Earth and waves of angry demonstrations in Middle Eastern Capitals and synchronous eruptions in Midwestern American states seem to have caught most political pundits by surprise. It’s at such times that an accurate analysis would seem to be most important; however fear-driven haste and impatience become difficult to avoid and crucial mistakes become more likely.

Such times also drive home another point: governments now exist at the pleasure of the populations they rule; once they have completely lost credibility as rulers, they are rarely saved by force alone. As Hosni Mubarak discovered last week and the shocking fate of the Ceacescus demonstrates so vividly: once an autocrat's credibility diminishes beyond a certain point, nothing can save them.

Death isn't always obligatory; all three Axis leaders surrendered power in 1945, but with significant differences. Mussolini and his mistress were murdered and hung by their heels in a Milan gas station by Italian communists. Three days later, Hitler married his mistress just before their mutual suicide in a Berlin bunker (but with Adolph's authority intact). Hirohito, survived for decades by giving a speech that allowed his people to surrender. That freed them from had been considered obligatory suicide and thus preserved what eventually became became a peaceful, prosperous post-war rehabilitation.

Although the aftermath of the Second Word War was severely troubled by the Cold War, the winners successfully avoided a global nuclear conflict; perhaps because they were deterred just enough by Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A great bonus is that the crowded European peninsula now seems committed to seeking prosperity through cooperation rather than armed conflict.

However serious new religious and economic fault lines have become uncovered elsewhere in the world. They are especially dangerous because, as 9/11 demonstrated, they cross national borders, and are fueled by religious fervor and suicidal resentment. Thus with a modicum of technical aptitude the artifacts of modern science can converted into devastating weapons. Another crucial characteristic, one that may hopefully impede all but the most fanatic, an implied need for indiscriminate mass murder. That limitation, together with some luck, may be why 9/11 hasn't been replicated; however several near misses remind us that grave danger still exists.

In the same vein, it should also be remembered that recovery from the present economic crisis is not guaranteed and we still face unsettling climatic, tectonic, and epidemiological problems our political leadership seem incapable of understanding, let alone solving.

In that context, I see our feckless drug war as metaphor, symptom, and contributing cause of our unprecedented existential malaise. While still tentative and by no means conclusive, the prognosis for complete recovery must remain guarded.

Doctor Tom

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

February 16, 2011

The President’s Cigarette Habit

A significant limitation on my use of cannabis applicant histories as evidence that our drug policy is a huge national mistake is that they are privileged. Thus I’m not free to use them except as anonymous statistics. However, now that I’ve accumulated enough data to make generalizations (that can also be tested by any other pot docs who have taken the trouble to ask similar questions) I also feel free to comment on drug use by public figures appearing in the public domain. One such item is President Obama’s cigarette habit. We already knew that, in addition to having admitted smoking cigarettes in the recent past, he is the only American President to admit trying “marijuana” and getting “high;” also that he experimented with cocaine. What he probably does not realize is that as a biracial male born toward the end of the Baby Boom, he also fits, to a remarkable degree, the profile I’ve been developing for cannabis use as a modern behavioral phenomenon.

The most consistent elements in that profile are:

1) male gender: (75%)

2) born in 1946 or later, (96%)

3) trial of inhaled cannabis to the point of getting “high,” (100%)

4) trial of alcohol to the point of intoxication, (100%)

5) inhaling smoke from at least one cigarette. (96%)

Modern “addiction” research, which wasn't vigorously pursued by Behavioral scientists until after passage of the Controlled Substances Act of 1970, has remained focused on the "risk" that adolescents who try certain drugs will subsequently try others. Although such studies quickly gave rise to a “Gateway” theory in the early Seventies, the theory itself has not progressed beyond a disputed, somewhat incoherent hypothesis. The most obvious reason (although not widely admitted) is that federal funding for drug "research" has been limited by Congress to studies that support the drug war; thus it's hardly unbiased.

To return to the President’s smoking addiction, one of the more prominent characteristics of people who eventually apply for cannabis recommendation is that 96% of them also tried cigarettes and roughly 2/3 became daily cigarette smokers for at least a while. Of those, nearly half were still smoking at the time of their initial interview (one of the benefits of the ad-hoc “renewal” requirement added to Proposition 215 is that it allows for follow-up of those applicants who opt to return). Another unanticipated benefit of the proposition is that it has uncovered subsets of behaviors that might not have been anticipated; for example, nearly everyone now smoking cigarettes feels guilty or foolish and most have tried to quit. One of the variants is “bar smoking,” the practice of accepting (or mooching) cigarettes from friends in social situations, often in association with consumption of alcohol. In fact, another subset are people who only smoke on such occasions and do not progress to full fledged recidivism by starting to buy them again; but, needless to say “bar smoking” is one setting in which recidivism is most apt to occur. Others are increased "stress" or inability to use cannabis. For me, bar smoking or stress preceded each of several returns to cigarettes between 1976 (I had quit completely for the first time in 1974) and 1993.

Since 1993, I have not been tempted and now cannot imagine lighting another cigarette, but also have to acknowledge that my compulsion to smoke them for almost fifty years was not deterred by daily contact with cigarette victims from 1953 on (1953 was my first year in medical school: also when I first pondered the unequivocal link between cigarette smoking and lung cancer established by Wynder and Graham).

I can only wish President Obama well and hope he will not only read these words, but will be inspired to consider his inadvertent culpability as head of the US federal bureaucracy most responsible for an insane global drug policy.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 06:59 PM | Comments (0)

February 14, 2011

Clueless America, as seen through the eyes of TIME

TIME magazine has been reporting and commenting on the world as seen through an American prism since it was founded in 1923 by a youthful pair of Yale Bonesmen. Despite a declining circulation (a malaise afflicting most hard-copy publications) it maintains a prominent web presence which also has an extremely useful archive that allows a patient researcher to read all the text the magazine ever published; minus original ads and illustrations. As such, it’s an invaluable resource for examining ambient American thought as it was expressed at weekly intervals throughout most of the last 100 years. By sheer happenstance, The New Yorker, another New York City based periodical, catering to a somewhat different audience, but similarly rooted in the Ivy League, began publishing in 1925. Their back issues were first made available on digital media in 2004 and are also now available to subscribers.

Once I was aware of a heretofore unrecognized generation gap in the way the tems “drugs” and “drug use” are perceived by most Americans, understanding those difference became important for obvious reasons. Over that same interval, I’d also become progressively disabused of the notion that simply learning and explaining the “truth” about such incendiary issues would be enough to start undoing the enormous damage being caused by the drug war on a daily basis. Just as I came to understand that the policy was even dumber and more destructive than I could have guessed, so have I learned that those for whom it has become a way of life share those characteristics to a similar degree. Thus undoing all the drug war's damage seems as forlorn a hope as undoing the human misery produced by other repressive policies of long standing: the Inquisition, American chattel slavery, and the Holocaust, to name but a few. What they also have in common is the idea that status is a crime; it’s thus OK to carry out savage punishments, up to the point of murder, against other humans based on what they appear to be.

Amazingly, that notion remains as viable in some parts of the today’s world as in the Thirties; just substitute “black”, “gay,” or “druggie” for “heretic,” infidel, or “slave” and you will get the idea: labels can excuse treatment that would otherwise be a crime. When enforced by a police bureaucracy under color of authority such policies become especially heinous.

A good place to look at how naive we were just as both the Viet Nam war and the drug culture were about to sweep over us is to read TIME’s opinion on the state of the nation’s youth just as the class of 1968 was getting ready to graduate.

I’d say TIME's editors were about as clueless then as Hosni Mubarak was last Thursday.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 07:26 PM | Comments (0)

February 13, 2011

Annals of Revolution

Recent human history is replete with popular revolutions that toppled governments. In a sense, the successful American Revolution, by bankrupting France, led immediately to the French Revolution. Considered together, the two may be seen as ending the hereditary monarchies envisioned in the Divine Right of Kings, an doctrine rooted in the questionable idea that temporal rulers derive their legitimacy from divine sponsorship. Two World Wars were then fought in the early Twentieth Century over the remnants of hereditary empires; the Bolshevik Revolution ended Russia's participation in the First World War before emerging at the head of a new kind of imperial autocracy that reshaped the world before failing economically when the West produced better consumer goods after both sides had excluded that nuclear war was not a viable option.

In a real sense, the youthful, and largely peaceful, protest that just ousted Hosni Mubarak after 30 years of authoritarian rule in Egypt may have been foreshadowed by an American precedent: the youthful counterculture that flared in the late Sixties and early Seventies before being swept aside by a combination of its own youthful excesses and Richard Nixon’s “war” on drugs. Ironically, Nixon, the only American President ever forced, a la Mubarak, to leave office by popular revulsion, is now remembered for a disgraceful triple legacy most would like to forget: his futile bombing of Laos and Cambodia, our failing drug war, and Watergate.

It’s still much too early to tell how the vacuum left behind by Mubarak will be filled, but one has to be impressed by the youthful enthusiasm and sincerity of the protesters; also their movement’s potential for threatening other Muslim autocracies. It was also very instructive to learn that the United States, which is increasingly unable to balance its own books, has been keeping peace in the Middle East by bribing Israel and Egypt not to go to war with each other.

Simple logic should tell us that’s not a policy that can be sustained for very long and my instincts tell me that the protesters we just saw in Tahrir Square are not itching to invade Israel.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 01:35 AM | Comments (0)

February 10, 2011

History in the Making

Like so many others, I've been caught up in the drama now unfolding on our TV sets: the clearly related series of of political movements sweeping through autocratic governments of the Arab world. At this moment, Tahrir Square in Cairo is jammed with demonstrators awaiting the downfall of an autocrat who has held power for thirty years with the blessing of the US and Israel. Although it started in Tunisia, the current tsunami of political unrest clearly has its greatest potential for significant change in Egypt because of its control of the Suez Canal and the uncertainty of who might take charge once Mubarak has vacated power.

The public display of emotion by hitherto unknown Egyptian actors in this drama must have a lasting effect; as will the weaseling responses of the minions of our competing news services, all of whom are equally unaware of what might happen next.

One of the characteristics of our species is that someone has to be in charge of every organization, whether a family, a business, or a nation; thus when death or some other form of ouster occurs, there has to be a mechanism for transferring either ownership or responsibility for leftover assets and liabilities.

That this is an historic event of great significance is beyond question. How it will play out is still clearly unknown, but that hasn't stopped various twits from criticizing Obama for not taking a stand. What I'm suggesting here is that his true measure as a political leader will be his response to whatever leadership emerges from the present chaos.

The real courage being displayed right now is by those clamoring for an end to the autocracy that has been oppressing them for three decades. As it is, I already see the sudden, unexpected dominance of emotional truth over a repressive autocracy as a sign that there's still hope for humanity. If Obama can also figure that out in the days ahead, so much the better...

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 05:01 PM | Comments (0)

January 27, 2011

The Impact of Tabu on Belief, Behavior, and Policy

Tabu (taboo) is a Polynesian term for something so off-limits that even discussions about it are forbidden. US drug policy is best understood as our government's attempt to render both use of certain drugs and any questions about the policy itself equally taboo. What recent experience shows is that if a prohibited item was- like alcohol- already well known and popular, its criminal prohibition is unlikely to succeed, primarily because of the profits that become available to those willing to defy the law. The most familiar example is our failed experiment with Prohibition between 1920 and 1933.

In retrospect, the chronic failure of laws against prostitution should have been a warning to those who predicted, in 1919, that Prohibition could not be repealed and would soon lead to a new Utopia. As we now know, our 14 year experiment left us a legacy of organized crime which then used its profits to become institutionalized as an American version of the Mafia and, after Repeal, quickly shifted its focus to labor racketeering, protection rackets, illegal gambling, and illegal drugs.

The basic lesson of Prohibition, that criminal bans inevitably create new opportunities for crime, seems permanently beyond the comprehension of certain moralistic types who can't wait to pass new laws that also fail for the same reason. It was probably no accident that Harry Anslinger's uncle transferred him from the Treasury's Prohibition unit to take over as Director of a brand-new Bureau of "Narcotics" in 1930. That the new agency began existence under an archaic name is an indication of how the ambient ignorance of that day has persisted: "Narcotics" remains code for "illegal drugs" to this day.

Two features make America's failed experiment with "marijuana" prohibition unique; one is that it was an attempt to ban a relatively unknown product for which the potential demand had been essentially unknown when it was made illegal through devious legislation in 1937. There is no way Anslnger could have foreseen the enthusiasm with which Baby Boomers (who wouldn't begin arriving for another ten years) would, as Sixties adolescents, give his "reefer madness" fantasy an aura of verisimilitude with their enthusiastic reception of "marijuana," or that the main reason would be its most characteristic pharmacologic effect: an immediate, brief, and easily managed anxiolytic state (but only when smoked). A final irony is that the key reasons for pot's commercial success and user loyalty would remain beyond the awareness of self-appointed cognoscenti in both camps and would then be disbelieved by most; even after being pointed out.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 09:45 PM | Comments (0)

January 23, 2011

Spinning the Truth

For the past several years, the focus of my (limited) ability to study the phenomenon of cannabis (“marijuana”) use from a clinical perspective has shifted from defining pot's appeal to its chronic users to an attempt to understand why (how) such a badly mistaken and intellectually shabby policy as "marijuans" prohibition has been able to retain the allegiance of government policy makers the world over. This morning, quite by accident, I stumbled into a major new insight; one that's still evolving and yet has taken my understanding to a whole new level. I awakened to TV: the program being aired had been produced for cable by an entity known familiarly as “Nat Geo.” It was a slick, brand new production dated 2011 and entitled “Drugged, High on Marijuana."


 It’s axiomatic that new insights favor a prepared mind (Darwin, for example, was familiar with the then-novel work of Geology pioneer Charles Lyell before he visited the Galapagos). As for me, I'd long been suspicious that “Nat Geo,” for all its undeniably interesting educational and scientific programming, was also a shill for the Drug War’s fascist status-quo. This morning, I finally had that confirmed by doing something I should have done a long time ago: I Googled "Nat Geo,Discovery" and was amazed to learn that their majority owner was that well known international fascist, Rupert Murdoch.

To back up a bit, I'd originally become suspicious of Nat Geo's basic motivation: from their Border Wars series, which is so highly selective in its characterization of marijuana and human smuggling that it could easily be accused of intellectual schizophrenia: no mention of even the possibility that US efforts at "control" on the border are failing for the same reasons: endemic greed and dishonesty in both nations. Instead, while Mexican suffering is largely ignored or minimized, the personnel in our militarized Border Patrol and ICE are portrayed as heroes frying to keep the rest of us safe from the twin scourges of illegal drugs and illegal aliens.

Another thing I have only recently had time to confirm: so far as I can tell, I'm the only "Pot Doc" who has been asking the same questions of applicants in any state with a medical marijuana law. I would not have believed I could spend almost 10 years taking histories from pot smokers (and reporting the results to any who would listen) and still encounter such dedicated ignorance from "colleagues." However that statement seems at least as accurate as my patient data.

To return to this entry's purpose; it's aptly summarized by its title, which, in turn, turns out to be the shorthand answer to the question raised in first paragraph: the drug war bureaucracy has been successful because of support for fascist causes by wealthy people (Rupert Murdoch is but one of several possible examples) many of whom are also committed to the extreme conservatism that fell under the rubric of "fascism" early last century. Once one understands Mussolini and Hitler (his best pupil) it's but a short step to the realization that extreme "control" policies often end up justifying the imprisonment (or destruction) of perceived enemies.

In the fascist movements of the early Twentieth Century, the common good came to be defined nationally in Germany and Japan. In the case of the drug war, the context of its (presumed) "control" mandate was enlarged to embrace the whole species when its responsibility was arrogated into a need to protect (all the world's) "kids" from "addiction" (similarly; some opponents of abortion believe they have the right to protect fetuses by killing physicians who perform legal abortions).

More, later.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 05:36 PM | Comments (0)

January 22, 2011

A Breath of Fresh Air

The carnage in Mexico tragically provoked by the Bush-Cheney Administration's thoughtless 2006 request of newly elected President Calderon to “clean up” drug smuggling along the US-Mexican border shows no sign of abating. But there is hopeful evidence that at least one person in a position to influence policy has been paying attention and has (at least partially) changed his mind. This blog has long asked how such a stupid and destructive “War” on Drugs could fool so many allegedly bright humans for so long; thus I have learned not to become too hopeful. However, Time Magazine’s confirmation that Vicente Fox (Calderon’s immediate predecessor) has had a change of heart is encouraging.

However, we’ve been here before: a similar announcement by the late Wm. F. Buckley Jr. in 1995: that the drug war was a failure, had provoked excitement, but follow-up was disappointingly slow (although it may have helped passage of California’s Proposition 215 later the next year). Buckley’s main reason for changing his mind was that he saw the drug war as ineffective. Fox’s is essentially the same; plus his nation’s appalling bloodshed. However, both men were careful to add that they didn’t “approve” of drug use. In that respect, they may have touched on the main reason a stupid policy has been politically correct for so long: it has been successfully cloaked as Public Health for some and a Moral Imperative for others through equally false, but widely accepted, notions about “addiction.”

Most repetitive drug use is not a disease; nor is it a sin. The urge to try drugs during adolescence is a complex behavior suggestive of symptoms that appear to be implanted in vulnerable children between ages 4 and 11. Furthermore, not all arbitrarily designated “drugs of abuse” are the same; some (including alcohol and cigarettes) are considerably more dangerous than others. Some illegal drugs (especially cannabis) are popular because they relieve troublesome symptoms more safely and effectively than others, including legal Pharmaceutical products.

Such conclusions weren’t remotely possible before a large sample of illegal cannabis users were grudgingly allowed to consult with physicians after a California initiative passed in 1996. Although my data has yet to be replicated, the passage of similar initiatives in several other states since 1996 suggests that cannabis (“marijuana”) is popular all over the country, a situation that should call for more unbiased research rather than more spending on the ineffective punishment of people who are more likely to be victims of dysfunctional or absent parenting than born criminals.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 09:38 PM | Comments (0)

January 20, 2011

Symptoms of an Ailing Species, 1: Suicide

Humans are the only mammals who deliberately kill themselves; we do so for a variety of reasons about which we are also in serious denial. The conversion of suicide into a weapon of war by the Japanese toward the end of World War 2 probably played a role in the US decision to attack Hiroshima and Nagasaki with nuclear weapons. Its modern use as a weapon by Muslims began with the destruction of the Marine barracks in Lebanon by massive truck bombs in 1983. The first use of suicide against Israelis in the First Intifada was non-explosive; but bombing by individuals using suicide vests soon became standard in the Second.

In the United States, where suicide is generally regarded as a manifestation of mental illness, it was the 10th most common cause of death in 2007. A closer look reveals reveals that the risk of self-destruction varied considerably with certain general factors: age, gender, and ethnicity, as well as understandable specifics such as general health, marital or financial problems, a history of depression, or certain provocative events, such as death of a loved one, social disgrace, etc. One key understanding that can be derived readily from all the data is that both emotions (feelings) and cognition (rational processes) play a role in any given individual’s decision to end their life. Another is that an unexpected suicide can be a very traumatic event for friends and family members, but under certain circumstances: when it’s a rational choice that had been planned in advance and was assisted by a licensed professional, that trauma can be mitigated considerably. At present, Oregon, Washington, and Montana are the only states that have approved initiatives allowing some form of legal “assisted suicide” (euthanasia) and it is specifically forbidden in the majority of others, but attitudes are clearly changing.

Suicide rates seem to be increasing around the world, although statistics are probably unreliable; particularly where a majority of citizens are either Christians or Muslims (it's considered a sin by both religions). In that respect, there is striking cognitive dissonance in Muslim nations in which modern suicide bombers are routinely considered "martyrs" rather than sinners or murderers; even when a majority of their victims may be other Muslims.

However, non-Muslim nations should not be overly comforted or succumb to feelings of moral superiority; they have sins of their own that are seldom admitted and many are seeing a parallel increase in non-lethal forms of self-mutilation such as cutting, particularly among adolescents.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 06:56 PM | Comments (0)

January 18, 2011

Thoughts on My Birthday

Today is my 79th birthday. I didn't expect to live this long, but as my 80th year came within hailing distance, I began hoping I would, especially with the discovery that I had also obtained, quite by accident, information I believed could change the world for the better. I’m still reasonably sure it could do that; but only if enough people were to understand it. Sadly, that's very unlikely in a world where the human population is nearing seven billion.

Which calls attention to what I see as humanity's biggest problem: there are too many of us and a critical evolutionary flaw in our brain almost guarantees that so long as even a few survive, we are likely to continue fighting among ourselves. Indeed, for that to change would probably require some further physical evolution of the brain that has become- paradoxically- both the crown jewel of hominid evolution and the reason we probably won’t reach our full potential.

What gives me the chutzpah to sound off like this? That's easy: what I learned from nearly ten years spent talking to pot smokers; not that pot smokers are so smart (some are), but what I’ve earned from them is so applicable to human behavior. If we take a couple of intellectual giant steps backward and look at human history as a discipline that became much better informed after Science was added to our cognitive skills, we can also see that today’s ordinary humans have been afforded an understanding of the universe that far surpasses what had been possible for the brightest and best-read humans in the thousands of years before Galileo (I think of Science as beginning with him and Newton, who was born the year he died). Science soon blossomed into an Enlightenment, which didn’t help us get along any better (in fact, quite the opposite) but did enhance the ability of Europeans to sail to distant lands where they “discovered,” and quickly began to exploit their fellow humans, especially in the Americas.

We now know that modern humans are literally brothers under our different-hued skins; that those differences were relatively recent evolutionary adaptations to the different climates that various “out of Africa” survivors encountered following their separate migrations from the home continent. That they also possessed language is quite certain; it’s difficult to imagine the successful mass migrations we now know took place without some critical elements of planning and cohesion. We also know from DNA evidence what routes they took and over what relative intervals; therefore we should, someday (if we can stop squabbling long enough and find enough spare cash) be able to trace their migration itineraries with even greater precision.

That touches on another reason we humans will probably never straighten out the mess we find ourselves in: there are some very bright “Creationists” who believe so strongly ins their cause they keep trying to pass laws requiring that their belief become part of the public school curriculum. That seems little different from Muslim Jihadists who believe that killing innocent infidels will result in a more sexually gratifying afterlife in an earthier and more misogynistic version of Christianity's of “heaven;” but similar in the basic conception of an afterlife restricted to the Faithful.

Returning to pot smokers, the opportunity to take their histories provided by proposition 215 was, as I have repeatedly pointed out, unique. Also when I attempted to report what they were telling me, I was surprised to learn others weren’t seeking the same information. That refusal of physicians to do straightforward clinical research was a shocking change from the attitude that had permeated the practice of Medicine when I’d been in a student and a surgical resident (between ‘53 to ’63). In retrospect, I’d also done a Thoracic residency in San Francisco at the epicenter of the latest cultural change to shake humanity during its apogee (‘67 to ‘69). Although I’d sensed there was something important happening then, it wasn’t until now that I think I’ve gathered enough information to understand it.

All of which brings me to perhaps my most important point: history is made every day, but it’s perceived very differently by different people (and affiliated groups). Soon, innumerable arguments begin about how those different impressions should fit into a coherent narrative.

Unfortunately, that narrative also becomes a matter of dispute within the arbitrarily created political entities we call nations and have endowed with “sovereignty.” Thus a dangerous tipping point may have been created by the conflation of excess human numbers and our stubborn consensus problems, especially since World War Two ended.

That seems like quite enough rain for one parade.

Docto Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 06:56 PM | Comments (0)

January 17, 2011

The Marijuana High from a Clinical Perspective

One of the (still) unrecognized benefits of Proposition 215 is that it has allowed, for the first time ever, protected clinical contact between physicians and the hitherto closeted users of reefer, which, as “marijuana,” took then-young Baby Boomers by storm in the Sixties and soon impelled an insecure President Nixon to declare “war” on all drugs declared illegal by the US Attorney General. One of several important points lost on most observers during that turbulent era was that whatever medical evaluation of “reefer” had taken place in the past had been neither thorough nor systematic and was, in any event, woefully out of date. When a special commission appointed by Nixon himself called those facts to his attention in 1972, he buried their report and scolded its chairman for ignoring his wishes

Thus have the imagined evil effects of smoking marijuana, now known by most as getting “high,” been demonized by those opposed to its use, even as a substantial fraction of those who have tried it either continue to use it or remain willing to again if they develop certain symptoms. Thus equally ironically, has relief of one person’s symptoms remained another’s excuse for their harsh punishment for over four decades with virtually zero mutual awareness. That such a bizarre situation could have evolved shouldn’t surprise a nation that fought a bloody Civil War over chattel slavery after seventy years of existence, then accepted that “separate” is the same as “equal” for another sixty, and still struggles with the notions of equality so eloquently stated in its founding manifesto.

To return to why marijuana’s characteristic “high” remains so misunderstood: it’s really a pharmacological phenomenon that’s far more complex than either its opponents or proponents ever imagined. The most accurate descriptive term for its unique effect is “anxiolytic,” a word (unwittingly) coined by a pharmaceutical company in the early Sixties to describe the effect of an an entirely different drug after oral ingestion. Another surprise is that smoking cannabis is an advantage because it provides the experienced user with almost instant awareness that an effective dosage level has been reached, an advantage that’s only possible when a drug can be delivered by inhalation and crosses the blood brain barrier (both of which cannabinoids do readily). Also, with respect to smoking “marijuana,” the extensive work of academic Pulmonologist Donald Tashkin, an unusually honest investigator, suggests that its carcinogenicity, like so many of its other presumed dangers, has been grossly exaggerated and may even be blunted by an anti-cancer and other beneficial effects.

The bottom line is that limited clinical evaluation (the only kind possible under the grudging restrictions that applied to how Proposition 215 could be implemented) has revealed important findings that remain either unknown to, or disbelieved by, many who should be interested. They include the current occupant of the Oval office, the family and fans of a recently deceased entertainer, and any number of other public figures whose personal drug use is sufficiently well known to allow discussion without breaching ethical canons.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 10:09 PM | Comments (0)

Questions Answered: #2

Question #2 on January 12th asked why “Reefer Madness” (a.k.a. America’s marijuana prohibition) survived Repeal. Although it should have been asked more precisely as "HOW did our drug policy survive Prohibition’s failure?" a major factor was obviously the care taken by federal bureaucrats from Anslinger forward to avoid any use of the “P word” in official documents. That practice became universal after Nixon and has also been honored by the media; just like they never mentioned FDR's polio residuals.

The implicit dishonesty with which a failing drug policy was given a pass became even more evident after Nixon; the drug war has been euphemistically described as drug “control” without it enforcers being asked any hard questions: how can a valuable commodity can be “controlled" when designated criminals are given a monopoly on its production, transportation, and sale. Also remarkable for their scarcity in the media are other hard questions: why is a chronically failing policy awarded a bigger budget every year and why has it been accompanied by a quadrupling of prison inmates since it was instituted in 1970? Finally, the same hard questions are never asked of aspiring Presidential candidates.

Thus are what may be the most important lessons to be learned from Prohibition’s failure either ignored or misunderstood by both political parties and the media and so, beg more questions: are they all stupid, cynical, or both? There seems no logical alternative. That the same policy is also implicitly, albeit cautiously, defended by the similar failure of professors of “Public Policy” at "leading universities" to ask the same questions is another puzzle. Are (we) humans simply consummate liars and equivocators?

While that may be a deeply disturbing idea, history tells us it shouldn't come as a surprise. Although we are the most recently evolved primates and the most capable of cognition, it's only a relatively short time since we even learned to write and an even shorter interval since we gained the ability to sort and classify various abstract ideas (Psychiatry hasn't even come up with a rational classification of our own behavioral problems).

Since we are also highly competitive mammals, only too willing to kill both ourselves and others for our strongly held personal and religious beliefs, the imposition of a silly drug policy by our political leaders may be just a passing phase and shouldn't panic us into throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Given all our other faults: murder, child abuse, torture and criminal neglect of the same environment our grandchildren may need to survive in, perhaps a failing drug policy shouldn't be of primary concern.

If we were to practice a bit more denial, things may even get better by themselves. Out here in California, where progress has been inching along for 14 years, we even had a legalization initiative to vote on last November. If the people who already had a doctor's recommendations, hadn't voted against Proposition 19, it might even have passed; but I haven't heard anyone complaining...

Doctor Tom (only slightly tongue-in cheek; see Fred Gardner)

Posted by tjeffo at 05:08 AM | Comments (0)

January 15, 2011

Unexpected Results; Unintended Consequences

Apropos of the shooting rampage in Tucson last Saturday: survival following a penetrating gunshot wound of the brain is indeed rare; that it should have occurred under such arresting circumstances and have victimized such a high-profile and sympathetic public figure endows it with the potential to begin civilizing our deeply divided and generally clueless species at a time when some rudimentary awareness of its increasingly desperate plight is long overdue. The question is really one of survival; the situation itself, and the logic behind it, are both relatively easy to grasp: despite our highly evolved and undeniably brilliant cognitive abilities, we humans are now embarked on the destruction of our own future because our emotions have been leading us into indefensibly stupid and destructive mass behavior.

Once Darwin’s intuition began leading biologists inexorably toward the conclusion that life is less likely to have been planned by a humanoid intelligence than to be random; an increasingly bitter contest between those able to accept cosmic uncertainty and those who cannot became started. Over time, It’s become obvious that disagreement is now so profound, yet inchoate, that it has acquired the potential to do great harm to both our species and our planetary environment.

These thoughts are an unexpected result of my continuing study of cannabinoids and the people who use them. I feel no need to defend it; instead I’m almost equally reassured about its validity by the consistency of the data and distressed by the implications of the (illogical) refusal of others with the same opportunity to do a similar study. Ditto, the relative lack of any coherent discussion of drug use as a phenomenon requiring understanding rather than punishment. Instead; the usual sources cling stubbornly to the glaring inconsistencies of a drug war dogma now invalidated to a grotesque degree and yet seemingly well beyond repudiation by either Congress or the Supreme Court.

The almost unbearable irony is that the shooting was done by a mentally ill person who symbolizes the inability of Medicine to either classify such problems in a meaningful way or shake its own drug war restrictions. Also that it took place in Arizona: a state that's become both a Second Amendment focal point and the most glaring example of our failing federal immigration and "drug control" policies.

However, it’s said hope springs eternal; which is why I will continue calling attention to these follies as long as I'm able.

Doctor Tom

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

January 12, 2011

Questions seldom asked about “Reefer Madness”

In 1937, the possession and use of cannabis were so effectively discouraged by the wording of the Marijuana Tax Act (MTA) that, for all practical purposes, it soon became effective prohibition of any amount whatsoever. Beyond a disproportionately high fine for failure to pay a small tax (for which the required stamps were never even printed) the Act also called for such tedious and intrusive record keeping as to discourage medical prescription of what had become a rarely ordered oral medicine, one already falling out of favor with Pharmaceutical companies; primarily because of their difficulty in standardizing its dosage.

The MTA was the brain-child of Harry Anslinger, the self-promoting Director of the FBN who, since his appointment in 1930, had combined his considerable bureaucratic skills with an antipathy to "addiction" to assert near-total control over a punitive American drug policy despite his obvious lack of medical expertise. From 1937 on, while Anslinger remained in charge of the FBN, "marijuana" arrests were rare. Essentially all prosecutions were at the state level during the Forties and Fifties, but thanks to his influence, the law was rigorously enforced and harsh penalties routinely imposed, especially in “Bible Belt” states.

In the Sixties, that situation began changing almost as soon as Anslinger retired (1962). Young people born during World War Two and its subsequent “Baby Boom” began entering high schools and colleges where they soon became noticed; not only for their sheer numbers, but also for their rejection of traditional norms, support for liberal causes, and experimentation with then-unfamiliar drugs. Somehow, they had even discovered the "reefer" damned by Anslinger in 1937 and were using it enthusiastically; along with some other even less familiar psychedelic agents: LSD, Psilocybin, and Peyote. That Boomer drug curiosity was triggered by a small, contentious Fifties literary movement that had became notorious for both its put-down of American consumer culture and its members' own enthusiastic drug use is obvious in retrospect, however the connection was described by only by few more perceptive observers like David Halberstam, and Tom Wolfe. That the Beat-Boomer connection has remained so unrecognized by "mainstream" media thus becomes one of several long-avoided questions about both America's drug use and its drug policy that should have been addressed long before a "drug war" could have been declared by Richard Nixon, let alone matured into a dutifully enforced UN policy failure.

1) How did such an intrinsically stupid policy ever get started?

2) How has it survived the failure of Prohibition in 1933?

3) What made inhaled cannabis ("reefer") so attractive to Baby Boomers in the Sixties?

4) Why is a "war" on drugs still global policy?

There are several other pertinent questions, but the ones listed here seem to be the ones most demanding of thoughtful answers.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 12:32 AM | Comments (0)

January 08, 2011

Evolution, Genes, "Race," Denial & "Justice"

When the young Charles Darwin visited the Galapagos in September 1835 as part of a daunting around-the-world voyage on HMS Beagle, he couldn’t have expected to gain the critical insights that would make him famous within his lifetime and leave him both hated and revered today, some 180 years later. Back when the voyage began in 1831, he was a youthful medical school drop-out whose decision to quit his studies had disappointed his physician father, yet he'd still managed to persuade the older Darwin to finance a position for him as resident “naturalist” on the Beagle’s ambitious (and risky) project of global circumnavigation, a voyage that would last five years.

As we now know, the younger Darwin was familiar with the then-new concepts of Geology pioneers James Hutton and Charles Lyell ; thus he knew that the discovery of marine fossils on upland slopes was casting serious doubt on traditional Biblical notions of time, one of the many Enlightenment discoveries that would prepare him for the insights he would be exposed to on his now-famous voyage. Those insights began with observations made during a relatively short visit to a cluster of volcanic islands off the coast of South America. The Galapagos, then nearly unknown to Europeans, are now recognized by the scientifically informed as one of the few locations on Earth where evidence hinting at Evolution would have been obvious enough to catch the attention of even a prepared mind like Darwin's in the early Nineteenth Century. Even so, other circumstances would be required to nurture those insights to fruition: the financial means to pursue what became a life-long obsession, a supportive family, and the production of an historic manuscript that would both satisfy Huxley and electrify the world in 1859.

Thus did Charles Darwin labor long and hard to generate a hypothesis that is still either unknown to, or resisted mightily by over half the world's humans. Even where it has been heard of, vested interests oppose it; primarily on religious grounds. At the same time, Evolution has matured into the most important biologic theory yet. It guides progress in the Life Sciences and has been further confirmed by Mendelian Genetics, a Science that didn't exist before Darwin (Darwin and Mendel were probably unknown to each other). Also elucidation of the structure of DNA (published in 1953), has led to a progressive understanding that a complex chemical has probably enabled inheritance in all life forms, provided invaluable forensic tools, and still offers exciting new possibilities such as back-tracking human migrations.

All of which brings up the distinction between an hypothesis and a theory: the former is an explanation proposed for an observed natural phenomenon. As such, it's also a preliminary form of the latter; to the extent an hypothesis proves useful, it tends to be retained as a guide to further investigation. At some point successful hypotheses becomes theories. Those that don’t fulfill their original promise, may be either radically modified or completely discarded. Phrenology is a good example of the latter: its logic depended on the localization of brain function demonstrated by the work of Hughlings-Jackson, but alas, bumps on the skull could not be similarly related to personality.

The process by which theories are discussed, modified, or discarded has itself evolved along with empirical Science. In general, the entrance of government into such discussions has been neither helpful no efficacious and often had the opposite effect.

Many glaring examples are provided by the Drug War, which is itself bereft of a coherent hypothesis (except, perhaps that "drugs" of abuse," as decided by a lawyer, should be prohibited in the criminal code). That notion has only fostered crime, murder and corruption in every nation that has implemented it, an observation readily confirmed by Google, but not acknowledged in the "mainstream" press of any nation.

Thus a reasonable litmus test for a rational drug policy becomes failure (refusal?) by the American "Drug Czar" and NIDA director to acknowledge the carnage "marijuana" prohibition is causing along our border with Mexico

That NIDA is now headed by a native Mexican is hardly an auspicious omen.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 07:52 PM | Comments (0)

January 01, 2011

Marijuana's Delayed Popularity; the Case Against the Drug War

When Harry Anslinger introduced his inane Marijuana Tax Act in 1937, the only thing we can be sure of is that he knew almost nothing about “reefer” from either personal experience or the medical literature because the prescribed use of inhaled cannabis was so rare as to be relatively unknown, especially when compared to its use today. We do know there was some non-medical (but legal) "recreational" smoking of “reefer” (“muggles,” “gage”). Also that Anslinger was a shameless liar who routinely made up evidence to justify the FBN’s existence. In fact, one of the most damning bits of evidence that the current US and global) “war” on drugs is based on nonsense is that an ignorant buffoon like Anslinger could have been the driving force behind such pivotal legislation.

"Marijuana” was finally discovered by American adolescents and young adults a little less than thirty years after the MTA was passed and just about the time the man most responsible for it was shuffling off to senescence and retirement. "Reefer's"delayed popularity could not have been forecast in 1937, nor indeed was it even recognized until the mid-Sixties. It's explosive popularity, almost three decades after all use had been made illegal, is without parallel in the history of illegal drugs. Ditto the youthful nature and enthusiasm of its first devotees. A third phenomenon requiring explanation has been the sustained loyalty of so many chronic users despite progressively severe prosecution (and persecution) at the hands of our criminal justice system.

Were it not for the nearly simultaneous emergence of information in the late Eighties that inhaled "marijuana" was relieving the nausea and vomiting then interfering with two newly effective treatments for cancer and AIDS, it's likely California’s Proposition 215 would not have even made the 1996 ballot, let alone passed by a comfortable maegin. Even more distressing, from my point of view, is the remarkable resistance of both our media and political power structure to factual information about cannabis, still a.k.a. “marijuana.” Anslinger may have been a clumsy liar, but he was a skillful enough propagandist to infect the general public with the same prejudices he'd displayed throughout a long life; perhaps that's the reason so few biographers have been inspired to tell his story (and none have praised his dubious "accomplishments").

All of which leads me to have contempt for academic gurus at "leading universities" who should have been smart enough to know better, but have continued taking Anslinger's ridiculous claims seriously throughout their (now) relatively long academic careers. We have been seriously led astray on drug policy; not only by all three branches of government, but also by those claiming special expertise in "Public Policy" an academic career field that didn't begin developing until after World war Two.

Anslinger didn't fool everybody; a few prescient authors, notably Dan Baum & Mike Gray published critical appraisals right around the time 215 passed. One, inspired by his earlier study of Nazism, pointed out that such academic and judicial blindness is not without precedent. In fact, a compelling example was flowering in Europe just as a still-vigorous Anslinger was selling the MTA to a gullible American Congress in 1937.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 09:46 PM | Comments (0)

December 25, 2010

Long Overdue Change

Harry Anslinger’s sponsorship of the 1937 Marijuana Tax Act set in motion an unplanned (and unwitting) natural experiment the results of which are still neither complete nor final. However, thanks to the remarkable series of events set in motion by California’s Proposition 215 in 1996, the weaknesses of our national drug policy are now so evident to so many people that its radical alteration over the next ten to twenty years is far more likely than its preservation. That said; both the direction and rapidity of those alterations are difficult to predict, precisely because the policy’s ardent defenders (including many who are also its dupes) have done such a good job of selling fear of addiction to their distracted, anxious fellow citizens. In essence, America’s experiment with drug prohibition has been a bipartisan disaster; however because of its support from both major political parties, it has also acquired a degree of veresimilitude sufficient to immunize it against its many failures and thus convince a majority of citizens they had no alternative to continuing the same destructive policy year after year. What has gradually eroded that belief since 1996 has been the revelation of how many ordinary people have continued using “marijuana” despite its considerable social and legal risks and how much benefit it seems to confer on them. Ironically, disagreement within the pro-legalization community over the nature of those benefits is perhaps more of a threat to their political success than the (understandable, but disgraceful) tendency of professionals in the medical and behavioral sciences to adapt their own beliefs and studies to supporting the increasingly disorganized requirements of federal dogma.

Although the Controlled Substances Act (1970) gave the drug war its modern arsenal, its remote federal origins were in the deceptive 1914 Harrison Act, which was then critically modified by passage of the MTA in 1937. It's important to remember that both older pieces of legislation were passed before modern Biochemistry, Pharmacology, or medical imaging had elucidated what are now considered the basics of "neuroscience," thus allowing the timely injection of just enough bias to keep drug war dogma current. It's even more important to note that even as the CSA was being drafted during the first two years of the Nixon Administration, there was no review of the implicit assumptions about "addiction" made in either Harrison or the MTA.

The evidence for that assertion is well documented, but not well known, because our mainstream press, which has always had a soft spot for lurid popular notions of addiction, buried Nixon's rejection of the Shafer Commission report: itself a timid statement of available evidence that should have persuaded more people to question the judgment of one of the biggest liars ever to occupy the Oval Office.

It's my contention that the hardening of those false assumptions about addiction into dogma over a long interval, together with the implicit support of the whole body politic, has had the effect of normalizing them in the minds of otherwise bright people who then looked past the glaring lack of clinical studies on people being labeled "addicts," "junkies," and-finally- "criminals" by whole new professions engaged in treating "patients" (clients) for a living.

Thus a lot of bright people will have to consume an enormous amount of crow before any real change in drug policy can happen. Fortunately the state initiative process has been left alone and if there's any solace to be found in our economic "downturn," it's that Prohibition was trashed early in the "Great Depression."

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 05:38 PM | Comments (0)

December 19, 2010

Yet Another Cannabis Video

Yesterday was busy; among other things, I happened to catch part of a documentary on cannabis that seemed a big improvement on the smarmy Marijuana Inc. that had become so hard to avoid on cable. I thought I was programming my DVR to record it, but I was wrong. That turned out to be a good thing because a Google search led me to a site where it can be watched on demand for nothing. Many of the commentators are people I know; some fondly, others not. Aside from lacking a coherent comment on Mexico, it covers much of current scene in reasonably balanced fashion.

Although the tone is more reasonable than most earlier documentaries, it still pays lip service to the ludicrous extremes... the good news is that it’s generally closer to reality and the overall message is that legalization is inevitable (but don't hold your breath).

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 10:11 PM | Comments (0)

Good News, Bad News

Watching the Brain Series episode on “Addiction” yesterday afternoon was both exhilarating and depressing; exhilarating because it confirmed that cannabis IS being used as a safe and effective, albeit illegal, medicine by a significant segment of the American population. Depressing because it signals that complete national legality may be delayed for years because all use is almost universally opposed by both the Medical and Law Enforcement establishments for reasons that, although profoundly mistaken, seem quite valid to them. Thus barring some sudden and unpredictable insight affecting a substantial minority of the ruling establishment, their opposition is liable to remain as a formidable barrier to a more rational drug policy for some time to come. One consolation is that it seems based on a combination of (understandable) false assumptions and characteristic human weakness rather than any malign “conspiracy.”

Explaining all these conclusions in detail right now would be both impossible and non-productive. Suffice it to say that my clinical findings remain unique because there are still no “pot docs” in a position to query applicants who are seeking the same clinical information and disseminating their results (if there are, I would like to hear from them). That such would be the case fourteen years after California passed Proposition 215 may be the most improbable of many improbable developments in the entire history of state “medical” marijuana laws; however, it is.

I do plan to offer limited explanations of the above conclusions as time, and my energy, permit. The first is that the main reason American drug policy began evolving into a tragedy nearly a century ago was that mistaken Supreme Court beliefs on “addiction” were able to block clinical medical research, thus creating a professional vacuum that has been eagerly filled by Law Enforcement ever since. Thus the research establishment has been busy sponsoring and distorting "research" so its results will comply with the policy's increasingly bizarre and incoherent "party line."

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 07:06 PM | Comments (0)

December 18, 2010

Truth; Unwittingly Revealed.

Dope?

Do you think the Russians allow dope? Hell no. Not if they can catch it. They send them up,

You see, homosexuality, dope, uh, immorality in general: These are the enemies of strong societies.That's why the communists and the left-wingers are pushing it. They're trying to destroy us.

President R.M. Nixon in a taped conversation with aide John Erlichman.

That excerpt from the Nixon tapes can be found in a recent item which also quoted presidential historian Michael Beschloss as saying that important people tend to reveal their true feelings in private conversations. My own experience is that’s also true when influential people are involved in discussions with other influential people they generally agree with. One such venue is Charlie Rose’s Brain Series, in which he conducts interviews of small groups of people with an interest in "neuroscience." Many are academic stalwarts; psychiatrists or others involved in mainstream academic medicine or research. After exploring the site, I settled on a program that aired on April 21, 2010, primarily because of its subject (human emotions) and its participants, one of whom was Nora Volkow.

I've now watched enough (abut half) to realize that the opinions expressed go a long way toward answering a vexing question my own study raised for me very soon after I realized what I was hearing from the the population I began interviewing in late 2001. Parenthetically, my vexation was further intensified by the obvious (but unspoken)disbelief my findings were greeted with by both opponents and supporters of "Medical Marijuana." I now realize that most of the (relatively few) people reading this will probably not be motivated enough to watch he entire one hour discussion emotions, but I plan to watch it all and then discuss it thoroughly because of how well it reveals the fatal error responsible for the American policy disaster that began around the turn of the Twentieth Century and has evolved into a "War on Drugs" in a little less than a hundred years

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 06:28 PM | Comments (0)

December 17, 2010

Faux Science 2

The last entry was intended to set NIDA up for criticism of its extreme bias in support of the drug war. As I was busy with its composition and editing, I had no way of knowing that NIDA Director, Nora Volkow, MD, was herself busy holding a press conference on the evils of "marijuana,” nor that it would be replete with a host of drug war misconceptions begging for rebuttal.

My work has not been publicized like that of Dr. Volkow, for whom propaganda is the most important part of the job at NIDA (she's charged with overseeing drug war “science,” perhaps more accurately thought of as “anti-science” or Faux Science). Although the lack of unfavorable publicity long enjoyed by the drug war may be about to end, the policy’s most ardent defenders would hardly be the first to admit such a dire possibility.

For example, the idea that an increase in youthful marijuana initiation at all three grade levels surveyed by SAMHSA is "fueling" the use of other drugs may well be based on accurate data, but Volkow’s interpretation is almost certainly nonsense- a simple-minded extrapolation of the bogus "gateway" concept embraced so profitably by Robert Du Pont, Gerald Ford's "drug adviser and NIDA's first designated Director. DuPont's predecessor, the first-ever Presidential “drug adviser” was Jerome Jaffe, then a young Jewish psychiatrist (remember how Nixon felt about them?) who was recruited by the Nixon White House staff because they feared (on the basis of secretly screening the urine of Vietnam returnees for opioids) that the nation was about to be inundated with GIs turned heroin junkies.

As it turned out, that didn’t happen, but Jaffe was able to sell a truncated and less-than-ideal-methadone maintenance program to the feds. That he is still active in “substance abuse,” but has switched his focus to alcohol suggests he probably agrees with Volkow that "marijuana" is a "drug of abuse" without either of them knowing that virtually all the long term marijuana users I've interviewed consistently consumed less alcohol once their use of pot had become repetitive. The reasons for that unexpected finding became clear from their aggregated histories: many had been self-medicating with both drugs for a while because both address symptoms of teen insecurity. However the two drugs do so very differently: alcohol diminishes judgment while enhancing aggression and cannabis does just the opposite. Whenever a pot initiate becomes "chronic," alcohol consumption is reduced to safe levels

I would have been content to end there, but two recent news items have added weight to my indictment of Volkov's intellectual honesty: she is the Mexican-born great granddaughter of Leon Trotsky; she was raised in Mexico and went to Medical school there before coming to the US for post gradate training in Psychiatry and Nuclear imaging. She succeeded the assertive Alan Leshner as NIDA Director in 2003. What troubles me is her faithful compliance with drug war dogma which takes no responsibility for the carnage created by the illegal markets it gives rise to. The Mexican Mafia is a US policy curse on the poor people of Mexico; why that simple fact is so blatantly ignored by Volkow and a host of others is a phenomenon I'm frankly unable to understand myself. However, I now see their refusal to address the issue, even when challenged, as as form of both denial intellectual dishonesty.

The second item was related; a massive jailbreak just across the border in Nuevo Laredo does not auger well for either the immediate or intermediate future of both nations. It's now four years since President Calderon began trying to comply with the abysmally stupid Bush-Cheney request that he attempt to "root out" drug dealers on the border.

Just how long will it take both the US and Mexican governments to realize that drug prohibition has been even more deadly than our failed attempt to "control" alcohol? Another way of asking that question is just how stupid are we?

Doctor Tom (Entry revised on 12/18/10)

Posted by tjeffo at 08:54 PM | Comments (0)

December 14, 2010

How Faux Science supports Bad Policy

As the late Barbara Tuchman pointed out in March of Folly (1984), powerful and respected governments sometimes pursued policies that were contrary to their nations’ best interests long after they should have recognized that fact. Although Tuchman was clearly writing as an historian, the psychological implications of her analysis are unmistakable and compelling. Even more to the point, her insights serve to remind us how bitterly our policy in Afghanistan is still divided over the same issues we couldn't agree on four decades ago in Vietnam, another poor nation with a history of resisting foreign domination. Then, as now, we were pursuing the same failing idea: that we could win the "hearts and minds" of a people with entirely different cultural and religious beliefs simply by sending our armed forces over to act as their police.

In a similar vein, the idea that persistence in harmful behavior (as defined by outsiders) is both "addiction," and a "disease" requiring imprisonment is a bizarre notion that has evolved into a core belief of the drug war. Yet drug warriors themselves are clearly unable to that their demand for blind obedience to an oppressive law is tyranny. Have they forgotten how this nation freed itself from England? Or do they think all US laws are equally just, logical, and deserving of obedience?

Such flagrant incongruity in core beliefs was once called cognitive dissonance, however the far Right now seems as bereft of irony as they had always been of humor. Which brings me, by a roundabout way, to my point: the "drug czar" is just as powerless over his policy's enforcement bureaucracy (the DEA) as its "scientific" agency (NIDA) is bereft of scientific credibility; yet neither our mainstream press nor our scientific establishment seems willing to admit those glaring deficiencies.

In other words, because "truth" is whatever the establishment's propaganda organs can bring themselves to admit, any significant changes in a bad policy will require a lot more revision than one might think.

Doctor Tom

Entry revised on 12/18/10

Posted by tjeffo at 04:15 PM | Comments (0)

December 12, 2010

Emotions and Cognition; Belief and Denial

Perhaps the most important lessons to be learned from my ten year study of Californians seeking formal approval of their use of cannabis as “medical” are that humans- the most highly evolved species on Earth- are now in trouble because they (we) have overpopulated our home planet and are prevented by an emotional commitment to deeply contentious beliefs from even recognizing that problem, let alone "solving" it.

Nor will an understanding of how we got into this dilemma come easily; it will require nothing less than an extensive rethinking of several basic ideas about "belief" and "faith" that have been dividing the species for millennia. Yet, because the potential consequences of doing nothing have become so dire (think Nuclear Winter, Global Warming, or Airborne Pandemics) we should start addressing them ASAP.

DENIAL is a pervasive human characteristic that literally allows us to look past those things we don't want to deal with; it has had survival value in the past by allowing "bygones" to become "bygones" despite painful reality ("inconvenient truth"). For that reason alone, getting past our need for denial may turn out to be more difficult than we now imagine.

Recent European history provides a helpful short-cut to further understanding of our population problem: the Enlightenment gave birth to both Science and Democracy, two of the phenomena that have allowed our species to get itself into so much trouble. Thus it behooves us to ask ourselves which of our modern existential threats, overpopulation, nuclear weapons or airborne pandemics, for example; didn't require the assistance of either Scientific Technology or its political homologue, Multiculturalism for their generation.

In a similar vein, both Understanding and Belief are brain functions; although the brain is a vital organ like the liver, kidney and heart, its array of functions is orders of magnitude more complex and its dependence on oxygen much more intense (we start "graying out" after seven seconds without oxygen and are unconscious in 15; brain cells begin to die after three minutes of circulatory arrest).

From an evolutionary perspective, the brain is a triumph: a problem solving machine that has allowed our species to dominate all others in terms of both its global distribution and the habitat it can render viable; we now can live year-round on every continent. We have visited the Moon and the Deep Ocean and can visually explore its extreme depths, even as we await information from a probe sent to "outer" space in 1977.

Paradoxically, what the brain (and thus our species) is now having the most trouble coping with is the very cognitive function that has enabled human dominance. We are threatened by an internal conflict created by the parallel evolution of two of its cortical structures. One, the Amygdala, is older on the evolutionary scale and has been recognized relatively recently as dominant in emotional responses in many species; some as primitive as reptiles. The other, relatively much newer, and obviously essential to both language and critical thinking, is the neocortex.

The concepts just outlined are offered as background for an updated look at the policy known by its supporters as "drug control" and to its detractors as "drug prohibition" or the "War on drugs."

Hopefully, these ideas will be fleshed out in greater detail in the weeks to come.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 07:45 PM | Comments (0)

December 08, 2010

Obama's Capitulation

Although the choice of Obama over McCain in ‘08 should have been a no-brainer for any intelligent electorate, my doubts about the depth of his appreciation of key issues began to emerge as early as January 2009 when his campaign promise on federal pot raids was tested by DEA bureaucrats. From there, he has exhibited a steady decline on all fronts. Thus while the contempt and hatred far-right crazies have for him has become almost palpable, it's now nearly matched by the disappointment of some who had once been his most hopeful supporters.

Yesterday’s performance in a hastily-called press conference intended to explain his sell-out on the insane Bush tax cuts was probably as close as we will come to a decisive moment marking his last chance to become a two-term president. The best hope for liberals would now seem to be that a viable third alternative will emerge between now and 2012.

I feel no need to equivocate on that opinion because my study of pot smoking allows creation of a surprisingly accurate profile of cannabis use as a behavior. Our forty-fourth President is almost an archetype; he is typical of someone who fit the pot-smoker profile but was deterred from self-medicating with it by its well established pejorative effect on any user being “outed.” (Another fitting that description far more tragically was Michael Jackson, whose childhood abuse by his biological father was well known and who died from a benzodiazepine overdose administered to treat his extreme insomnia.)

Barack Obama was born in 1961, near the tail-end of the Baby Boom; he is the only President ever to admit to getting high on marijuana; but so great is the pejorative impact of repetitive use that he would never have become a nominee for the Presidency if he'd ever been a serious “head.”

The characteristics that qualify him as meeting the pot smoker profile are: a) a history of absent or dysfunctional male parenting (he met his biological father only once for two hours during an airport stopover when he was 12). b) biracial origins (the disapproval of both extended families, even when subtle, is almost inevitably felt by the child). c) cigarette addiction (96% of cannabis applicants tried them, two thirds became daily smokers and half are unable to quit completely although all but a few are trying). d) initiation of other drugs (we know Obama has an occasional drink and once tried cocaine; there may well have been others).

What that profile suggests (but does not prove) is that adolescents whose childhood experiences left them uncertain and insecure are prone to try (initiate) drugs, starting around age 12. The agents tried are selected from among those available at that age and repetitive use of any, although a function of several other variables, does fit certain demonstrable patterns. In general, “reefer”, which didn’t become widely available to adolescents until the mid Sixties, soon joined alcohol and cigarettes as one of the three most commonly tried agents; precisely because it treats adolescent uncertainty so much more effectively.

The major hazard of repetitive use is a function of its illegality and the (mindless) social disapproval triggered by any revelation (or credible allegation) that use was chronic.

Obama, like many others, was victimized by his childhood. The big question for me is what would have happened if he hadn’t quit using pot? That’s a moot question that won’t be answered until pot is "legalized" by the dishonest and insecure representatives we keep sending to Congress.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 06:49 PM | Comments (0)

December 05, 2010

Anslinger’s Gift

Harry Anslinger was a relatively uneducated liar who, through a series of improbable events, was given the Federal Bureau of Narcotics to run in 1930 just as the Great Depression was about to plunge the world into a protracted economic debacle that wouldn’t start correcting itself until World War Two became global in 1941 and wouldn't be seen as finally over until it was ended by the nuclear destruction of two Japanese cities in August, 1945.

Although those responsible for guiding and protecting American drug policy since 1970 would clearly prefer to ignore Anslinger, there is no denying his critical role in their policy's evolution: in 1937 his Bureau sponsored the blatantly dishonest “Marijuana” Tax Act, a law based entirely on his “Reefer Madness” myth. Although Anslinger could not have known it at the time, the drug he demonized so effectively would eventually be enthusiastically embraced by the first Baby Boomers to reach adolescence almost thirty years after the MTA and twenty after Hiroshima. Even so, that Boomer discovery of “reefer” changed the world both rapidly and profoundy; thus in a real sense, Harry Anslinger, not the most honorable of men, deserves great credit for the current popularity of cannabis. Given what we now know, it’s nearly impossible to imagine any other scenario by which that might have happened.

As it turns out, seeing the introduction of cannabis as a positive event is still a tall order; however some understanding of the basis for pot’s undeniable appeal to adolescents offers important clues required for an accurate understanding of human behavior. Even though the hour is late, such understanding can still help us mitigate the human and environmental damage we now seem so impatient to bring about.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 06:13 PM | Comments (0)

December 04, 2010

Wikileaks & the Drug War

The latest Wikileaks "dump" generated a firestorm of headlines and opinion, much of which echoes those expressed almost four decades ago following publication of the Pentagon Papers. Although the stimuli for both unauthorized releases of classified information were foolish, expensive, and fundamentally dishonest American wars, the two people most responsible for the exposes could not be more different. The Pentagon Papers were gathered and turned over to major newspapers by Daniel Ellsberg, Harvard Phd (Economics) and ex-Marine officer who had accidentally discovered the illegitimacy of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution while serving as an aid to then Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. His younger counterpart, Julian Assange, the founder and driving force behind Wikileaks, is an Australian career activist who became committed to political causes in his teens and was thus probably searching for an opportunity to be disruptive on behalf of a just cause.

Their methods and tools, also different, primaily reflect their different generations and intervening technical advances. Ellsberg's main tool was a Xerox machine- woefully slow by modern standards- but in 1971 it could amass enough damning evidence to convince the NY Times and other influential Newspapers to publish it. Finally; the enhanced capabilities of modern IT explain the huge volume of the Wikileaks dump, while the Internet it gave rise to also provided Assange with the dedicated coterie of helpers Ellsberg lacked. The sheer volume of the Wikileaks dump also raises its own questions: would it have been better to parcel it out bit by bit to keep other important issues from being overlooked? We simply don't know that answer yet, but I suspect Google will prevent that from happening.

For example, the US is now engaged in another foolish, futile, and expensive war much closer to home than Afghanistan. Among the Wikileaks revelations was a refreshingly frank assessment of the drug war's most recent failure to "control" smuggling, which was grievously exacerbated by Bush & Cheney's pressure on newly elected Mexican President Calderon to use Mexico's Army (and later its Navy) in 2006.

Ironically, one of the best current descriptions of our Mexican debacle appeared in an Australian newspaper, suggesting we are now truly a "global village" in which embarrassing secrets are harder to hide than ever.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 07:50 PM | Comments (0)

November 30, 2010

New "Marijuana" Message: the (gradual) Emergence of Big Pot

Recent publication of a book on the economic strength of "medical" marijuana calls attention to the fact that whether it's characterized as "medical" or "recreational," the criminal market that has been developing under the noses of NIDA and the DEA over the past 40 years is much bigger than anyone realized (or the feds could ever admit). So much so, that the huge national demand for cannabis, reinforced by tragic developments in Mexico since 2006, has become today's most easily understood "message" on "Marijuana." Beyond that, the degree to which we Americans are pretending not to hear that message is assuming the dimensions of a national disgrace.

Leaving aside the pot market's tragic human implications and focusing only on its economic emergence, one can now reasonably compare Big Pot with Big Booze, Big Tobacco, and Big Pharma. Once the validity of that comparison is admitted, it's but a short step to the realization that all are competitors in the treatment of Anxiety, which although not qualifying as a disease, can nevertheless be seen as the modern world's most troublesome symptom.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 10:32 PM | Comments (0)

November 28, 2010

Descent into Chaos

Given the relentless flow of improbably bad news bombarding us through the media and the internet, it’s becoming more and more difficult for me personally to pretend that the contemporary world of humans is even rational, let alone that anyone in a position of “leadership” has a realistic plan for dealing with our most obvious problems. I realize, of course, that this is an entirely personal response, one (obviously) not shared by many. In fact, that’s precisely why I’m so alarmed: it's the manifest lack of interest in the latest news of drug tunnels between Mexico and San Diego, or the horrific atrocities in Juarez, on the same pages chronicling the lavish attention showered on a dim-bulb politician like Sarah Palin and her latest misadventure with the English language, or the juvenile antics of some underage celebrity du jour.

The reason for my angst should be obvious: we now have enough information about our species' past failures to enable prudent leaders to avoid certain obvious pitfalls. What seems lacking is a degree of reality sufficient for both the leadership and the polity to react appropriately. In fact, just the opposite seems to happening: the more serious the problem, the more difficult its recognition seems to become, a phenomenon widely recognized as denial. Nor does having a name for that phenomenon allow us to overcome it; things are now so out of whack that I think it’s fair to say that our species’ most pressing problem has become denial itself; thus our prognosis for recovery from threatened climate change , short of an avoidable catastrophe has become guarded at best.

Of course, if the catastrophe were to be one of the ultra rare natural disasters over which we would have little "control" (say a mega volcano or collision with a comet) it wouldn’t matter at all.

Perhaps that's the best those of us with a stubborn sense of reality can hope for. 2012 anyone? But isn't that notion simply another example of wishful thinking imitating science?

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 06:03 PM | Comments (0)

November 26, 2010

Whither Legalization?

In an interesting coincidence, the same LA Times article cited in the last entry re: Steve Cooley’s concession in the race for state AG contains a link to a chart on changing voter attitudes toward the issue of “legalization;” both currently and over the years since 1969 (the same year the Nixon Administration began drafting its invidious Controlled Substances Act).

One doesn’t have to be a professional pundit to understand that California may well vote to legalize pot two years hence on the sixteenth anniversary of Proposition 215, which will also coincide with the next Presidential Election. Also, given the popularity of “medical” marijuana around the nation, it’s quite likely California will continue in its traditional role as America’s bellwether state, at least on social issues.

Indeed; pot’s chances in 2012 would now have to be rated as better than Obama’s.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 06:58 PM | Comments (0)

November 24, 2010

A Pleasant Surprise and some Interesting Possibilities

The close race between Steve Cooley and Kamala Harris to become California’s next Attorney General ended suddenly when Cooley conceded, well before December 3rd deadline, that Harris had amassed an insurmountable lead.

Depending on how Harris interprets her mandate, the implications could be very significant for arrestees already in the system on charges related to Proposition 215 offenses. One of the anomalies still unresolved by either the California or federal Supreme Courts is the liability people who might be charged by either “sovereign” (because both governments are arguably "sovereign").

Another potential stumbling block is the fact that Proposition 215 has been allowing practices specifically prohibited by a Federal law that could itself easily be interpreted as a violation of the Tenth Amendment.

Federal and State issues aside, if Harris were simply to exercise the AG's responsibility to see that the state's laws are "uniformly enforced," it would be a huge improvement over the chaotic standards in effect since 1996.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 11:23 PM | Comments (0)

November 21, 2010

More Questions

The last entry ended with a rhetorical question: how did our species, the only one capable of both literacy and empirical science, manage to make such a mess of the modern world? Important collateral questions, which in any rational context, should at least be addressed before an attempt is made to fix such problems: is a fix even possible? And is there enough time?

It’s now obvious that my (admittedly limited) study of the clinical pharmacology of marijuana strongly supports the notion that in its natural state, cannabis possesses unique, potent, and generally safe medical properties. It’s also probable those properties could be enhanced considerably in a setting in which pot use were both legal and socially acceptable. The opposite is also clear; until those conditions are met, anyone using cannabis for any reason will risk arbitrary and capricious punishment from police entities at all levels for the simple reason that policing drug use has become a major source of Law Enforcement's institutional influence and financial security.

Because mode of ingestion turns out to be an area of considerable federal inconsistency, it's one that also demonstrates our drug policy's reliance on enforced ignorance and thus also worth considering for that reason alone.

Cannabis wasn’t native to Europe; it was introduced from the Far East in the Nineteenth Century, perhaps much earlier, probably in both its inhaled and edible forms. Just when, and by whom, are not precisely known. Martin Booth, in his exhaustive history does not attempt to pin the dates down exactly, but infers that the inhaled form was usually seen as less desirable, even in Muslim countries; thus when Anslinger attacked inhalation with "reefer madness" propaganda, he was simply following an established pattern. What was new with Anslinger was the idea that "marijuana' somehow represented a foreign threat to American teens.

What's clear is that modern users still recognize major differences in effect based on whether pot is inhaled or eaten, but are not at all clear why that's so. What's also clear is that the existence of those differences should have become clear to NIDA and the DEA long ago because both, like Anslinger, claim expertise on all facets of drug use.

The difference is that we now have, in place of NIDA's repetitive studies of "kids," information provided by applicants of all ages, coherent evidence based on their years of experience. The more such evidence accumulates, the shabbier and more contrived federal doctrine should appear.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 07:37 PM | Comments (0)

Thinking Out Loud

It would be difficult to find much support for the idea that America’s (or the UN’s) drug wars are succeeding. About the best being claimed for either right now is an empty assertion: that the world’s drug problems would somehow be even worse if certain arbitrarily designated agents had not been declared illegal by act of Congress forty years ago. However, closer scrutiny of even that modest claim reveals it to be just as absurd as the notion that any market for products or services desired by enough humans- from commercial sex to nuclear weapons- can ever be “controlled” by declaring them illegal. In fact, the ongoing quests of 3 designated “Axis of Evil” nations for their own nuclear weapons are a telling rebuttal: both North Korea’s and Iran’s efforts can be seen as crude attempts at nuclear blackmail; as was Iraq's before unilateral Israeli aggression canceled it abruptly in 1981 (and set it back enough to obviate any need to overthrow Saddam as part of a rational response to 9/11).

Nor can it be claimed that the current emotionally charged dispute between India and Pakistan over Kashmir has been made safer by nuclear weapons. Ditto North & South Korea; in fact, just the opposite. Finally, who would Israel nuke in response to unequivocal evidence that an extremist Arab weapon exists?

Nor does the current global economic debacle auger well for the immediate future: pessimism and resentment are far more conducive to mindless aggression than is optimism about the economy and the future. That neither modern nations nor their vaunted international agencies, including the UN, are capable of controlling rogue nations like Somalia is just as evident now as it was in Jefferson’s day when the “shores of Tripoli” unwittingly expressed a still-futile American promise to impose its brand of order on unruly populations.

Finally, does anyone doubt there are Muslim Jihadis somewhere whose faith would allow them to deliver a bootleg nuclear device to an infidel target meeting their (personal) criteria of legitimacy?

All of which prompts an obvious question: How did the world’s only cognitive species get itself into such a mess?

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 06:25 PM | Comments (0)

November 14, 2010

California Election Aftermath

Supporters of California’s failed November 2nd initiative to legalize cannabis have three solid reasons to be confident that victory is probably no more than a few years off. All are essentially demographic: the first is that only 237 (3.81%) of the 6207 applicants I gathered data from were born before 1946; in other words, before the Baby Boom. The second is closely related: a majority of the relatively few pre-boomers were between 25 and 35 years of age before "initiating" marijuana (inhaling "reefer” for the first time) whereas their younger colleagues were overwhelmingly in their mid-teens at initiation. Finally: essentially everyone who applied for a “medical” designation was already a chronic user whatever their age; only a handful, five or so, were cannabis naive.

Those rather straightforward findings provide both a solid time-line and firm starting point for evolution of the enormous criminal market for marijuana that exists today; it started growing only after the Baby Boom counterculture began coming of age in the mid-Sixties and quickly penetrated the nation's high schools, where trying marijuana has been a rite of passage comparable to trying alcohol and cigarettes, a pattern that's very unlikely to be changed by more drug war propaganda.

Collateral data supplied by applicants of all ages on their initiations and use of alcohol, cigarettes, and several illegal drugs support an entirely different hypothesis for the patterns of juvenile drug use than the speculations supported by supporters of drug prohibition, who are forced to rely on the less-than-complete Monitoring the Future studies that began(belatedly) in 1975 and thus also lack data from critical earlier years.

Beyond that, the older age at initiation of the pre-boomers in my study suggests that whatever market for “reefer” existed before the mid-Sixties must have been tiny and unsophisticated in comparison to the one that has developed since then. That's a finding that can easily be verified by obtaining year-of-birth data from older applicants already in possession of a physicians' recommendation.

Thus the discovery of “reefer” by Baby Boomers in the mid-Sixties was a signal event, a critical bit of history that has been assiduously ignored by both policy advocates and reformers, each for their own reasons. That reality that should become increasingly obvious as the first Boomers begin aging into Medicare on January 1, 2011.

On a more mundane note, perhaps the most immediately practical election result will be the identity of California's next Attorney General, a contest certain to be go down to the wire, perhaps beyond. If Cooley wins, I'll be surprised if he doesn't interpret a razor thin margin as a mandate for legal harassment and restriction of cannabis distribution outlets (dispensaries) to the extent possible.

One could hardly expect such a rabid Republican to do less.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 06:13 PM | Comments (0)

November 11, 2010

Trial Update

A while back, I reported on a trial in which I’d volunteered to become an expert witness on behalf of a patient I’d first seen in April, 2002 when I was still a novice “pot doc” struggling to understand the new specialty I’d become involved in. My rationale was that over eight years of studying pot use as a behavior and publication of the only medical profile of Proposition 215 applicants should give me some standing to refute what I now regard as the mistaken assumptions still dominating popular discussions of cannabis use.

Yesterday the trial, which began in December, 2009 and stalled almost immediately over the prosecutor's demand for the raw data from an ongoing study (the names, addresses, and personal details of thousands of people seeking to comply with California law).

What it had finally taken for the trial to resume was for me to be represented by my own attorney who could then explain why honoring the prosecutor’s demand would violate the most basic canons of patient confidentiality. Yesterday, the long awaited resumption took place. As expected, there was no hint that the prosecutor had learned a thing about medical marijuana in the past eleven months; he was still intent on sending my patient to prison if at all possible. I could not even tell if he’d ever read the paper based on the data he had demanded, but my best guess is that he hadn’t.

The trial will resume sometime in January (marking the fourth calendar year since the patient's arrest). All indications are that my patient will be found not guilty by the judge, but that’s still not certain. What was confirmed for me is that our modern age is woefully in need of an overhaul; we humans are trapped within a system that's out of control because the most basic beliefs underpinning our behavior are still in dispute: was the universe created by a humanoid intelligence or did it simply evolve by complex mechanisms we are just beginning to understand?

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 05:18 PM | Comments (0)

November 04, 2010

Late, Hopeful News on Cooley vs Harris

As I suspected this morning, the election outcome that will be most important to cannabis users in California won’t be Prop 19; it will be who wins the race for Attorney General. Ironically, shades of 2000, it’s already being predicted that the outcome may remain in doubt “for weeks.”

Let’s hope the US Supreme Court doesn’t become involved...

For what it's worth, I suspect that the relatively unknown Harris' unexpected "strength" came from late publicity emphasizing Cooley's hostility to medical marijuana and his desire to shut down LA dispensaries.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 12:36 AM | Comments (0)

November 03, 2010

Election Results

Although I voted for it, I was neither surprised nor disappointed by Proposition 19’s relatively narrow defeat yesterday; in fact, I rather expected it based mostly on the tone of recent American political commentary and the antics of the US electorate over the past several weeks. Another factor was the frankly disappointing performance of our rookie chief executive whose rhetorical skills clearly outshine his ability to lead. If he wants to be a two-term president, he will have to hope for either a GOP error like the one that saved Bill Clinton in ‘95 or find a way to quickly demonstrate leadership skills similar to those exhibited by Truman throughout his entire presidency.

Back to Cannabis and California: the most critical election result yet to be resolved is Attorney General and the stakes are huge: Steve Cooley is an almost-fascist throwback to ex-California AG Dan Lungren. He declared war on LA’s cannabis “dispensaries” long ago. In contrast, his opponent is San Francisco DA Kamala Harris, whose attitude toward pot use seems nearly as confused as Obama’s.

Talk about deja vu; it's the lesser of two evils... all over again.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 05:42 PM | Comments (0)

October 31, 2010

Control of Science by Politicians

Even though Geology, Archeology, and Paleontology, can now provide Anthropologists with the context required for an understanding of humanity’s place, both in History and the Cosmos, our species still faces daunting challenges. The most pressing of all are obviously related either directly or indirectly to Science: its unending cornucopia of modern technology, our outmoded religious beliefs, and our unchecked population growth are all in conflict. Unfortunately, many humans can’t agree and we may be running out of solutions that could minimize environmental damage and reduce human suffering

One way of framing the issue may be to point out that empirical Science itself does not appear to have been a divinely preordained phenomenon, which was probably why the leading religious authority of Galileo’s era found it necessary to brand him a heretic and place him under house arrest. The same conflict is still in evidence: the most useful scientific theories often seemed completely improbable when first introduced. Over time, however, those that have endured not only offered better explanations of known phenomena when first proposed, and were also validated by later discoveries. For example, Darwin could not have anticipated the double helix postulated by Watson, Crick (and Franklin) in 1953; however, the molecular structure of DNA is the optimal mechanism for explaining the Evolution he first intuited in 1832 and subsequently fleshed out by 1959. When combined with Continental Drift, (derided in 1903 when Wegener suggested it but later confirmed by undersea discoveries in the Sixties). CD also helps explain how humans have adapted to weather cycles, how those cycles may have impelled our early hominid ancestors to leave Africa, and the dangers implicit in our current appetite for fossil fuels.

Perhaps the most important revelation of my nine year ad hoc study of cannabis users relates to human behavior under stress and the fact that of all Medical specialties, Psychiatry is the only one bereft of an objective nosology: we are still clearly struggling with the mind-body duality that has puzzled human thought from well before Plato and well beyond Descartes. One step that might help is recognition of the damage done by false assumptions, especially when codified by authoritarian regimes that force Scientists to shill for their pet theories; In that sense, Nazi racial doctrine, Communist ideology, and America's drug war are brothers under the same skin.

In that context, he results of next Tuesday’s election, both in California and in the nation, take on considerable significance.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 07:32 PM | Comments (0)

October 27, 2010

The More Things Change...

Today’s San Francisco Chronicle contained two silly items confirming what I’ve either known or strongly suspected about the vacuous drug war “debate” for several years: first, that rather than a real debate, it’s been a cacophony of monologues, none of which make much sense or approach problematic drug use with anything like systematic clinical analysis. In that sense, it echoes the futile exchanges before Proposition 215 passed fourteen years ago. That observation doesn’t mean that I expect Proposition 19 will win; it’s still a toss-up and the outcome could be decided by something as peripheral as election day weather or voter reaction to events occurring right up to November Second. If it loses, I think the margin will be small and the duration of further illegality short-lived: one or two election cycles, at most.

The first silly item was the Chronicle’s own editorial re-iterating its opposition to the initiative and adding the same reasons as Professor Kleiman and his Rand cronies: that the feds simply won’t tolerate legal marijuana; they will crack down as Holder just promised. What that argument loses sight of is that federal doctrine on marijuana hasn’t changed in the forty years since the the CSA was passed by the NIxon Administration; it simply hasn't worked, as demonstrated by the strength of the medical gray market. All illegal drug markets for Schedule one agents have continued to thrive (except for psychedelics which aren't used repetitively for long intervals).

That long term user loyalty to cannabis (often for decades) is unique among "drugs of abuse." It suggests that pot's medical benefits haven't been fully recognized and that "recreational" use may simply be an assumed default for the ignorant.

I've mentioned the main reason for feds’ perennial failures before: it's the same as Prohibition: the law itself creates irresistably lucrative illegal markets. Also, inhaled cannabis is a far more complex and effective therapeutic agent than any others; because it palliates such a wide variety of severe symptoms so effectively, the feds have never (and still don't) understand why discouraging its use by adolescents became essentially impossible for them once markets had developed in most high schools (probably by the early Seventies).

Ironically, that same weakness is replicated by the current initiative's exclusion of users under 21, which is one reason the response to Prop 19's fate could be so revealing: if it passes, would law enforcement come down even more heavily on youthful use than it does now? If so, would such a highly visible focus on youth create its own backlash?

Beyond that, it has become obvious to me that there has been a general failure by nearly all interested parties to understand that “reefer's” appeal to youth in the Sixties depended on the fact that cannabis, when smoked, is an easily controlled and short-acting anxiolytic, while more traditional "edibles" were (and still are) far longer acting and more difficult to titrate. These obvious clinical differences (and others) have yet to be even recognized, let alone studied; either in humans, or in laboratory animals.

Finally, cannabis can be grown year round, indoors and out, in all parts of the country; thus rendering interruption of its domestic supply unlikely and further highlighting the enormous (and still increasing) demand for the generally low-grade Mexican product being smuggled across our 2000 mile Southern border.

The second silly item in the Chronicle was a report of the million dollar gift by billionaire George Soros to the war chest of Proposition 215. I consider it silly only because it demonstrates how little he and Ethan Nadelmann have learned since 1996. In fact their rhetoric is little changed from that of the late William F. Buckley Jr. in 1995: "drugs" are “bad,” but laws making them illegal don't work and may do more harm than good. Duh.

We should know the fate of the new proposition by November 3. The federal response will be interesting no matter what happens; but don’t look for any change in pot’s now-overwhelming popularity (however the motivation for its use may be categorized).

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 08:16 PM | Comments (0)

October 25, 2010

Rand Corporation: not exactly neutral on Proposition 19

Almost exactly a year ago, in a an entry predating the Proposition 19’s qualification for the ballot, I criticized a specific group of academics for their unfailing, albeit tacit, support of the drug war. A more recent entry, emphasizing both the drug war’s (and our species’) habitual dishonesty pointed out how dishonest "expertise" can be translated into support: by appearing to take a dishonest and chronically failing policy seriously, "reputable" academics automatically diminish the most telling criticisms that might be leveled against the policy in question while also shifting the burden to those who who oppose it. Beyond that, critics of drug policy can be (and often are) accused of supporting use of “drugs of abuse” by "kids," especially by federal agencies paid to support the policy.

Sure enough, in the the run-up to November 2, in which Proposition 19 has emerged as the issue commanding the most voter interest but the fewest advertising dollars, the original gang of four, together with a newcomer, has been hard at work in their usual vein. Typically, they are also being fronted by the same think tank where I first encountered the genre in 1995: Santa Monica’s Rand Corporation, a major recipient of federal dollars.

A telling example of how Rand researchers manage to make conflicting statements is revealed by comparing two recent publications on Prop 19: in a paper published in July the Rand group suggested that passage of the initiative could dramatically lower the price of marijuana while increasing consumption. In the press release accompanying publication, they were quoted as estimating a ten-fold reduction in the price per ounce.

We didn't have long to wait for the inevitable switcheroo: another paper published by the same group in October opines that even if Proposition 215 were to pass, it wouldn't have much impact on the activities of the Mexican drug cartels now engaged in a bloody turf battle over lucrative smuggling corridors into the United States. They also estimated (in the press release) that the revenue estimated to accrue to cartels from marijuana smuggling is actually far less than has been estimated without citing any basis for that estimate. In essence, the Rand researchers were contradicting themselves without appearing to do so.

Of course, both papers cite the notorious uncertainty of any estimates about supply or demand related to illegal markets without ever acknowledging that the policy they have consistently supported is responsible for both the markets and the crime they generate.

These academic shills for the drug war have a share of responsibility for the totally corrupt policy they support so deviously and consistently. Never in their "research" have they ever bothered to ask the most pertinent questions about "marijuana" as an illegal product: just when did its popularity with adolescents begin? (it was the mid-Sixties). Also: why was that popularity delayed for thirty years? Finally: why has marijuana, of all drugs of abuse, retained such customer loyalty throughout the four decades since Nixon?

One would have thought that such basic questions would have long since occurred to recognized "experts" with advanced degrees in public policy. Didn't science begin only after Galileo had enough data to question the Catholic Church's time-honored (but false) assumption about Earth's relation to the Sun?

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 02:00 AM | Comments (0)

October 23, 2010

Credibility: the Central Mystery of the Drug War

The aspect of American drug policy that always intrigued me, even before I knew much of its details, was its ability to retain credibility in the face of two glaring handicaps; both of which have also become progressively more obvious since I began studying it seriously in 1995. One is the clinical absurdity of its uninformed doctrine on addiction (I soon learned US addiction dogma is rooted in the assumptions underpinning a cluster of narrow pre-1920 Supreme Court decisions). The other handicap has been the perennial failure of our (and the world's) drug prohibition bureaucracy to come close to policy goals throughout their lifespans. That those failures were qualitatively identical to those of American alcohol Prohibition between 1920 and 1933 is just as obvious as our federal bureaucracy's treatment of them with far greater denial than curiosity. Ditto the grotesque failures of our stubborn attempts to apply the techniques of alcohol Prohibition to "drugs" between 1920 and 2010.

An inescapable conclusion, ironically facilitated by the scope of the failures themselves, is that denial, hypocrisy, and self-deception are far more deeply embedded in "human nature" than we have heretofore wanted to admit. In fact, our species' biggest single problem may be its own dishonesty

Worse, that characteristic appears finally to have exposed us to real dangers, some of which had always existed, but couldn't have been recognized until we'd discovered empirical Science. Ominously, some others: rapid climate change and the threat of human overpopulation for two, are also largely dependent on human activity, but still denied by a majority of living humans.

Worse, they (and their dangers) are compounded by the extreme disagreement extant at the level of human political leadership, clearly more responsive to emotions than to logic.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 08:47 PM | Comments (0)

October 17, 2010

Straws in the Prop 19 Wind

Almost a year ago I reported on my attempt to qualify as a (pro-bono) expert on behalf of a former patient, one well known to me and whose history had been among those suggesting that a systematic study of pot applicants might be useful. As noted, the prosecutor had demanded all my raw data from that study less than an hour into my testimony and the trial judge, despite a reputation for being “reasonable,” has been taking the request seriously ever since.

Now, over eight months later, the issue remains unresolved despite several additional court appearances during which not one more word of testimony has been heard. I now have since been fortunate enough to be assisted by my own (pro-bono) attorney; he has introduced a statement on my behalf stating why I believe the prosecution’s request should not be granted. Meanwhile, the patient is still on trial facing a possible prison sentence, albeit free on OR and collecting a pension from a neighboring county. He is also allowed to smoke marijuana medically, thanks to a court order from the same trial judge. I still have no way of knowing whether the judge or prosecutor have even read the peer-reviewed paper reporting the data at issue; nor can I ask because I can't address the Court until recognized as a witness.

Such is the logic of “Justice” in a state unable to pay its rank and file employees.

The most recent notice came from the defendant's lawyer: the trial will resume on November 10th, eight days after Californians will vote on a "legalization" initiative that is both badly crafted and poorly understood; both deficiencies reflecting the damage done to truth by nearly a century of contemptibly stupid drug policy exacerbated by forty years of drug "war."

As important as the vote itself will be how its results are interpreted. If Proposition 19 passes, will that focus California's enforcement bureaucracy on users under 21? Will the state's cases against my patient and other Proposition 215 defendants be dropped? How will the Obama Administration respond to such decisive rejection of a failing policy by the nation's most influential state?

One recent straw in the wind was Friday’s raid by local police on a Santa Clara dispensary. Ironically, it was justified because of (alleged) "profits" in the world's leading champion of capitalism. What I also suspect is that those profits are often simply confiscated by police without any public accounting.

Other straws were warnings from both the Drug Czar and the Attorney General that the feds will not tolerate "recreational" use, a position that implicitly concedes that medical use exists, even though explicitly denied by present law: the key disagreement that led to Proposition 215 in 1996.

Even if "legalization" fails in this election cycle, Baby Boom demographics (apparently still unknown to most federal policy supporters) auger well for an eventual end to the drug war as more pot-smoking Boomers age into Medicare eligibility every year after 2011.

Finally; that all three federal branches will stubbornly defend their failing policy ad absurdum was further emphasized when the "liberal" Ninth Circuit dismissed ASA's 2007 suit as "premature." Go figure.

Doctor Tom

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

October 06, 2010

False Assumptions from Academia

As November 2nd approaches, more state-wide curiosity about the fate of California’s marijuana “legalization” initiative (Proposition 19) has been evident than when Proposition 215 was on the ballot in 1996. Even the Los Angeles Times, which had taken little note of 215; either before the 1996 election or while LA's local "medical" industry was evolving in the first several years after it passed, is displaying considerable interest in this year’s initiative.

Unfortunately, as is often the case when the subject is “marijuana,” intelligent appraisals are hard to find for the simple reason that our nation’s power structure is still strongly biased in favor of the war on drugs. Two recent opinion pieces were published by the Times , each was authored by a concerned faculty member from a local university. Predictably hostile to the initiative, they serve as good illustrations of how vested interests and wishful thinking can combine to induce well-educated people to support bad policy.

The first, authored by Mark Kleiman of UCLA in July, predicts that even were Proposition 19 to pass, it would be resisted so effectively by the federal government as to have little effect. He supports that opinion with another completely unproven (but widely shared) assumption: that there are easily determined differences between the “recreational” and “medical” uses of marijuana. It was the same idea that inspired NORML to petition the DEA to reschedule as far back as 1972.

As it turned out, that idea didn't gain much credibility until 1988, when conservative Administrative Law Judge Francis Young issued his widely quoted ruling. Although summarily overruled by his administrative superior, that same idea, after maturing for several more years, would eventually evolve into Proposition 215. Ironically, Doctor Kleiman himself would play an important role in that process.

In my opinion, Kleiman should take more heed of historical reality: although the the Prohibition Amendment never lost its support in Congress, it was Repealed by another Amendment because the nation was broke. Given our current economic debacle, it's not that unlikely that the same thinking might prevail.

The second opinion piece was more recent.

Written by a specialist in "Addiction Medicine" whose bias in favor of the drug war is even more transparent than Kleiman's, it parrots, albeit in milder terms, many of the standard, never-proven DEA assumptions about the dangers of inhaled cannabis. That "Addiction" has never been satisfactorily defined, and that neither he nor the DEA even recognize a significant difference between cannabis when eaten and when it's inhaled tells me all I need to know about the validity of his (their) opinions.

My own opinion on Proposition 19 is that although its wording is flawed for the same reasons as Proposition 215's, it's also a big step in the right direction because it will force more people to ask why this "drug of abuse" has remained so popular since it was first discovered by "kids" in the Sixties.

Perhaps the most important lesson taught by Science is that until erroneous assumptions can be questioned, ignorance will prevail.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 12:38 AM | Comments (0)

October 03, 2010

Suicide, Cognition, and Political Beliefs

The last entry focused on historical events around VJ day as examples of human behavior that could shed light on contemporary global problems. That humans are a single species with common problems (and a history of repeating the same mistakes) is a theme recently developed by polymath/historian Jared Diamond. My own experience certainly agrees with his point that rapidly evolving technology may seduce us into seeing old problems as unique, and thus amenable to new high-tech solutions. Over the long haul, history seems to depend more on critical decisions about allocation of whatever limited resources humans considered essential at a particular time. An important corollary is that those resources might have varied considerably from one era to another: salt and fresh water were critical to the Roman Empire, while there is no immediate substitute for petroleum in our energy-starved world. Also, recent food riots in Asia were an unexpected response to diversion of American corn into ethanol production.

History has also shown that when serious mismatches develop, affected civilizations may become threatened with a phenomenon Diamond has termed a “collapse,” also that collapses can occur with startling rapidity. In that respect, our modern danger may be unique in only one critical respect: our numbers may have reached an environmental tipping point predisposing to global collapse from which recovery could be historically slow and uncertain.

Suicide is a uniquely human behavior that has always been controversial, but remains surprisingly common. Although variously classified as either mental illness or a sin in Western cultures, it has been praised as valid protest by Buddhists, legitimate defense by others or as valid religious expression by Islamic militants.

The use of piloted aircraft, first by Kamikazes in World War Two, and later the 9/11 hijackers, "weaponized" suicide and greatly expanded the number of potential casualties. In fact, the most significant addition to that combination would be a nuclear weapon, which is what prompted this line of thought.

The first, and only use of nuclear weapons in war was by the United States. 10 days after a vaguely worded warning issued as part of the Potsdam Declaration on July 26, 1945, the city of Hiroshima was nearly destroyed by a single uranium bomb to encourage the Japanese government to accept "unconditional surrender." After three days of silence from Japan, Nagasaki was attacked on August 9th with a plutonium bomb.

The two attacks succeeded in ways that could not have been anticipated precisely because they were, like the atomic weapons themselves, completely unprecedented. Then another unprecedented event took place: for the first time since Japan began its campaign of military aggression by invading Manchuria in 1931, Emperor Hirohito (Showa) intervened personally to overrule his divided military advisers by surrendering. The result was far more than mere surrender; because of his god-like status as Emperor, a civilian population that had been ready to resist invasion to the death surrendered meekly and cooperated with the American Occupation because he had told them to. That cooperation was sustained through four years of extreme economic privation and extended to acceptance of Douglas MacArthur's one-man rule and his imposition of a Constitution renouncing war.

Ironically, it would be a war on the Korean peninsula would jump-start Japan's delayed economic recovery in 1950. Equally ironically, it was made possible by Truman's decision (fiercely disputed by some Republicans) to resist the invasion of South Korea by Soviet puppet Kim Il Sung. Finally, the current modern dilemma posed by nuclear arms on the Korean Peninsula are all products of several unpredictable decisions made under duress by specific (and very fallible) humans in the last month of World War Two and in June 1950.

The next entry will explain the relationship between this historical analysis and my nine year study of cannabis applicants.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 06:45 PM | Comments (0)

October 01, 2010

Cognition, Hirohito, Suicide, & Nuclear Winter

There can be little doubt the physical and psychological injuries humans inflicted on each other in the course of two World Wars between August 1914 and August 1945 shaped the Twentieth Century to a critical degree. However, contrary to what one might logically assume, the millions of deaths caused by those conflicts did not curb growth of the human population. Quite the contrary; as we now know, the number of humans living on Earth increased spectacularly: from approximately 1.5 billion in 1900 to about four times that many by 2000. Thus far In the new millennium (which, contrary to popular belief began in 2001) we have probably added another 600 million or so and are still believed to be on track to reach nine billion by mid-century.

There are several reasons why the World Wars that blighted the early Twentieth Century didn’t curb human population growth as one might have intuitively assumed. One is that the Industrial Revolution, enabled by the discovery of empirical Science, remained in full swing- especially in the nations that did most of the fighting- while much of the population growth took place in relatively undeveloped nations where enhanced sanitation, transportation, and food production- often developed as part of support for the war effort- were increasing both human numbers and life expectancy.

However, the most important reason population growth continued unchecked may be what didn’t happen in the aftermath of world War Two: the Cold War that began almost immediately between the victors persisted for almost fifty years and ended without becoming a nuclear war, thus contradicting two well established historical patterns. One was that the dominant rivals in particular areas (Athens and Sparta, Rome and Carthage, France and England, for example) usually become directly engaged in a series of wars until a clear victor emerges. The US and its allies, as opposed by the Soviet bloc, clearly qualified as dominant rivals after World War Two.

Another tendency was for new weapons technology produced in one war to be used at the first opportunity. While the Cold War did spawn several proxy wars starting with Korea in 1950, the United States and the Soviet Union each managed to avoid any hostile use of nuclear weapons for its duration; even as both actively pursued nuclear programs that produced enough warheads to destroy the world several times over.

Finally, it's generally agreed that the 1962 Cuban Missile crisis, which took place long before Nuclear Winter had even been hypothesized, was the closest the world came to a hostile nuclear exchange. Thus neither Kennedy nor Kruschev, the principals solely responsible for the compromise that avoided nuclear war, could not have known what they were avoiding, a circumstance that begs the question of what did deter them. The most logical answer would seem to be that it was their memories of Hiroshima.

To explore that premise in some detail it's necessary to remember that World War Two ended abruptly in 1945 only after the United States' unannounced use of nuclear weapons that destroyed the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6th and August 9th, respectively. Although (as with most such unique historical events) there is still not universal agreement on all details, there is good reason to believe that the unprecedented use of atomic weapons shortened the war significantly; which was also the stated intent of President Harry Truman. There is also little doubt that another unprecedented event, the surrender broadcast by Emperor Hirohito on August 15 announcing acceptance of the Potsdam Declaration obviated what had been anticipated as die-hard resistance by the Japanese people to any invasion of their home islands. In fact, the ritual Banzai Charges by Japanese garrisons on Pacific Islands overrun as Americans were tightening the noose around Japan after the Battle of Midway gave credence to that belief, as did the formal use of Kamikazes by the military in the latter stages of the war.

NEXT: Suicide, cognition, and political beliefs.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 06:17 PM | Comments (0)

September 23, 2010

When Silence can be Deafening

The rapid approach of November 2, together with the unanimous opposition of federal officials to all state legislation allowing medical cannabis (“medical marijuana”), has led me to wonder when President Obama will finally break his personal silence on California's Proposition 19.

My own position is clear. Even before I began taking medical histories from applicants seeking a physician’s recommendation as allowed by Proposition 215 in 1996, I would have favored “legalization” simply because of the abysmal failure of all attempts at prohibition; whether China's during the 18th Century or those of the the US and the UN in the 20th. In fact I consider the enduring support of drug prohibition policy by all administrations since Repeal passed in 1933 to be a mystery; also the continuous endorsement of our policy by UN treaty since 1970 as solid evidence that our species has more trouble with deductive logic than we care to admit.

In any event, there is now little doubt that history has conspired to place our first nominally black chief executive in a position that is both ironic and improbable. Not only is he the first to be seen as “black” (as opposed to biracial) he is also the first American President ever to admit trying illegal drugs, (inevitably called "drugs of abuse" by every administration since Nixon).

One of several things I've learned from studying the ingestion cannabis as a repetitive behavior, is that the effects of edibles are so different from the inhaled form that the two are almost entirely different (albeit similar) drug experiences. In fact, the differences can be so pronounced it’s even possible Bill Clinton’s claim to have not inhaled was true; beyond that, if he’d tried an edible first, it could well have been a negative (dsyphoric) experience.

What makes it all the more interesting for me is that while I've been learning about cannabis from simply taking histories from admitted pot users for almost nine years, no other physicians have tried to replicate that experience; or if they have, they haven't reported their results. Without doubt, waiting for confirmation has made me impatient, which is probably why I'm so mindful of Obama's silence.

I'm also impatient to see who will be the first to ask him the long avoided question, which wing of American Journalism will ask it, how he will answer, and how his answers will be parsed by the same pundits who have been supporting our destructive national policy for so long.

It promises to be an interesting several weeks; perhaps well beyond November.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 07:51 PM | Comments (0)

September 16, 2010

A Growing Crescendo on Proposition 19

The rapid approach of November 2nd, when Californians will have a chance to vote on an admittedly imperfect "marijuana" legalization initiative is finally provoking a spate of opinions; some predictable, and others quite surprising, on whether legal cannabis would be a good idea.

Given that the San Francisco Chronicle, albeit under different ownership, had been reporting on Proposition 215 since well before the ‘96 election, one would expect them to have a well-grounded recommendation, but such is not the case. Although conceding that cannabis prohibition has been an abject failure and the past 14 years have revealed a surprising level of public support for “medical" marijuana, they failed to ask themselves (or their readers) just what that support was based on. Instead, they wring their hands over imperfections in the the initiative's wording without any realization that it, like Proposition 215, can only be a beginning and not a definitive solution. The editors thus recommend a "no" vote.

Don’t they realize that defeat would simply delay the inevitable and encourage the arrest and prosecution of more pot users? What evidence can they cite that either of the two federal laws banning “marijuana” were well written or supported by studies that would pass muster as even remotely “scientific?” There is none.

On the facing page, the Chronicle carried a dissenting opinion; one more representative of the victims of the federal policy its editors are so anxious to placate. A different take,exemplifies the type of analysis any controversial “war” should be subjected to before being carelessly endorsed by the media was written by the irrepressible Michael Moore and appeared in yesterday’s Reader Supported News.

Moore Yes,! NAACP, Yes! Chronicle editors, NO!

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 06:39 PM | Comments (0)

September 11, 2010

An Aging Global Infrastructure & Human Numbers

The explosion of a thirty inch gas main that devastated an entire neighborhood in the quiet San Francisco suburb of San Bruno two nights ago and the spectacular collapse of an important bridge across the Mississippi River on August 1, 2007 had a lot in common: each represented the sudden catastrophic failure of a modern structure that had functioned without incident for decades and long been taken for granted. Both happened early on a Summer evening as people were heading home for dinner, and both could easily have been much worse in terms of the number of lives lost.

From my perspective however, none of those considerations begins to express the significance of the two events, which is the degree to which our species has overpopulated its home planet and is now racing headlong towards its ultimate destruction. Because I’ve sounded that alarm on this blog so often in the past with so little noticeable effect, I’m under no illusion that this time will be any different; however, I still find it difficult to resist pointing out the obvious, particularly in a setting in which the whole world seems so intent on its denial.

To advance the original comparison just a bit further; each structure had, in its own way, remained out of sight while carrying out functions that had become increasingly critical to the growing populations they served. Such failures, no longer rare, are inevitably followed by investigations, finger pointing, and attempts to assign blame and compensate victims, none of which can ever be entirely satisfactory. In some cases, a valuable lesson may be learned and incorporated into future planning. However, the problem of population growth is almost never mentioned, particularly in poorer nations which often have the largest vulnerable populations and the least disposable wealth.

That we now may be entering a prolonged deflationary period (Depression) can only make matters worse.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 05:50 PM | Comments (0)

September 02, 2010

Mexico: What to Believe?

As someone who lived in pre-drug war El Paso between 1958 to 1963, I have great difficulty adjusting to the virtual tsunami of information about drug trafficking, murder, and corruption that has been emanating from Juarez since I began following the drug war in earnest in 1995. Not only have the numbers of alleged drug-related killings increased dramatically, so has the savage and brazen manner in which they are being carried out; to say nothing of the fact that pitched battles between government forces and narcotrafficantes are being fought deep in the interior.

Even given their dramatic progression from levels reported as recently as 1995, there is general agreement that after newly elected President Felipe Calderon dutifully attempted to accommodate a Bush-Cheney call for a crack down on drug smuggling in 2006, things have become even worse: more savagery, more killings, and more disturbing evidence the Mexican government is losing control.

Even against that background, President Calderon is still claiming progress in Mexico's version of the drug war, based on the most recent arrest of another notorious drug lord. How long can such blindness persist without provoking a catastrophic failure of government South of the Border? More to the point: how might such a failure affect us?

And isn't this very reminiscent of our "successes" against the cocaine cartels and Pablo Escobar in the Eighties, to say nothing of claims made on behalf of body counts and the "light at the end of the tunnel" in an earlier war?

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 06:01 PM | Comments (0)

August 31, 2010

Pot Prohibition: a complete history...

Tom Meyer, cartoonist, is one of the SF Chronicle's real treasures. His latest Sunday effort neatly summarizes the war on marijuana ...

Posted by tjeffo at 08:15 PM | Comments (0)

The Importance of Demographics

My decision to accept the invitation of an Oakland cannabis “club” owner to do the required medical screening of people seeking a “recommendation” to use cannabis (and thus qualify as his customers) in compliance with Proposition 215 was motivated mostly by curiosity. I already had a strong belief that US marijuana policy was terribly misguided and harbored the naive conviction it could be “reformed” on the basis of logical arguments once the dimensions of its failure were understood by enough people. But I had no specific plan for how to bring that about.

Even worse, I had no idea of how seriously that judgment understated our government's commitment to its self-induced drug problem or how daunting the idea of changing our drug policy might become.

In any event, it took a few months before I saw the required patient encounters as the opportunity for a unique study of illegal marijuana use. Even then, the task of designing such a controversial project on the fly while continuing to record data took more time than projected. Thus it wasn’t until early 2007, when I was analyzing data from the first four thousand applicants that I tumbled to the significance of their demographics, specifically their dates of birth.

The item itself was simple and straightforward, but its significance is profound and far reaching: only four percent of the first four thousand applicants seen were born before 1946. By default, the rest were all Baby Boomers or Post Boomers.

To fast forward: what that suggests to me at least, that our federal government has missed the significance of the youthful rebellion that suddenly became manifest in the mid-Sixties. Thus rather than attempting to understand and adapt to one of the the most important social developments of the Twentieth Century, America has remained committed to suppressing it with an amalgam of ad-hoc propaganda and repressive law enforcement; with tragic consequences.

The significance and complex ramifications of that hypothesis will be explored in future posts.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 06:56 PM | Comments (0)

August 28, 2010

How Quickly we (Pretend) to Forget

Back in January, I wrote: “Not only has the past been prologue, its cognitive errors and false assumptions have shaped the present in ways that were not- and probably could not could not have been- anticipated by our ancestors.” Even then, I didn’t realize how quickly Mexico would descend into chaos, how steep the descent would be, or how aptly it would make my point. Still unknown is the degree to which the critical implications of present reality would/will be lost on the American polity and its government.

Simply put, how long can we pretend that the chaos in Mexico is not a consequence of drug war folly? Do we really believe that our government’s rigorous preference for the ridiculous euphemism of “drug control” over the more accurate term of “drug prohibition” will hide the fact that the creation of violent criminal markets is an inevitable consequence of prohibition policies, no matter how they are named?

How quickly we seem to have forgotten it was Operation Intercept, Nixon’s unilateral imposition of drug prohibition on Mexico and the US, that initiated the folly that's blossomed into today’s carnage.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 04:34 PM | Comments (0)

August 15, 2010

Giant Steps Backward

Today is one of those days that’s tough on optimists.

The lead story in today’s NYT confirms my worst fears about the direction being taken by the Obama Administration: now well into its second year, it seems more deeply committed to failed policies; not just of their immediate predecessors, but also of the first Nixon Administration, which launched our disastrous war on drugs right after starting secret wars in Laos and Cambodia trying to salvage “victory” in Vietnam (or at least avoid the onus of “losing").

The reasons for their failures are as old as history: foreign invaders are resented by every population, especially if they are culturally different and their duties include killing the people they claim to be protecting. “Victory” in Afghanistan became even more elusive when killings by drone aircraft became a form of extra-judicial murder and it had to be admitted that some had been misdirected against innocent civilians.

Closer to home, the administration's support of Mexican President Calderon’s escalation of the drug war against Mexico’s cartels is more of the same; its outrageous death toll is ample evidence that it won’t succeed.

Finally; that marijuana is both the principal target of border interdiction and better palliation than the Pharmaceutical industry can offer for our distracted society's most common mood disorders is either tragic or ironic, depending on one's point of View.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 06:36 PM | Comments (0)

August 12, 2010

Response to the Wikileaks Release as a Litmus Test

President Obama’s immediate response to the Wikileaks release of classified reports from Afghanistan betrayed a troubling misunderstanding of events in that part of the world; even worse, a commitment to the same old beliefs that led us into the 9/11 debacle in the first place.

It’s also difficult for me to understand why the parallel between the Wikileaks event and the Pentagon Papers released by Daniel Ellsberg to the New York Times in 1971 has been missed by so many supposedly well informed observers (but not by all). While the two wars were undertaken for quite different reasons, they also share critical characteristics that would predispose them to failure.

Both were based on dishonest pretexts. Although the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution was based on an outright lie, our entry into Afghanistan might arguably have been plausible as an effort to capture Bin Laden after the crime of 9/11, but that's not how it transpired. We eased up on our efforts to capture Bin Laden in December 2001 and then waited 15 months before invading Iraq on a new pretext. By that time, Bin Laden was inaccessible, an even greater threat to peace, and the situation in both countries even worse. That the current economic debacle may have been triggered by those two wars will be debated by future historians, but the first two international Depressions to afflict the Industrial Revolution were also preceded by wars and triggered by bank failures in Europe and North America.

Beyond that, military history back to Alexander confirms that Afghanistan has successfully resisted efforts at "control" by great powers, particularly when made by armies with different cultures.

These aren't complex issues. They deserve more open discussion and coherent answers in a troubled world.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 05:18 PM | Comments (0)

August 10, 2010

More of the Same; but with a Twist

There are apparently no limits to the absurdities possible on the Mexican border; nor is there much evidence that either the US or Mexico is capable of learning from past mistakes in their historically futile efforts to “control” drug smuggling. Those efforts began with Nixon’s attempt to interdict marijuana in 1969 and have continued unabated. Over that interval, a panoply of drugs, ranging from Colombian marijuana, and cocaine, through Mexican marijuana and “black tar” heroin and have taken turns being the contraband of the moment, but the lack of success and increasing efforts at interdiction have remained constant.

The latest was an (obviously political) “request” handed to President Obama by by Texas Governor Rick Perry, minutes after Air Force One touched down in Austin yesterday. Citing increasing violence by Mexican drug cartels (appalling, but hardly news) Perry asked for more of the same, but in addition to more troops, he also asked the feds to use the same predator drone aircraft that have been winning us so many friends in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Given that that the smugglers are often impoverished Mexicans who are primarily seeking to enter the US illegally to work and have been pressed into service by those running the operation, it is difficult to see how unmanned aircraft will do anything but increase the death toll and the resentment attributable to a failing policy.

Perhaps it's time to ask why marijuana had suddenly become so popular in the Sixties and why it's once again in such short supply. Just who is buying all that bammer weed; and why?

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 04:52 PM | Comments (0)

August 07, 2010

A Species in Crisis, the need for definitions

Science & GNT

The method of thinking now known as Science has not been around for very long, especially given the more accurate perspectives it has given us for thinking of time itself. It's only been about five centuries since Galileo and Newton were born in Renaissance Europe, literally back-to-back (Newton was born in 1642, the same year Galileo died).

Not only have our concepts of time changed since GNT; so has just about everything else. Considering today's world, however briefly; it has changed more radically since GNT than in the thousands of years of prior human existence; and we may be but the latest in a chain of primates stretching back to the Miocene epoch. Nor were G & N the two smartest men ever; just two with exceptional potential who chanced to be born at a time when their talents could be maximally expressed and then fortunate enough to live to have the influences for which they are both remembered (but neither can enjoy). It’s also quite likely that two, probably more, infants with similar potential already exist; but because of the enormous competition now facing them, and how much we have learned since GNT, won't have comparable impact.

Which brings me to my first major point: the role of chance in history. It’s at least theoretically possible that if all the important variables are known in advance, anything could become predictable; however the "arrow of time" makes that unlikely. Thus there will (probably) always be uncertainty.

Or perhaps God does exist. While a supreme deity can’t be disproved, the evidence favoring one has been diminishing steadily since GNT began.

The next logical point I want to introduce is that, in an over-crowded and contentious world, arguing with religious true believers is not only a waste of valuable time and energy, it’s probably the main reason for the “crisis” referred to in the title. Muslim jihadists’ willingness to kill themselves is unlikely to be matched by their opponents, thus the logic of the Cold War still prevails and “war” is almost certainly not a "solution."

Equally importantly; problems should be defined as accurately as possible before attempting a solution. Thus the best approach may be something humanity has never done before: tried honestly to solve basic problems short of violent destruction of presumed enemies. We humans are both the problem and the solution; no one else can save us from ourselves. While I am also aware there are fundamentalists who see today’s troubling signs as confirmation that an “end of days” is almost upon us, I don’t consider arguing against them to be helpful; thus I choose not to. If I have any “faith,” at all, it’s a hope that common sense will ultimately prevail.

In the meantime, I intend to keep on writing about what I’ve been learning about human emotions from talking to pot smokers for almost ten years.

My logic is straightforward: the emotional symptoms most of them began treating with inhaled cannabis are those now most evident in the modern world; thus they offer a potential short-cut to defining (diagnosing) our global problems; a necessary first step before attempting any radical "therapy."

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 05:23 PM | Comments (0)

August 04, 2010

Improbable, yet “Fit to Print”

Some of the material printed in the NYT lives up to its motto; a recent column by Bob Herbert was such an eloquent statement of my growing disappointment in the Obama Administration’s increasingly mindless policy in Afghanistan that I feel compelled to cite it here. However, I’m also forced to note that the fickle American public will soon forget it was the Bush-Cheney strategy to abandon Afghanistan just as Osama bin Laden was within our grasp in order to pursue their Iraq adventure. That particular folly was almost ten years, thousands of deaths, and billions of dollars ago, when the economy was stronger and a balanced budget hadn’t faded to a distant memory. Speaking of memories, ten years is clearly beyond the attention span of a culture that dotes on Lindsay Lohan’s latest peccadillo and seems ready to accept the notion that the Gulf clean-up has been a huge success.

Another report recently appearing in the Times was that the VA, under timid Obama leadership, is slowly warming up to the idea that self-medication with marijuana might even be acceptable for veterans similar to those described by Bob Herbert, so long as they live in one of the fourteen states with an existing medical marijuana law.

In support of that less-than-crisp explanation, the Times referenced the same vaguely worded letter from a VA physician to Michael Kravitz that I’d referred indirectly last Friday. What the article and Dr. Petzel's letter both leave out is the fate of potentially suicidal returnees who live in states without a medical pot law. Will they just have to make do with Ambien or one of the other legally prescribed, medications supplied by their local VA?

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 05:39 PM | Comments (0)

August 02, 2010

A World being Overwhelmed by Reality

Ironically, Northern California’s weather has been unseasonably cool so far this summer, but such is not the case in many other parts of the world, including the Southern half of the state; to say nothing of the Eastern US, the Gulf Coast and the Deep South, where everything from triple digit heat, floods, and wild fires are being reported. Then there’s the news (and graphic videos) of other weather-related disasters: huge floods in Pakistan and wildfires in Russia. Funny; there seem to be fewer recent complaints from the far Right about global warming being a liberal “hoax.”

I just turned off the first 1/2 hour of TV news, skipping from one channel to the next as is my wont; it ranged form the improbable to the outrageous, but its theme, for me anyway, was that of a human world still so unwilling to face the magnitude of its self-made disasters that one is forced to wonder what it will take to wake it (them, us) up.

I know that I’ve been writing in this vein for years, hoping against hope that the world would get it. I’m now about ready to admit that the prognosis for meaningful recovery has never appeared more bleak; yet most of the species still seems so oblivious to that reality that I’m occasionally forced to question my own sanity.

Not to worry; whenever that happens all I have to do is to turn on CNN...

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 04:07 PM | Comments (0)

July 30, 2010

Incremental Sanity in Action

The outcome of the process that began with the passage of California’s Proposition 215 in 1996 has yet to be decided. Barry McCaffrey, then Clinton’s drug czar, couldn’t even wait for 1996 to end before threatening the license of any California doctor for simply discussing the therapeutic use of marijuana with a patient. Fortunately, the Ninth Circuit ruled that a violation of free speech and the Clinton Administration elected not to appeal.

The presence of Proposition 19 on this year’s ballot is evidence that considerable progress has been made since then; however several related questions have remained unanswered over the past 14 years and more will be raised no matter how the vote goes in November

If Proposition 19 is defeated, federal law will remain unchanged, but the margin of victory will be of great interest to both sides, neither of which seems to have learned much in 14 years. Ironically that same interval- from 1919 to 1933- had been all that was required to bring about the demise of Prohibition.

Since 2001, the most obvious lesson of Proposition 215 seems be one that both the political supporters and opponents of cannabis have enormous difficulty acknowledging: its market is much larger than most had imagined and is still growing. Ironically (there’s that word again) the reason neither side wants to cop to the size of the pot market is that it requires a contradiction of claims each made in the past: the narcs have claimed to be “winning” the war on drugs, while stoners have claimed to be “recreational” users simply exercising free choice.

The truth, both simple and yet more complex than the medically uninformed claims of the opposing sides, is that a significant fraction, generally over 50%, of the population born since the end of World war Two has been trying inhaled cannabis as part of their adolescent rites of passage and a smaller, but still significant, minority have been using it- often for long intervals- because it's safer and more effective than competing “legal” products.

In other words, federal claims that herbal cannabis can’t be medicine are baseless and have done enormous medical and financial damage to our social structure. That such would be difficult for any bureaucracy to admit goes without saying; however a small beginning may have just been made in the form of letters from obscure VA functionaries in response to queries from a veterans' group.

This could be the first crack in the dam that’s been holding back the truth since 1968.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 04:48 PM | Comments (0)

July 29, 2010

A Throwback to Harry Anslinger

Joe Arpaio, Sheriff of Maricopa County (Phoenix) is a miserable human being, one of those people whose need for the limelight and bad behavior combine to become a litmus test of character. While I may neither like nor admire all "Sheriff Joe's" many detractors, I can be reasonably sure I wouldn’t have much in common with his admirers.

He and I do have a few things in common however: we were both born in 1932 and went to work for the federal government in the Fifties. I spent thirteen years- from 1958 on- as a US Army doctor until my disgust for Nixon and the war in Vietnam induced my departure, while Joe served as an enlisted MP between 1950 and 1954, before reentering federal service with Harry Ansliger's FBN in 1957 after a short stint as a civilian cop. He then survived the transformation of the FBN into the DEA before retiring in Phoenix 1992 and running successfully for Sheriff of Maricopa County, an office he has retained tenaciously ever since despite multiple law suits, court orders, and an unequivocal public record of abusing both the powers of his office and the hapless prisoners in his custody.

As luck would have it, the present anomalous situation in Arizona guarantees Joe a place in the limelight for as long as his health permits and his constituents will tolerate his irresponsible antics.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 04:58 PM | Comments (0)

July 28, 2010

Missing the Importance of Whistle Blowers

That there would be more immediate interest in identifying and punishing the “leaker” who supplied Wikileaks with an enormous volume of classified documents than in the significance of the documents themselves should probably not surprise us, even with the recent example of the Pentagon Papers deliberately leaked to the New York Times by Daniel Ellsberg.

What the Pentagon Papers established beyond any doubt was that the Viet Nam War had been a thoroughly dishonest federal enterprise from the beginning; one of the most important effects of Ellsberg’s disclosure was that the feckless war to “save” South Vietnam from Communism (a war already being abandoned by Nixon) lost all credibility.

Although the wars we are now fighting in South Asia had quite different justifications when launched by the Bush-Cheney Administration in 2001, they were equally dishonest from the outset and have evolved into hopeless failures for exactly the same reasons as Vietnam: a foreign army of occupation actively engaged in killing civilians faces an almost insurmountable task in trying to convince citizens of the occupied lands to accept their presence.

The 9/11 terrorist attacks were crimes; they should have been treated as such and any military operation limited to apprehending Bin Laden and his accomplices. Once he’d been allowed to evade capture at Tora Bora, all plausibility for an American presence was lost. It’s especially ironic that Tora Bora was terminated because the Americans were then so preoccupied with the upcoming invasion of Iraq.

Sadly, George Bush was not the first, nor even the only, American President to be snookered into an avoidable war, nor was Richard Nixon the only one to prolong one by escalating attacks on civilians.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 07:16 PM | Comments (0)

July 25, 2010

Birds of a Feather (Political)

As the Shirley Sherrod story began unfolding earlier in the week, I resisted the temptation to comment. For one thing, I was too busy; for another, it just seemed too bizarre: a highly unlikely scenario in which some of the usual suspects on the far Right had become ensnared in their own clumsy trap, an attempted smear of a mid-level black female bureaucrat as "racist" without checking the most basic facts: the incident upon which the claim was based was over twenty years old and had been not only misrepresented, but also lifted out of context by someone with a history of similar dirty tricks. Nevertheless, the “story” broke on Tuesday amidst an obviously coordinated flurry of excited announcements from the Limbaugh/O'Reilly/Beck chorus.

It should have reminded others like myself who are old enough and still possessed of the requisite long term memory of Joe McCarthy’s desperate attempt to smear Army dentist Irving Peress just before the Senate hearings that brought the Wisconsin senator's noxious influence to an abrupt end in 1954.

Of course, the Guilt-by-Association similarity doesn’t end there; despite McCarthy’s public exposure as an incompetent alcoholic bully and his shockingly sudden death from liver failure at the ripe old age of 48, many still see him- not as a pathetic drunk and liar- but as a genuine American hero unfairly smeared by his political enemies.

That one of them is Cliff Kincaid, I regard as ample confirmation that my analysis is correct.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 06:29 PM | Comments (0)

July 24, 2010

First Exploitation, then Hope?

As the human population of Planet Earth has increased to unprecedented levels, so have its demands on the environment. Thus meeting those demands for the entire species has gradually become humanity's major source of wealth and one of its more significant existential threats. Seen in that context, the greater the human population, the more money could be made from exploiting humans through various forms of slavery and the manipulation of essential markets.

Unfortunately, there are limits. Only recently have we learned that although different populations have different ecological footprints: the resources required to meet aggregate human needs in terms of energy, fresh water, and a growing list of resources extracted from the earth (and its oceans) have their own limits. The major factor both driving and meeting human needs over the past five centuries has become the increasing efficiency of the technology enabled by Empirical Science; particularly after the Industrial Revolution began a little over two hundred years ago.

All of which heightens the critical importance of government decisions in establishing rules; not only for populations under their direct control, but also affecting smaller, weaker nations either directly or indirectly. Given the spectacular increase in human population just since the Industrial Revolution began, one does not have to be a genius to understand that humanity is in a crisis it's still unable to recognize; one for which the old ways are proving (and will probably remain) completely inadequate.

Given that our species is the only one capable of our degree of cognition, it follows that aside from some uncontrollable catastrophe such as an impact or a seismic event, the greatest threat to human welfare is human cognitive activity.

Perhaps the best we can hope for is that the forced reduction in our numbers that now appears inevitable will leave an optimum number of survivors with enough residual technology for a fresh start.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 04:51 PM | Comments (0)

July 22, 2010

Compensation, Decompensation, and Awareness

The first two words in the title have specific meanings which are quite different when used in Medicine as opposed to ordinary speech. Medically, they refer to a phenomenon in which mild or moderately impaired function of an organ or organ system may be made up for temporarily by compensatory change. However, there is usually a price to pay; if the impairment is mild enough, it may only become apparent with increased activity. For example, when a young, otherwise healthy, cigarette smoking golfer plays a round on a hilly course instead of his usual flat one. Even then, he may relate early shortness of breath to a cold he just got over, rather than to cigarettes.

However, as time goes by smoking will induce changes in his airways: chronic bronchitis with cough and sputum along with changes in his body habitus that may remain unnoticed by him and family members who see him every day, but would immediately be recognized by most medical chest specialists as early COPD: reduced muscle mass, overinflated lungs, a wet cough. More subtle signs may follow: ending most coughs with a soft laugh, the avoidance of exercise; or purchase of a golf cart, for example.

These changes and the speed with which they develop will also depend on his genome and the numbers of cigarettes smoked, but they will be ultimately be found to some degree in a majority of regular smokers and when compensation fails (decompensation), it may be either rapidly or slowly: as with a sudden fatal heart attack or a lingering dependency on others.

All of which explains why laws punishing use of a safe herbal remedy that regularly diminishes alcohol and cigarette use by its chronic users has been a terrible public policy and those guilty of supporting it for years are either fools or scoundrels.

But don't expect them to admit that; it wouldn't be consistent with their human nature.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 07:04 PM | Comments (0)

July 19, 2010

Mark Kleiman still doesn’t get it

A recent entry described how UCLA Public Policy Professor Mark Kleiman and I have been interacting negatively since 1996 over our differences on drug policy. Because I'd identified him as one of Academia's more important supporters of the drug war, I'd recently started sending him blog entries hoping to provoke a discussion. Instead, he responded with an angry demand that I stop, which I agreed to do; still not knowing if he'd ever bothered to read what I'd sent him.

I had an answer of sorts when his dismissive put-down of Proposition 19 appeared in the LAT. It also confirmed what I'd long suspected: Kleiman relies heavily on NIDA propaganda for both facts and assumptions about cannabis prohibition, a dangerous stance for a policy maven focused on a policy based almost entirely on Harry Anslinger's imagination and nearly bereft of unbiased clinical confirmation. It's a particularly vulnerable position for a policy wonk because, starting with Urban VII and Galileo, some of Science's most important revelations have started with observations that challenged long-accepted false assumptions.

It's especially ironic because a paper Kleiman had written with Rick Doblin may have provided the impetus required to get "medical marijuana" on California's ballot in 1996.

I've also been one of the "recommendationists” he sneers at, but If he'd taken the trouble to read the material I sent him, he'd have learned that data supplied by the applicants I've studied challenges NIDA and DEA dogma in very fundamental ways.

Beyond uncovering several unexpected and/or under-appreciated medical benefits experienced by cannabis users, the study also revealed that some of the most critical assumptions made on behalf of the drug war are seriously off the mark and go a long way towards explaining its perennial failure to “control” pot use.

As noted only yesterday, it doesn't matter that the data may not be believed immediately; only that the false assumption is challenged. In this case, time is also on the side of pot smokers because their large numbers, still unsuspected by the establishment, will start becoming more obvious as more Baby Boomers reach Medicare age, starting next year.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 08:09 AM | Comments (0)

July 18, 2010

Disasters, Databases, & Stubborn Beliefs

In today's United States, most investigations of major accidents and natural disasters are eventually made public. As computer technology has evolved, such investigations have become increasingly dependent on relational databases into which pertinent items of information (data) are entered, thus automatically arranging important events along a time-line and clarifying their relationship to each other while calling attention to possible additional areas of importance. In fact, the contributions of databases to empirical Science have been a major factor in the recent acceleration of scientific progress. Unfortunately, control over just how that progress is employed has remained with the same old fallible human institutions as before.

Also unfortunately; any public policy based on creation of illegal markets is nearly impossible to study with database technology because of intrinsic human dishonesty. In essence, such laws render all data about illegal commerce immediately unreliable; whether generated by market participants or, as is now painfully obvious, by involved government entities.

So obvious has been the tendency of humans to take advantage of the opportunities for exploitation offered by any public policy of prohibition that a key modern implication: namely that there is enough difference between the rapid failure of America's experiment with alcohol "Prohibition" and the more protracted failure of its contemporary Drug "Control" Policy to justify its continued enforcement as a "war" on drugs. In other words, there's an assumption that we have nothing to learn from the past because Al Capone and his rivals were merely fighting to control alcohol, while murderous Mexican cartels are struggling for a drug monopoly.

That distinction is now so painfully unrealistic as to represent an indictment of the conceptual human thinking that still supports it. Since that includes all branches of the US federal government and most state bureaucracies; to say nothing of the nations bound by UN treaty, I don't expect much public agreement with my heretical conclusions and have long since abandoned any notion that such a huge error as the drug war can be corrected rapidly. The baggage of the past is simply too heavy.

However, I have gained some perverse pleasure from pointing out the errors of our ruinously destructive drug policy while legally gathering data from its victims. As I've learned from them, I've also derived satisfaction from helping pot users understand why they have found their use of cannabis helpful; which is why I intend to continue gathering their data and commenting on related events for as long as possible.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 11:30 AM | Comments (0)

July 16, 2010

Mid-July Report

The runaway gusher in the Gulf finally seems at least temporarily tamed by its new cap and the striking visual contrast between the old futility and the new calm have endured overnight. It’s still too early to know if the Obama Presidency or the economy of the Gulf Coast have been saved, but at least each has a chance at survival that certainly would have been denied to both if the ninety day mark had passed with no end in sight. Such is the reality of today’s constantly changing Brave New World as it struggles to keep up with the demands of its burdensome human population.

What we seem unable to grasp as a species is that our collective security depends on belief; not in a deity, but in the integrity of the global economy. If, at any given time, a critical fraction of humans doesn’t remain at least nominally obedient to local rules, the system may not function. If too many nations were to go rogue at once economic recovery could become impossible.

There is little doubt the human population has increased enough to stress the carrying capacity of the planet, even as Science has been revealing new existential risks a majority of humans are clearly unable to understand; let alone admit.

On a more mundane level, an historic opportunity for symbolic rejection of an inane federal policy is only a few months off in California amidst increasing evidence of great anticipation by some and continued willful ignorance by others; all very reminiscent of 1996, but with even higher stakes.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 04:22 PM | Comments (0)

July 04, 2010

Happy Birthday?

July Fourth, 1776 was the day the 2nd Continental Congress approved the text of Jefferson’s famous essay as its official explanation of an action they had taken on July 2nd: treason, (at least in the eyes of the British) by their rejection of the authority of King Gerge III over his American colonies. Be that as it may, the Fourth of July has been celebrated as our national birthday almost from the beginning. Among many other overlooked details, the Fourth also commemorates our first two wars as a nation: both fought against Great Britain, then the strongest military power on Earth.

The first was our Revolution; it gained freedom from the Crown and also marked the historical beginning of the end of the Divine Right of Kings as a plausible theory of government. The second, The War of 1812, matched the same two antagonists three decade later in a war neither side was prepared for. The Americans, goaded by British insults and provocations, but also seeking territory in Canada, foolishly risked their national existence, but were ultimately able to win enough key battles to claim victory. That "victory," coming on the heels of a windfall acquisition from France, also allowed the fledgling nation to pursue its hypocritical development of chattel slavery while taking its first halting steps toward ultimately replacing Britain as the World’s dominant colonial power.

Ironically and unhappily, an accidental catastrophe sustained by a British oil company just off shore from New Orleans may have exacted the vengeance an equally vengeful Andrew Jackson had denied the proud British Conquerors of Napoleon just under two centuries ago.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 05:17 PM | Comments (0)

July 01, 2010

Selective Analysis

This morning, I just happened to catch a jaw-dropping analysis on Fox News. Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan conducted an informal seminar for a bevy of respectful Wall Street analysts who were permitted to question him on the severity of our current economic woes. What was ominous was his occasional use of the term “deflation” (because it characterizes depressions); what was truly amazing was his soft shoe dance around any possibility that rampant dishonesty and theft on Wall Street, had been either assisted by complicit “regulation” or played a significant, let alone dominant, role.

What the brief exercise did for me was to update my insights into the problem I’ve been struggling with for the last few years: a coherent understanding of the various mechanisms by which we humans have created the present mess. Clearly denial has been a pivotal factor. To that must be added omission, or what is not reported by media. Greenspan’s apparently erudite analysis, was almost exclusively in economic terms. Although he touched on other factors like “culture,” he didn’t do so in any meaningful way and almost completely ignored the political dishonesty that had permitted theft of billions under cover of a “just” (but avoidable) war.

Clearly, recognized "experts” like Greenspan find it easier to get away with such highly selective analysis; especially if they take pains to limit their remarks to their acknowledged areas of expertise.

It was a masterful performance by an an old pro before a friendly audience.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 04:57 PM | Comments (0)

June 30, 2010

Nemesis & Apocalypse

Mark Kleiman is a professor of pubic policy at UCLA; although we’ve never met face to face, we’ve been aware of each since May, 1996 when a letter I wrote accusing him of “intellectual constipation” was published in the Los Angeles Times. It had been written in response to an Op-Ed authored by Kleiman and psychiatrist Sally Satel on the dangers of methamphetamine, a new drug "menace" then being hyped in terms eerily similar to those used to describe the crack “epidemic” a decade earlier.

I later learned from a mutual acquaintance that Kleiman, then teaching at Harvard’s Kennedy School, had been annoyed enough by my characterization to join the drug policy discussion group I’d been participating in as a neophyte, apparently intent on debate. Because communication was slower in 1996, I'd already departed on a European vacation when he began posting. By my return, he had been so rudely treated by list regulars he had resigned.

Our next brush came a year or two later when I sent him a rude e-mail after hearing a rebroadcast of his interview by a Bay Area NPR station. He responded with an expression of extreme annoyance. By then I’d also read Against Excess, his 1992 drug policy treatise and found it both confused and confusing; primarily because it tacitly endorses criminal prohibition as reasonable public policy. For me, what is inexplicable about many obviously intelligent drug prohibition advocates is their inability to recognize that the fate of the 18th Amendment should have conclusively demonstrated that human nature will defeat any attempt to outlaw commerce in a popular commodity or service. Fifteen additional years, eight of which have been spent interviewing criminal market participants, have strengthened that judgment to the point where I see continued UN efforts to sustain a global drug war in today's world as a sign our species is in deep trouble.

Parenthetically, a quick Google search also reveals that Dr. Satel seems have significantly modified a stance that was once very similar to the one Dr. Kleiman still embraces.

Moreover, current human population numbers may be so stressful and difficult to change (because of Path Dependence) that there is no practical alternative to hoping that leaders will recognize and correct them soon; a hope growing more forlorn by the day as crude oil gushes unchecked into the Gulf of Mexico.

Why, one might ask, should we concern ourselves with drug policy at such a time? One answer, applying to most humans with jobs or other projects that sustain them, is that even with an apocalypse approaching, we seem to need something to do. Besides, we’ve been here before, often without knowing it; especially since the dawn of the nuclear age. Indeed, we may have already survived several close calls; to say nothing of hazards we’d been blissfully unaware of for millennia.

For me, Mark Kleiman has come to represent the dilemma that has long puzzled our species: was our creation planned or accidental? It was set in motion so long ago and remains so inaccessible to proof that, short of a biblical Apocalypse, we are unlikely ever to know with certainty.

What makes it more poignant is that the discovery of empirical science five centuries ago might have offered something closer to real choice; had the long-established human institutions of temporal and religious power not contrived to effectively control how Science is used, a phenomenon that has forced us ever deeper into a trap from which escape may already be impossible.

Over the next several weeks, as we await various possible outcomes, I hope to outline why I think drug policy has become both a metaphor and a reason for whatever will happen.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 07:48 PM | Comments (0)

June 27, 2010

McChrystal vs MacArthur

Although it’s tempting to compare Obama’s firing of Stanley McChrystal with Truman’s sacking of Douglas MacArthur in Korea almost Sixty years ago, it’s considerably more accurate to compare the rookie president’s dilemma to the one we faced in a more recent conflict: our equally ill-advised adventure in Viet Nam in the late Sixties and early Seventies. It was there that we failed to learn a very important lesson, namely that a foreign army attempting to fight a prolonged guerrilla war while also maintaining the “rule of law” in a nation with a different language and culture faces an almost impossible battle. In Viet Nam, we lost a protracted war while substituting aerial bombardment for an army of draftees. In Afghanistan, we are also failing with an all-volunteer army in an otherwise similar context. Also; just as we failed to learn from the French adventure in Viet Nam, we have ignored its Russian variation in Afghanistan. Santayana was right.

I’ve now had a chance to read both the Rolling Stone article that induced President OBama to fire McChrystal and a more recent dispatch from the same author. Both lead to the same conclusion: McChrystal was a bad choice for the mission; once his disrespect for his commanding officer had been made public, Obama had no choice but to fire him. However, the two phenomena are essentially unrelated and it's also unlikely Petraeus will fare any better.

As someone who has wished Obama Well (and still does) I am increasingly distressed by his reliance on shibboleths over informed, rigorous analysis of hard facts. That’s a mistake he's also made vis a vis the drug war.

I hope to go into more detail on the reasons for those opinions in the near future.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 05:47 AM | Comments (0)

June 20, 2010

Fear of the Feds: Still more PC than sane

One of the reasons a public policy as incoherent and unsuccessful as the war on drugs has retained support for so long is fear. In that respect, American drug policy invites a comparison with Nazism, perhaps the most terrifying repression of modern times; also one of the most rapid in terms of gaining total control over an advanced, well-educated polity. Yet, as I learned in two recent casual conversations, just making that comparison opens one up to being called a crack-pot, anti-semitic, or worse; thus demonstrating yet again how reasonable ideas can be misinterpreted by listeners with different points of view.

My first awareness of a serious comparison between Nazism and the drug war came from two books by Richard Lawrence Miller, an American historian who is also Jewish. The first was Nazi Justiz, Miller's analysis of Nazi exploitation Germany’s vulnerable legal system to gain total control of the nation within a few years of taking power. The other was his analysis of how the US drug war bureaucracy has long been using similar techniques to enhance its power.

I recently came across an interesting example of just how pervasive fear of offending the federal drug war has become; when I searched Wikipedia for anxiolytic, a well-understood medical term coined by the makers of Valium in 1962 to advertise their product, I was delivered to an article that was exceptionally complete except for its failure to mention that cannabinoids, especially when inhaled, are powerful anxiolytics.

I consider the anxiolytic properties of "reefer" very important; precisely because they were what led to its sudden popularity with Baby Boom adolescents in the Sixties, a phenomenon drug war supporters have yet to even notice, let alone explain coherently.

The good news was that medical use of cannabis was recognized when a "medical marijuana" initiative was passed in 1996; the bad news is that almost fourteen years after the most populous state in America created an opportunity to study the very population that has been such a source of confusion, their "criminal" behavior is still considered too politically incorrect for "respectable" research.

Instead, that population's needs are being administered by"pot docs" who may soon be rendered redundant by another voter initiative.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 05:52 PM | Comments (0)

June 19, 2010

Joe Califano: Just as stupid as ever; after all these years.

Joseph A. Califano, Jr., is a native New Yorker, Harvard educated lawyer, and career bureaucrat who entered federal service in 1961 after a stint in the Navy and soon became a behind-the-scenes power in the Johnson Administration after JFK’s assassination. He later served as Jimmy Carter’s Secretary of Health Education and Welfare between 1977 and 1979.

Unfortunately, a misguided interest in Medicine has apparently kept him enamored of the false notion that criminal prohibition can be rehabilitated into good public policy, thus he founded the Center for Addiction and Drug Abuse at Columbia University (CASA Columbia) which has since become entrenched as a drug war propaganda machine with a prestigious Ivy League address. While editing a low-budget drug policy newsletter between 1997 and 200I, I became very familiar with an unending stream of CASA “studies” that inevitably found evidence in favor of coerced “treatment” while decrying the money spent on criminal prosecution. In fact, one of the more pleasant consequences of my recent immersion in a study of cannabis users had been not having to deal with the conundrum represented by Mr. Califano and his ilk: are they evil or just stupid?

Sadly, the latest evidence has me leaning more toward evil. Yesterday afternoon, during my return from Oakland after interviews with nine typical victims of cannabis prohibition had left me more convinced than ever of the policy's stupidity, good old clueless NPR provided me with nearly ten minutes of teeth-gnashing evidence of its fecklessness: a report on the latest carnage in Mexico followed by a typical witless endorsement from Joe C.

Now I get it. Like anything human it's not all or none, but a combination of the two: thus anyone who takes Joe Califano seriously must be as evil AND stupid as he is.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 04:08 PM | Comments (0)

June 18, 2010

Continued Posturing

While the window for an effective plan to deal with the consequences of what CNN has just quietly upgraded from a “spill” to a “disaster” closes a bit more each day, the finger pointing continues. One is forced to wonder: if BP and other large oil companies were guilty (as they certainly were) of collective myopia in failing to anticipate the likelihood of a disastrous deep-water drilling accident, what about all the concerned government agencies and media sources who now seem completely blind to the probability that the simultaneous disruption of several important industries in the Southeastern US will trigger a wave of further business failures, foreclosures, and repossessions within months?

Given the enormity of the potential problem, isn’t it likely that refugees from the Southeast will stress other parts of the country, all struggling to balance state and municipal budgets in the third year of a financial crisis?

Also certain undeniable facts raise another question: most “advanced nations” of the world are struggling to emerge from a credit crisis brought on by their own greed and the overproduction of consumer goods, even as “developing” nations also struggle: to earn enough to afford those same goods and compelling evidence suggests that rapid changes in both climate and sea levels are directly related to their production.

Have we humans finally managed to create a problem without a solution?

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 04:26 PM | Comments (0)

June 17, 2010

Complicit Denial

A favorite theme of psychologists and psychiatrists committed to the “addiction” model of disease is that denial is an invidious mechanism by which addicts avoid confronting their need for therapy. Such thinking dovetails very neatly with the (false) 20th Century model of coerced treatment that began with the Harrison Act in 1914 and has since gradually evolved into a “war” on drugs with essential help from the US Supreme Court, President Hoover’s Secretary of the Treasury, and President Richard Nixon.

A mainstay of drug war thinking is that the only acceptable drugs are those approved by the FDA and prescribed by physicians. Self medication with “drugs of abuse,” especially for mental symptoms, gradually became a crime requiring intervention by the criminal justice system; also a major argument for a prohibition policy (euphemistically labeled Drug Control). Another mainstay of drug war dogma is that the optimal goal of treatment is total abstinence.

My almost nine-year experience taking clinical histories from chronic cannabis (“marijuana”) users seeking to become “medical” under existing law has decisively altered my own beliefs. Rather than seeing pot prohibition as a reasonable policy as I once did (when my children were adolescents), I have become convinced that it's delusional nonsense based on a dangerous denial of obvious reality, one most humans have been brainwashed into believing.

Well beyond that, I also think our human capacity for denial is one of our species' most dangerous characteristics. Perhaps once a useful tool for keeping differences of opinion from generating conflict when our numbers were small, it has become dangerously outmoded; precisely because both our numbers and our capacity for self-generated disasters are now among our greatest hazards.

Ironically, current events, both in the Gulf of Mexico and along our Mexican border provide worrisome examples. On land, it’s the amnesia of both governments for the lessons of Al Capone and Chicago as they vow to "crack down" on cartels fighting to control lucrative smuggling corridors for “bammer” being carried across the desert by expendable human “mules.”

Out at sea, it’s the real-time drama that began over eight weeks ago when an oil rig exploded, an accident apparently neither the Petroleum Industry nor its government “regulators” ever thought possible. Nor did the public,including this observer, even know drilling has been going on for years at depths where ambient pressures limit human activity to robot devices.

Finally, the best evidence for denial is that the first concern I've heard or seen expressed since day one about the enormous risk of economic catastrophe represented by an uncontrolled gusher was last evening.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 07:36 PM | Comments (0)

June 15, 2010

Competitive Mismanagement

As the world awaits the outcome of what may soon come to be known as the Costner Experiment, one is forced to wonder how humanity ever found itself in such a predicament and, if the experiment succeeds, will it have learned anything from the experience?

As it turns out, the answer to the first question is now painfully obvious; but the most informed response to the second would have to be, “almost certainly not.” Dealing first with the oil disaster’s root cause, it was concisely articulated to Anderson Cooper by Costner himself in the segment I watched last night: he had approached the petroleum industry with his proposal years ago, but they had not seen any need to invest in technology for cleaning up spills. Given that they have also been drilling at greater and greater depths for years, that attitude, confirmed by their meager investment in safety and clean up, was irresponsibly reckless. The Air Transportation equivalent would have been an assertion that air travel had become so safe that airline crashes were now a thing of the past.

The real time vicarious experience of participation in these unfolding events continues; I had just listened to Congressman Ed Markey upbraid a stony faced panel of big oil execs for their behavior and then turned the set off to write this entry rather than listen to his eager colleagues wax predictably self-righteous in the TV spotlight.

It’s now time for me to drive over to Oakland to screen some new pot users seeking to become “legal’ and renew that status for others under the provisions of California’s still-disputed and much misunderstood law.

All of which simply reinforces my belief that, for all our cleverness, we humans can be maddeningly self-destructive.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 05:00 PM | Comments (0)

Can the crisis really be avoided?

Despite its obvious limitations, I was strongly in favor of California's marijuana legalization initiative from the time it qualified for the November ballot, and had thus been following developments closely until very recently.

However, the deepening crisis in the Gulf of Mexico had completely changed my focus; particularly after it became painfully evident that very few of those in a position of responsibility had come to terms with the enormity of the problem, or that any "solution" would have to be a remarkably lucky ad-hoc experiment. At a minimum, it would have to succeed well before the November election if a massive global financial crisis were to be avoided.

In an almost unbelievable real time coincidence, I then found myself typing this as I watched and listened to Kevin Costner explaining to Anderson Cooper on CNN how he had been developing an oil/water separation device for the past several years; also that several will soon be deployed by BP.

It's now about two hours later and this is the first chance I've had since listening to Costner to finish this entry. Why? Because other, more pressing matters intruded; and hey, we still have a few weeks to wait before seeing if Costner's invention will prevent a total melt-down of the world's financial system.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 02:23 AM | Comments (0)

June 13, 2010

Needed: A Scientifically Valid Theory of Human Behavior

Empirical Science can be defined as an approach to natural phenomena based on observation, hypothesis and experimentation, all ideally carried out in a collegial atmosphere of healthy skepticism and rigorous honesty. Also understood is that new observations should be scrutinized for both their accuracy and compatibility with accepted theories. In that context, it is not expected that new observations or hypotheses must be accepted by all workers in a given field; rather collegial disagreement on some issues often persists for long intervals; but without introducing error or impeding overall scientific progress

In terms of its impact on human behavior, the spectacular development of empirical Science (generally conceded to have started with Galileo) has become the single most important factor shaping human (and other) life on the planet. Indeed; violent discontent generated by ambient discrepancies in the rate of scientific “progress” and distribution of the wealth it enables may be the single most immediate threat to human existence. Although we are often reminded of other, more potent existential threats, the ones we create are important because they are at least potentially remediable and some, like accelerated climate change and looming shortages of energy and fresh water, are decidedly urgent.

In that context, it can also be persuasively argued that what our species needs most is an accurate, evidence-based theory of human behavior, one also as compatible as possible with well established scientific theory.

Whether one can be developed in time to avert all extant man-made threats is unlikely; however, it’s also unlikely that any one threat would become an extinction event. Indeed; a “natural” reduction in human numbers might even be a useful first step towards planetary stabiliization.

In future entries, I hope to present persuasive evidence that the erroneous faux-scientific theory of drug prohibition now embraced by the world's governments (for a variety of understandable reasons) has become a major obstacle to an accurate understanding of our behavior as a species.

Until that obstacle is removed, it will probably be impossible to “solve” the serious behavioral problems now being forcibly misrepresented as a matter of (seriously mistaken) policy.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 05:51 PM | Comments (0)

June 12, 2010

Is Denial an Ultimately Fatal Human Flaw?

My study of pot use has supplied me with a gradual understanding of the degree to which denial is a form of intellectual dishonesty, one all too characteristic of human behavior. That, in turn, brought some other human vulnerabilities into greater focus. To a degree I could not have imagined a few months ago, recent events in the Gulf of Mexico may have started the clock on a doomsday scenario consistent with my worst fears. That it also involves Mexico, the most recent subject of my “drug related” concerns, simply adds to the irony. To put it as succinctly as possible: evolving events in the Gulf since April 20, in combination with the world's swollen human population, together with our tendency to deny obvious problems and our basic insecurity may have already intensified the current economic "downturn" enough to make escape uncertain.

The reasons are relatively straightforward: the Exxon-Valdez disaster, with which the gulf “spill” is being compared, was limited from the beginning by the size of the tanker. A runaway leak from a breached well one mile below the surface is potentially unlimited; neither its rate nor its effects can even be measured, particularly until we know if it can be shut off; let alone how long that might take.

In the meantime, a rich ecosystem is being poisoned and a cascade of devastating economic consequences has been set in motion in a world already reeling from an unprecedented burden of debt; yet the concerns being voiced by world “leaders” are as pedestrian as always.

Need I say more?

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 06:07 PM | Comments (0)

June 06, 2010

The Impact of Policy on Research

The last entry described the discovery of what I initially mistook for a whole new area of research on youthful “stress” by two neuroscientists using exotic techniques for gathering blood samples from unstressed subjects. Among other things, I would soon learn that similar physiological "stress" research has been far more common than I'd realized; although not necessarily as focused on differences between youthful and adult subjects as in my two examples.

In the first, East African baboons were being surreptitiously darted by the researcher himself, a Stanford professor who had developed it as a virtuoso technique during annual visits to Kenya over a span of decades. The other, younger and also a PhD with post-doc experience at Rockefeller, was using a more lethal technique: guillotining rat pups for the same purpose: obtaining blood samples as free from the effects of stress as possible.

As I read further about what had at first impressed me as an exotic new subject, I came across names and concepts from my college and medical school days, both now over fifty years behind me. The first was Claude Bernard, a Nineteenth Century giant considered by many to be the father of modern Physiology, and also famous for his insistence on objectivity and the concept that a millieu interieur compatible with survival had to be maintained in all species. Another was early Twentieth century American Walter B. Cannon, a Harvard professor who helped Bernard's concept along by linking psychological stimuli to physiological responses and introducing the concepts of fight or flight and homeostasis to the dialog. Cannon had also identified the adrenal gland as the source of adrenalin and a key component in a non specific pituitary-adrenal response to change ("stress") a theme that was quickly developed and expanded between 1936 and 1956 by Hans Selye as the General Adaptation Syndrome.

Based on my own certainty that cannabis became popular in the Sixties because it had been so effective at relieving adolescent stress, my immediate response was to wonder why Doctors Sapolsky and Romeo (both of whom had professed a desire to see their results extrapolated to human behavior) had gone to such lengths.

Then I got it: human subjects would have been verboten. One of the drug war's greatest successes has been to persuade laymen that research on "drugs of abuse" is illegitimate; studies of cannabis most of all. The mechanisms are federal control of most drug research funding, fear of incurring federal displeasure, and the second of three (never-validated) claims concocted to justify Schedule one in 1970: arbitrarily designated "drugs of abuse" have no "accepted" medical utility. Why? Because we say so.

Sadly, the more respected one becomes in academic research, the more important it is to remain NIDA compliant.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 08:01 PM | Comments (0)

May 31, 2010

How Logical Assumptions evolve into Major Mistakes

The question asked near the beginning of an article in The Scientist caught my attention: “Was it possible that stress affected young brains and older brains differently, in ways that researchers and clinicians had overlooked? ... Do adolescents and adults undergo a similar neuroendocrine response when stressed?”

The reason I’d been searching for information on Dr. Russell Romeo was the youthful researcher's growing reputation for investigating the impact of emotional stress on young animals, in his case, rat pups. Also, we had arrived at a similar key understanding, albeit by very different routes: namely that the amygdala and limbic system are critical loci for sensing, integrating, and responding to emotional stress. Finally; I had become interested in learning more about whatever neuroendocrine mechanisms he might be proposing as explanations.

What I soon learned was (typically) equivocal. I knew, of course, that because his research is further into the academic mainstream than mine, it had also to be more compliant with the official (but ludicrous) NIDA position on “addiction." Nevertheless, Romeo's focus on youth gave me some reason to believe his studies might be congruent enough with my clinical data from humans to be seen as supporting similar conclusions.

The reasons are more complicated than complex; my interest in Romeo had originally been piqued after encountering his name in a search for material on Stanford’s Robert Sapolsky, another ex-Rockefeller University fellow who had also worked and published with Bruce McEwen while in New York.

That all three investigators had become focused on stress in youthful animal models simply added to the hope their work would lend support to my most obvious, yet controversial, finding: namely, that the large scale initiation of cannabis by American adolescents in the Sixties had clearly been the key to its paradoxical (and never questioned) commercial success thirty years after being banned for obviously spurious reasons.

All that's necessary to explain that success is a realization that the safety and efficacy of inhaled cannabis in relieving the adolescent angst of baby boomers was why "marijuana" had, over time, become the most valuable crop harvested in the US and is now, also paradoxically, the most valuable and frequently intercepted illegal drug along our border with Mexico.

Another key to the increasingly complicated puzzle is yet another simple understanding: the drug war's only major success has been its placement of human populations of illegal drug users off limits as "legitimate" research subjects by continuing to insist that such use can't possibly be "medical."

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 10:28 PM | Comments (0)

May 30, 2010

Unpleasant Memorial Day Thoughts

Watching that disastrous geyser of crude oil erupt into the Gulf of Mexico on TV news for the past few weeks has been almost as surreal as following the denial of reality that's long been standard practice for both the US and Mexico with respect to their vexing issues of illegal immigration and illegal drugs. What the three unwelcome intrusions: oil, drugs, and illegal aliens, have in common is that all are uncontrollable, almost impossible to measure precisely, and expose the penchant for dishonesty that may be the most tragic flaw in humanity's otherwise glorious cognitive ability.

If so, it would be tragic indeed, for it is that same cognitive ability that has been allowing Science to unravel secrets of the universe we inhabit at an ever-increasing rate over the past several hundred years. Unfortunately, thoughtless exploitation of new scientific technology, our innate dishonesty, and an underlying emotional vulnerability seem to have combined to produce the multiple problems we now find themselves embroiled in and from which we may have considerable difficulty escaping; primarily because there are now so many of us and we have become so adept at avoiding unpleasant reality.

I'm only too aware that I've been harping on the same unpleasant themes a lot recently; but it's difficult to imagine solutions for problems that can't be acknowledged.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 05:33 PM | Comments (0)

May 28, 2010

The Lessons of History

It’s not impossible for the ecologic disaster now evolving in the Gulf of Mexico to become the deep sea equivalent of the “Dust Bowl” that added so much to the woes of the Great Depression.

As someone who grew up in the East and was only four years old in 1936, I never appreciated the degree to which mismanagement of America’s grasslands had added to the miseries of an era I had lived through, but not experienced directly.

However, just reading that history now is all it takes to see that the same hubris and impatience for profit that allowed Midwestern topsoil to be blown away in the Thirties have also been responsible for whatever economic blight will follow the release of millions of gallons of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico.

Even so, the world doesn’t seem to be paying much attention...

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 04:22 PM | Comments (0