http://www.doctortom.org/ en 2012-01-31T19:23:37+00:00 http://www.doctortom.org/archives/2012/01/on_the_impporta.html 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 ]]> Dr. Tom's Blog tjeffo 2012-01-31T19:23:37+00:00 http://www.doctortom.org/archives/2012/01/with_friends_li_1.html 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 ]]> Dr. Tom's Blog tjeffo 2012-01-23T04:59:25+00:00 http://www.doctortom.org/archives/2012/01/brief_note.html
Doctor Tom]]> Dr. Tom's Blog tjeffo 2012-01-13T17:21:49+00:00 http://www.doctortom.org/archives/2012/01/when_cannabinoi.html 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]]> Dr. Tom's Blog tjeffo 2012-01-11T23:32:30+00:00 http://www.doctortom.org/archives/2012/01/federal_duplici.html 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 ]]> Dr. Tom's Blog tjeffo 2012-01-07T17:33:23+00:00 http://www.doctortom.org/archives/2012/01/annals_of_inges.html 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. ]]> Dr. Tom's Blog tjeffo 2012-01-05T19:38:17+00:00 http://www.doctortom.org/archives/2012/01/marijuanas_unsu.html
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 ]]> Dr. Tom's Blog tjeffo 2012-01-03T21:28:24+00:00 http://www.doctortom.org/archives/2012/01/what_pot_smoker.html
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 ]]> Dr. Tom's Blog tjeffo 2012-01-01T19:46:06+00:00 http://www.doctortom.org/archives/2011/12/is_mexico_our_f.html 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 ]]> Dr. Tom's Blog tjeffo 2011-12-29T01:42:49+00:00 http://www.doctortom.org/archives/2011/12/unexpected_vind_1.html 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]]> Dr. Tom's Blog tjeffo 2011-12-24T17:23:54+00:00 http://www.doctortom.org/archives/2011/12/a_search_for_co.html "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.

]]> Dr. Tom's Blog tjeffo 2011-12-23T21:09:59+00:00 http://www.doctortom.org/archives/2011/12/could_cognitive.html
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.]]> Dr. Tom's Blog tjeffo 2011-12-20T21:11:18+00:00 http://www.doctortom.org/archives/2011/12/the_drug_war_as_1.html
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.

]]> Dr. Tom's Blog tjeffo 2011-12-13T18:16:22+00:00 http://www.doctortom.org/archives/2011/12/a_thickening_pl.html 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.

]]> Dr. Tom's Blog tjeffo 2011-12-07T01:33:17+00:00 http://www.doctortom.org/archives/2011/12/a_new_documenta.html 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 ]]> Dr. Tom's Blog tjeffo 2011-12-03T17:29:40+00:00