http://www.doctortom.org/ en 2012-05-16T15:43:00+00:00 http://www.doctortom.org/archives/2012/05/carefree_but_he.html CNN, are a product of poverty and desperation; part of a brutal turf war over the smuggling of “marijuana” and other drugs that has been assiduously ignored by both governments- each for its own reasons- for years. The obscene irony is that the most popular illegal drug now being smuggled into the US is “marijuana,” by far the most benign of all designated as "schedule one" by the DEA. In fact, had it not been declared illegal, an honest Pharmaceutical industry could almost certainly have used it to develop a panoply of drugs that would be safer and more effective than the synthetic poisons being pushed by smarmy TV spokespeople advising viewers to "ask your doctor,” about stress, insomnia, depression, or trouble focusing. As if generations of psychiatrists and psychologists whose peer reviewed literature has been corrupted by NIDA since 1974 would have learned anything useful about the problem behaviors being unwittingly generated during childhood in our stressed and overcrowded modern world.

Although smuggling-related murders in Mexico have been steadily increasing since the late Nineties, their remote origins were the misguided utopian beliefs that persuaded bible thumping Nineteenth Century US fundamentalists that sin, in the form of “liquor,” could be successfully outlawed. That effort, an ignominious failure, was abandoned, but an equally feckless effort to prohibit "drugs” survived; largely because US drug policy was dominated by the prejudice and ignorance of a federal bureaucrat named Harry Anslinger from 1930 until well past the end of War Two. As the huge crop of post-war babies began to mature in the Sixties, they were induced by the writings of a small coterie of modern shamans to try several new consciousness-expanding agents that soon became known as psychedelics.

The result was a tragic generation gap in which the youthful drug culture of the late Sixties and early Seventies fanned the parental anxiety of the “moral majority” that bred them. The first immediate consequence of that gap was election of the most insecure President in US history in tandem with a rare Supreme Court moment of near-clarity. The tragic result was that as soon as Anslinger’s feckless Marijuana Tax Act was struck down in 1969, it was replaced by the even more invidious Controlled Substances Act, an almost demonic legislative perversion, that although historically bereft of scientific support in either its 1937 or 1970 versions, won prompt Congressional and Presidential approval and began empowering a UN-supported global drug prohibition through a treaty dating back to Anslinger.

As a footnote to history, the entire world has a policy of global drug prohibition that has been responsible for financial success of related markets trafficking in illegal drugs, arms, and disadvantaged people that. The response of humans everywhere has replicated the passive acceptance, by “good Germans,” of the grotesque racist doctrines of Adolph Hitler that would soon lead them into a war of unparalleled scope and destruction..

Whether inspired by fear or resentment, it was German acceptance of Hitler's false doctrine that led directly the maelstrom of World War Two and the siren song of Eugenics that provided its scientific basis. The German populace wasn’t required to actively support Nazism at first, merely to accept their excesses as legal . By 1937, it was already too late. Ironically, just Germany's 1935 Nuremberg laws were being implemented, Anslinger and Hearst's "reefer madness" campaign was preparing the way for the similarly misguided Marijuana Tax Act of 1937.

Who knows where the today's drug war insanity will lead, or what will be required to end it?

Doctor Tom ]]> Personal tjeffo 2012-05-16T15:43:00+00:00 http://www.doctortom.org/archives/2012/05/cognitive_disso_1.html Texas Drug Wars,” it turned out to be a state police clone of the federal “Border Wars” trash I’d seen earlier on Murdoch's National Geographic Channel; only worse. The decidedly mixed message is that evil Mexican Cartels are doing their level best to smuggle deadly “narcotics” across, under, around, and over the border with a bewildering panoply of techniques that simply can’t be stopped. Fortunately, Texas Rangers and other State Police are on the job with flak jackets, automatic weapons, helicopters, and a panoply of high tech sensors to harass them and (occasionally) intercept their evil contraband- or at least force them to abandon it; thus keeping (some) “off the street” and hurting the cartels in their wallets, “where it hurts."

Unfortunately, there is no data on either the evil product line’s production or other costs, or their sales volume, thus the Cartels' profit and loss picture remains highly speculative. In fact, the whole exercise was such utter nonsense, the immediate question any rational viewer should be asking is: why bother?

Silly me. The drug war’s sponsors have been doing this for years because it works. We know that because no matter how much money the drug war wastes and how much human damage it causes, it continues to be a high priority policy for the US and the other “sovereign” governments that pretend to take it seriously.

So long as that’s the case, the drug warriors on both sides of the border will have job security, bribes will be paid, court dockets will be choked with interminable drug cases, the prisons no one can afford will be kept full and we can go on polluting the planet with CO2. Oh yes; we can also save money on public education because many of the the kids arrested on pot charges won’t finish school. An overlooked saving is that because the symptoms they can’t obtain medical insurance to treat are more effectively treated by cannabis, they don’t add to our sky-high medical costs and the booze they don’t drink won’t encourage violent behavior.

There are, of course, other consequences of Nixon’s forty year folly, but discussing them has never been a high priority with the Fourth Estate for reasons they prefer not to discuss; perhaps because the drug war’s villains and heroes in uniform are more interesting to advertisers than a bunch of desperately poor “illegals” willing to risk their lives to cross a dangerous border in search of a better life.

Doctor Tom]]> Personal tjeffo 2012-05-13T19:19:11+00:00 http://www.doctortom.org/archives/2012/05/connecting_the_1.html James Hutton and Charles Lyell, after becoming aware of marine fossils on upland locations in their native land, became convinced that the world was considerably older than previously believed. Lyell’s views, in particular, were already well known to Charles Darwin, when the young naturalist made his brief, but pivotal, visit to the Galapagos Islands during the Beagle’s five year voyage.

That was because, by remarkable coincidence, Lyell had given a copy of the first volume of his seminal Principles of Geology to Robert FitzRoy, Captain of the Beagle, who would become Darwin’s room-mate and companion on their historic voyage. Thus, the fledgling naturalist was intellectually well prepared for the critical intuition that would eventually mature into a theory that, although still scoffed at and actively opposed by many educated people, has reshaped both Biology and modern thought.

Interestingly enough, both FitzRoy and Lyell eventually disagreed with Darwin’s hypothesis as expressed in The Origin of Species. The emotionally unstable FitzRoy, who would eventually take his own life in dramatic fashion, was far more outspoken; and Lyell more reserved. In fact, Lyell may have been a part of the arrangement that eventually protected Darwin's claim to priority over that of the younger and less well connected Alfred Russel Wallace, whose work some find more thorough.

Be that as it may, what Darwin actually intuited was an idea that obsessed him for the rest of his life: namely that a causal relationship existed between the different beak structures he observed on birds of the same species, and the strikingly different climates and growing conditions he found on nearby islands. His intuition was that, over time, the beaks had somehow become adapted to the different environment. Darwin had no knowledge of the multiple other factors that made the Galapagos environmentally unique, such as the the Humboldt current; nor, because SCUBA diving was unknown, that Marine Iquanas would have been even better examples than his (misnamed) "finches."

He also had no way of knowing that other similarly situated large islands adjacent to continents (New Zealand, Madagascar, and Greenland) would eventually be recognized as examples of the same general phenomenon; nor could he have realized how much validation his intuition would receive from other scientific discoveries long after his death.

Indeed, discovery of structure of DNA provided both a logical and biochemical explanation of how natural selection could have been operating over millions of years to produce the species variety exhibited by Earth’s biota, absent any “intelligent designer” but has not convinced the most die-hard theists who continue to flaunt their misunderstanding of both Science and history.

That the same disconnect between factual observation and belief continues to haunt modern American political and “scientific” thought is well illustrated by the continued insistence of several Federal agencies that herbal cannabis (“marijuana”) cannot possibly have “medical” benefits despite a massive accumulation of credible evidence to the contrary. There are several reasons for that anomaly, many of which have to do with what I now think of as federal “M and M’ (Money and Morality) logic: they have a monopoly on tax dollars while reform had to depend on contributions from a disorganized gaggle of medically uninformed activists. Beyond that, he smear of illegality has an obvious effect on belief despite the fact that the federal government position is the one that is both factually and intellectually dishonest.

Doctor Tom]]> Personal tjeffo 2012-05-12T22:01:59+00:00 http://www.doctortom.org/archives/2012/05/is_latin_americ.html column that backs him up and can be found all over the internet

Oppenheimer is a well informed, no-nonsense, commentator on drug policy, so I am impressed. What he says about Mexico also makes sense: the new President will have to back away from the carnage on the border and the only way US demand can be reduced would be lowering US prices by forcing the DEA to back off.

It promises to be interesting. At the same time, it’s disgusting that those at the top of “sovereign” nations have to use the lives of their poorest citizens as bargaining chips in an argument over a stupid, failing policy left over from the 2nd Nixon Administration.

Doctor Tom]]> Personal tjeffo 2012-05-01T21:28:54+00:00 http://www.doctortom.org/archives/2012/04/unwelcome_findi.html
Beyond that, their mistakes have not been identical; the federal error, more profound and longer in the making, has been their attempt to enforce a policy of criminal prohibition that can only fail. Thus they have become progressively adept at rationalizing the expensive failures they can neither recognize nor admit.

The errors and false assumptions of "reform" are more recent and easier to understand; for one thing, most reformers were not alive when Anslinger retired, or even when his MTA was overturned by the Warren Court in 1969. Thus the Mitchell-Nixon Controlled Substances Act of 1970. was their powerful ruling paradigm. Their goal was correspondingly timid: carving out a limited medical exception for "medical" marijuana while continuing to agree that "recreational" use should be punished as before. They were so unprepared for any possibility that youthful pot use could be effective self-medication for common emotional problems that they rejected it out of hand and sadly, have not looked further at the evidence; a position that appears vindicated by the absence of similar studies and the obvious interest of most "pot docs" in revenue.

Thus I've spent nearly 10 years simply unraveling the intertwined errors afflicting both sides in the legalization debate: although the federal position is weaker and must ultimately fail, it can probably hold out for quite a while because it's supported by the law, fear, tax dollars, and a host of powerful vested interests.

Last night, I was heartened by a rare breath of fresh air when Jimmy Kimmel twitted the President about DEA raids and reminded him that pot smokers also vote.

However the early media response has been disappointing: the usual unfocused confusion and denial. With each passing month I see a last-minute Obama epiphany as progressively less likely; it's even possible enough pot smokers will either sit out the election or vote against him to elect a clueless religious fundamentalist as his successor. It's happened before.

Doctor Tom]]> Personal tjeffo 2012-04-29T22:37:27+00:00 http://www.doctortom.org/archives/2012/04/the_drug_wars_d.html
That question becomes even more pertinent when one remembers that the US promptly canceled alcohol prohibition, the drug war's conceptual twin, by passing an ad-hoc "Repeal" Amendment in 1933, an event that might have warned of a similar fate following any attempt at rigorous enforcement of then-extant drug policy or sudden increase in drug markets it was focused on (precisely what happened in the Sixties). Thus the continued acceptance of a failing drug prohibition policy by the nations of the world becomes an issue for serious consideration: are human governments unable to think very clearly? Or do the various organization now benefiting from criminal drug markets have the political power to keep them in existence despite the harm they cause? I suspect it's a bit of both.

However, any idea that the various disparate groups profiting from the drug war are conspiring is nonsense. Drug criminals profit from breaking the law; they are also essential job security for police, as well as a source of bribes and other favors. Modern "Treatment," "Prevention,"and "Rehab" industries are also beneficiaries of drug prohibition, as are those who advocate (and promise) "drug free" schools and workplaces. Then there is the dubious moral imperative that "legalization" would be irresponsible because it "condones" use. What none of those "anti-drug" arguments recognize is that the ignorance imposed on all concerned parties by drug illegality eliminated the best opportunity to have understood what made them popular, the basis for their appeal to users, or how their use might be related to other factors just as their markets began flourish in the Sixties. Instead, a robust criminal drug culture based on youthful initiation of new agents was fanned by the CSA, a repressive omnibus prohibition law. The same markets, plus several new ones, have since been expanding uncontrollably for four decades; materially assisted by the ignorance and official myopia imposed by the CSA's two supporting agencies.

A major disadvantage of having a mistaken policy imbedded in criminal law has been the automatic support commanded by Law Enforcement Agencies and the Judiciary. In that respect, early supporters of drug prohibition were more aggressive than their opponents; they passed off the deceptive Harrison Act as a way to track problematic prescriptions, but began arresting physicians who were writing them on the notion that they were fueling "addiction." The Supreme Court's agreement expanded the law's intent and allowed the federal bureaucrats to prescribe specific treatment, a right they have yet to relinquish.

Medicine defines disease based on its pathological anatomy; legal precedents, are established by case law, in which outcomes (and precedents) are determined largely by rhetoric. That disconnect between objectivity and opinion remains at the heart of the drug policy controversy; it has allowed the drug war's claim to be a form of Public Health to be taken seriously. Unfortunately, it was based entirely on the medically incompetent rhetoric of John Mitchell, as protected by Richard Nixon.

Thus the drug war remains an incoherent policy without grounding in objective clinical studies, which have been literally impossible from the time Harrison was approved by the Supreme Court in 1920 until the first medical marijuana initiatives finally created the possibility of clinical access to "drug criminals" in 1996.

Although interval clinical research on cannabis users has been discouraged, enough recognized therapeutic benefits have been documented to render continued federal claims that "marijuana" has "no recognized use" in American Medical practice both embarrassing and stupid; yet that argument seems to the DEA's sole excuse continuing its raids in California.

If Obama would reign them in and make some positive noises about cannabis well before November, he'd probably be re-elected. But, given his recent clueless behavior, I'm not betting on the outcome.

Doctor Tom ]]> Personal tjeffo 2012-04-24T21:02:23+00:00 http://www.doctortom.org/archives/2012/04/annals_of_feder.html
The concept of how to redefine drug prohibition as the CSA was born in the fertile brain of John Mitchell in 1969; it soon earned the approval of Richard Nixon and was promptly passed as the Controlled Substances Act of 1970. Next, it was successfully defended against any modification when Nixon summarily buried the Shafer Commission report in March 1972. The next steps on the road to policy disaster were critical: creation of two entirely new agencies by Executive Order. The first, in 1993, created the DEA as a dedicated federal police force to enforce what amounted to a new prohibition. The second Executive Order in 1994 was truly diabolical it created NIDA as another dedicated agency charged with articulating and protecting the policy's (non-existent) "scientific" theory, a move that has had debilitating consequences for Psychiatry and the Behavioral Sciences for over four decades.

Given its provenance, the CSA’s failure as legislation should not surprise us; on the other hand, its continued ardent support by a substantial minority of Americans is critically important to understand; as is its acceptance as reasonable global drug policy (via UN Treaty) by the an overwhelming majority of nations on our troubled planet. Tangible proof of that acceptance: even a small personal “stash” of cannabis will result in a traveler’s arrest in virtually every international port of entry.

Narrowing the balance of this essay to the US, my systematic questioning of cannabis applicants reveals some important contradictions in the basic assumptions made by federal policy. One of the more cherished is that any drug that has to be “smoked” can’t possibly be medicine, an idea specifically articulated by the FDA on April 20, 2006.

That it was simply a press release, suggests it was pure propaganda; beyond that, its release on an April 20th, suggests a not-so-subtle dig that went over the head of the mainstream media that dutifully reported it as “news.”

However, a consideration that has become important to me, one revealed only by my questioning of users, is that there are significant differences between smoked "marijuana" and "edibles." Also that those differences are both clinically important and have not been adequately addressed by either side in the largely rhetorical "debate" that's been in progress since 1996.

I now think I've differentiated both the important therapeutic differences and the physiologic reasons behind them sufficiently to describe them in some detail and speculate about the reasons they haven't been addressed by either side in the "debate."

Doctor Tom]]> Dr. Tom's Blog tjeffo 2012-04-14T22:56:00+00:00 http://www.doctortom.org/archives/2012/04/epistemology_vs.html culture should have been upgraded to accommodate the then brand new concept of evolution shortly after publication of Darwin’s landmark On the Origin of Species in 1859. Unfortunately, the many serious implications of Darwin's work have still not received the attention they deserve; probably because the most troubling of all were so contrary to the widely held (and comforting) religious beliefs of the mid-Nineteenth Century.

Ironically, the first solid confirmation was work by Mendel, a Roman Catholic cleric whose inspired insights almost certainly didn’t extend to rejection of an omnipotent Creator. Mendel and Darwin probably didn't read each others' work, and Mendel would certainly have disagreed vigorously if they had. The first decisive confirmation that an evolutionary process had been operating for billions of years was disclosure of the molecular structure of DNA (1953). The fall-out from that discovery has already been enormous and is just beginning.

Even given the relatively brief interval since Evolution was first proposed as a hypothesis, the rich context it has established within Biology renders the percentage of modern skeptics and naysayers surprising. Beyond that, the degree of denial our species is obviously so capable of is disquieting: that we are clever enough to create technology that poses serious dangers to the planetary environment while blindly pursuing it to excess is now painfully evident; but still not widely acknowledged.

The term “culture” almost certainly predated “evolution,” but once the former acquired its specific biological connotation, both terms have acquired new meanings. We can now think of culture as evolving, a concept that modifies the idea of "history." Further, if “evolution” is “true,” (an accurate theory) that circumstance necessarily casts great doubt on the concept that had dominated Cosmology (then known as Metaphysics) towards the end of the Eighteenth Century about the time the US Constitution was being debated in Philadelphia (en era still known as the Enlightenment to Philosophers and Historians). Before this short essay becomes too complicated, I just want to point out that we live in a changing world; one in which the rate of change has itself been accelerated, and that it would be unreasonable to expect that the underlying phenomena could not be having important, but so far unrecognized consequences. In other words, our IT capabilities are not necessarily a guarantee we won’t be blindsided by some new reality the same way mid-18th Century Victorians were by the most obvious implications of evolutionary theory.

The Universe may not have been planned and created by an omniscient god after all. Indeed, what we have been able to learn about what we now call the Cosmos is that it’s more likely a random, self-adjusting system infinitely older and bigger than we are yet able to measure. While our species certainly seems unique and has unquestionably had an important impact on events on our planet and within our solar system, we are comparatively insignificant on a cosmic scale.

At the same time, we can also recognize that other factors related to human thinking and behavior have been evolving in dangerous directions: there are more humans now alive than ever, and our accelerating acquisition of knowledge has unquestionably made us uniquely dangerous to both ourselves and other life forms. For one thing, we recently learned that Yellowstone National Park, in addition to being a "national treasure," represents an existential threat to all humans for reasons we are, thus far, unable to “control.”

Speaking of “control,” our species seems to have succumbed to that comforting euphemism as it has been applied to the lunatic American policy known as the “War” on Drugs. The idea that handing designated criminals a monopoly on the production of a commodity many people are willing to pay high prices for and risk arrest to possess deserves more than a quick stamp stamp of approval by politicians, academics and others who aspire to be taken seriously as policy mavens. Just what is it about Al Capone, Chicago, and bathtub gin that those smug idiots don’t understand?

On the other hand, a species so incapable of learning from its past mistakes may just have to reinvent itself. Unfortunately, and thanks largely to Harry Anslinger, John Mitchell, and Richard Nixon, hominids may have to start over from the cognitive level reached by Miocene Apes about nine million years ago. Even then, there’s no guarantee the conditions that ultimately produced Homo sapiens could be replicated.

It would be far better to learn from our mistakes before it’s too late.

Doctor Tom ]]> Personal tjeffo 2012-04-08T20:10:18+00:00 http://www.doctortom.org/archives/2012/03/predictable_nid.html survey confirming that teen use of both alcohol and cigarettes has declined substantially since 1996 was greeted with predictable satisfaction by NIDA Director Nora Volkov MD. However, true to form, Volkow also complained that the same surveys showed adolescent use of “marijuana” had increased substantially during the same interval. Thus the NIDA director was simply confirming what I have long suspected: America’s prohibition bureaucracy is either woefully ignorant or incredibly cynical; depending on whether it is aware of information I’ve been gathering (and describing) from a study of (now) more than 6500 unselected cannabis applicants since November 2001. One of that study's most important findings is that chronic use of cannabis is regularly associated with less problematic use of both alcohol and tobacco by a population that has been particularly liable to try ("initiate") the panoply of illegal drugs created after the mid-Sixties. Most were agents declared illegal under the feckless provisions of the Controlled Substances Act.

The obvious implication is that rather than "controlling" dangerous substances, America's war on drugs has been creating new markets for a succession of agents that became popular and were then declared illegal on the basis of that popularity. More recently, a number of new opioid and cannabis agonists have been introduced to consumers; a particularly worrisome development, since they are apparently becoming easier for molecular chemists to create.

That both NIDA and the DEA have remained blind to the realities of cannabinoid use since the mid Seventies is bad enough; that they are still unwilling (or unable) to recognize their intrinsic medical benefits is nothing less than a disgrace. To add insult to injury; neither agency (both of which speak with great authority on drug use) has yet discovered there's a significant difference in the therapeutic effects of inhaled cannabinoids and edibles. Beyond that, cannabinoids are among the most effective therapeutic agents for the symptoms of PTSD, a condition wreaking havoc among the "volunteers" in our armed forces being repeatedly deployed to combat zones in Asia.

The premise our applicant study is based on was arrived at only after gathering data the first 660 applicants (roughly 10% of the current total). It's that anyone willing to undergo the expense, risk, and inconvenience of obtaining what remains a federally disputed, renewable state license to use an illegal drug must be someone for whom its use was important: either because they were “addicted” or were self-medicating.

Indeed, my detailed findings amply confirm that chronic users of cannabis have been self-medicating safely and effectively with a remarkably benign and effective, albeit complex, therapeutic agent; one tragically declared illegal in 1937. A further legislative development was that after the Supreme Court struck down the original law in 1969, the worst Attorney General/President combination in American history contrived to replace it with one that has been much more damaging to those arrested and is proving far more difficult to overturn. That’s especially true now because we are dealing with the most biased and medically incompetent Supreme Court in history (because it has been stacked by Republican Presidents with appointees hostile to abortion a qualification that's been abundantly clear for years) The anti abortion agenda of Republican appointees was never openly addressed by America’s Fourth Estate, itself an institution that long ago forfeited any serious claim to be “guardians of truth.” Given the easily available evidence of the benefits cannabis confers on its users and the human damage inflicted on them by mindless federal prosecution, our press bears a heavy responsibility for taking both cannabis prohibition and the drug war as seriously as they pretend to.

Even less informed and more cynical than Congress, America's press corps has been a major component in the failure of its Democracy. According to early reports from Washington, the next disaster could easily be a negative Supreme Court ruling on “Obamacare;” thus bringing down a well-intentioned, but mediocre Presidency in favor of one that would be far worse.

The question we should now be asking is, “how many policy disasters can one nation tolerate before imploding?”

Doctor Tom ]]> Personal tjeffo 2012-03-27T20:58:35+00:00 http://www.doctortom.org/archives/2012/03/the_car_radio_h.html Melinda Haag, US Attorney for Northern California, was giving the usual lame excuses for a new federal crackdown on medical marijuana “dispensaries.” She was discussing one I was familiar with, the Berkeley Patients’ Group, long considered one of the better ones in the Bay Area.

Ms. Haag, like most of her colleagues in the DOJ, is an obligatory doctrinaire prohibitionist; her script was written long ago and no deviations are allowed. All prohibition bureaucrats must profess an unshakeable faith in the ability of federal law enforcement agencies to “control” commerce in services and products our Federal Government has decreed too dangerous (or immoral) for citizens to use or possess. That belief has survived for over a century despite the well documented failures of all anti-prostitution laws (for millennia), a Constitutional Prohibition Amendment in the 20s, and the modern “war on drugs" since 1971.

Despite doctrinaire prohibition’s remarkable lack of success, Ms. Haag’s statements are consistent with the widely held belief that it should be successful, a notion born somewhere in the muddled Populist Movement near the end the Nineteenth Century and never abandoned. Faith in prohibition as policy inspired two separate federal legislative efforts; one to reduce or eliminate consumption of drugs (1914) and alcohol (1918). The first to be passed was the deceptive Harrison Act in 1914. Portrayed as merely a tool for tracking use of heroin and cocaine by its sponsors, Harrison was almost immediately enforced as prohibition by Treasury agents who arrested hundreds of physicians for prescribing either Heroin or cocaine, the two named drugs (as required by the law) for patients, some of whom were clearly addicts. The physician arrests were based on a claim that had not been made clear in of the legislation itself: that prescribing for "addicts" goes beyond the “normal” practice of Medicine, thus such prescriptions were considered illegal and deserving of punishment. The law was really a deceptive usurpation of medical practice by untrained federal bureaucrats.

Because "addiction" was not then, and has yet to be satisfactorily defined as other than a troublesome behavior, a dangerous precedent was covertly established and hardened into prohibition by the Supreme Court's decisions: untrained bureaucrats were given the power to overrule the medical judgment of licensed physicians on what amounted to specious moral grounds. Even worse, a specious concept, and its underlying moral implications, effectively froze research into addiction at a very early stage in its evolution while actively corrupting federally sponsored "studies" with official bias since 1973-74 when the DEA and NIDA created with an official mandate to bot define and enforce a law based on (ridiculously) erroneous assumptions dating back to 1937. If a piece of maladroit legislation was worse timed and more disastrous consequences, it may have been the secret "three fifths" Compromise by which chattel slavery was buried in the Constitution of a new nation that proudly proclaimed in its revolutionary manifesto that "all men are created equal."

Harrison was upheld several times by the Supreme Court between 1915 and 1920 by 5-4 margins. In 1925, the same Court reversed itself in Linder, but, unfortunately, because Medicine never appealed, the original error was "grandfathered in" and the way thus paved for the Draconian Controlled Substances Act of 1970 (a circumstance that dramatically underscores the crucial difference between Medicine and the Law.

The CSA, was conceptualized by then-Attorney General John Mitchell in 1969 after the Supreme Court struck down the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937 (which had also threatened Harrison (because both laws were transparently spurious “taxes” with no legitimate taxation purpose). Their real purpose, thinly disguised from the outset, was control of Medical prescriptions for designated drugs by unqualified federal agents based on ill-defined and (to this day) completely unproven hypotheses about “addiction.”

The obvious shortcomings of the drug war are augmented by Psychiatry's lack of verifiable objective standards: other than "organic" brain diseases, the conditions psychiatrists treat cannot be defined by anatomic Pathology, nor can “addiction” be considered as other than a behavioral manifestation.

Classifying "addiction" as a "disease" for which total abstinence is the obligatory "cure" and prison the only allowable "alternative therapy" is irrational, unjust, expensive, and has become increasingly destructive as new "substances are readily developed by molecular chemists for burgeoning criminal markets. Beyond that absurdity lurks another: we don't imprison non compliant diabetics for the "crime" of spilling sugar in their urine; why do we imprison drug users for a positive urine?

What has been (slowly) exposed by the unprecedented “push back” against federal marijuana prohibition in current state “medical marijuana” laws is disquieting evidence of a far deeper, and even more disturbing, flaw in human nature: our species, despite its vaunted cognitive prowess, seems intent on failure. Its exact mode is, as yet uncertain, but can be readily summarized: the more scientifically talented we become, the more dangerous we are to both ourselves, the environment, and to other species.

That notion was memorably summarized by cartoonist Walt Kelly in the Fifties when Pogo, his main character observed, ”we have met the enemy and he is us.”

Doctor Tom ]]> Personal tjeffo 2012-03-22T18:24:39+00:00 http://www.doctortom.org/archives/2012/03/annals_of_weapo.html weaponization is fairly straightforward. It involves the use of either old ideas or new technology as weapons that allow users to influence decisions by either killing their opponents or rendering them defenseless. In modern parlance, the concept of asymmetric warfare has emerged as a generic description of such tactics. The speed with which weaponization takes place can be appreciated by the evolution of powered flight from its first demonstration at Kitty Hawk in 1903, to the use of solitary B-29s to deliver the atomic bombs that convinced Hirohito to overrule his advisers and end the Pacific War in 1945.

Although seldom mentioned in accounts of that war, the national characteristic that made a conventional invasion and conquest of the Japanese so daunting was their embrace of suicide as a weapon, a belief deeply rooted in their history and mythology. Also seldom mentioned in conventional accounts was the abrupt turn around in their behavior after Hirohito's historic speech; finally, their high level of cooperation with the Occupation under General MacArthur between September 1945 and his sacking by Truman for insubordination. The high level of cooperation continued after MacArthur's termination and helped rehabilitate the nation from the terrible wounds of WW2.

Unfortunately, the concept of suicide as a weapon has recently been expanded to involve religious martyrdom for Moslems of many different national origins. While its use is now an almost daily event in South Asia, its most dramatic and effective expression was the coordinated 9/11/01 attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, which not only inflicted severe psychological damage on Western nations, but also spooked (tempted?) an inexperienced Presidential Administration into waging a ruinous war that was more unfocused, wasteful, and destructive than need be; results that were explicitly warned against before the search for bin Laden at Tora bora was abandoned.

By chance, my entry into the practice of "cannabis medicine" (a designation I abjure) began at almost the same time as 9/11. Although already convinced by working for 5 years in Drug Policy "Reform" that America's drug war was a huge policy mistake, it has taken a decade of clinical experience with cannabis users to appreciate its enormity and far reaching consequences. Those concepts have led me to theorize about why our entire species now seems so intent on its own destruction and so blind to its imminent possibility.

I have accordingly decided to limit my practice to "renewing" old patients as I attempt to inform readers about the unpalatable reality I see as awaiting our species. My fervent hope is that humans will find some way to avoid that looming disaster, but escape seems both unlikely and would be intrinsically painful in any event.

Doctor Tom]]> Personal tjeffo 2012-03-20T17:16:45+00:00 http://www.doctortom.org/archives/2012/03/smoking_and_the.html declared by Richard Nixon in 1971. Although credible victories are non-existent, there has been a surprising degree of acceptance of a policy many privately agree is a loser. That there have been almost no serious calls for an end to the drug war begs a logical question: Why? What accounts for that immunity from criticism, or at least calls for change, in a policy lacking any credible claims of victory?

The answer has just been hinted at by events in Afghanistan: we have have been asked to withdraw our troops from a troubled nation we entered as ally in the fanciful and unnecessary "War on Terror" declared by the an illegitimate Bush-Cheney Administration after the shocking (but hardly surprising) events of 9/11. The facts at that time were that Afghanistan was a proud, but poor nation that was earning most of its foreign exchange from the heroin trade carried out by its Northern Alliance (of heroin growers with the knowledge of the CIA.

Our misbegotten drug war had been playing a not-so-hidden role in shaping our Afghan misadventure well before 9/11. In fact, the global market for illegal heroin was an American creation that predated both the modern "Drug War" and our military involvement in Vietnam, facts documented in the first edition of Alfred McCoy's "Politics of Heroin" in 1974. The later use of drug smugglers by the CIA was documented in McCoy's second edition in 1991. Since stumbling into an Asia version of the "French Connection," as a twenty-five year old graduate student at Yale, the Australian born McCoy has earned his PhD in Asian studies, become a full professor at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, and also an obsessed student of America's favorite folly: the war on drugs.

Against an updated background provided by McCoy and his graduate student Brett Reilly, it becomes easy to understand how a cascade of bad decisions, cover-ups and assorted misadventures have plagued this nation since its founders made their own great mistake: secretly agreeing to mollify South Carolina planters by retaining chattel slavery and referring its victims in our Constitution as "those obligated to service."

Although American "Democracy" has been seen as a success by much of the world, it has not lived up to its own promises and may already be in serious decline, a process accelerated considerably by the spectacular maturation of Science over the two centuries since the Constitution was written.

It's still too early to tell, but we may just be another empire of the type that's been failing in the same part of the world since the days of Alexander the Great.

Doctor Tom]]> Personal tjeffo 2012-03-19T20:39:56+00:00 http://www.doctortom.org/archives/2012/03/annals_of_futil.html wealth or influence of their clients. Thus prostitution has evolved into a complex, multilevel industry in "advanced" nations. However, even when "decriminalized," a stigma remains, and prostitution's harmful consequences are only mitigated, rather than "cured."

Recent American attempts at prohibition have been directed at two "substances," alcohol and "drugs," which until recently, had not even been thought of as in the same category. Although it was a mainstay of Colonial American commerce, the damage produced by excessive consumption of alcohol led to a Temperance Movement by the 1830s. During the balance of the 19th Century several state prohibition laws were passed, primarily in Midwestern states, but all were eventually undone by smuggling from adjacent "wet" states. That pattern encouraged the Anti Saloon League to adopt Constitutional Amendment as a new strategy in 1893 in the belief that a national law would have a greater chance of success. The Eighteenth Amendment was finally passed in 1918 and went into effect in January 1920; the idea that it would lead to national sobriety quickly proved delusional. Although the failure of Prohibition had been obvious to many from its inception, the federal government has never formally admitted that reality; even after a novel Repeal Amendment passed in 1933. Beyond that, the economic woes of the Great Depression may have helped obscure the historic necessity of Repeal.

Despite its relatively brief duration, the "Noble Experiment" generated several adverse consequences that have become part of American Culture. Perhaps the worst was the transformation of localized crime into a National Industry, one that received another break when the federal agency that should have become its nemesis (the FBI) became controlled by J. Edgar Hoover, a Director whose human weaknesses allegedly allowed the Mafia to blackmail him into denying its existence for decades. Thus the Thirties witnessed the growth of protection rackets, illegal gambling, and union corruption; all of which helped replace the criminal funding lost when alcohol was "legalized" by Repeal.

World War Two added to the Mafia's coffers by adding black markets for goods rationed because of wartime shortages. The power of the mob was also demonstrated by the deal Lucky Luciano allegedly made from his prison cell after the French Liner Normandie mysteriously caught fire and burned shortly after docking in New York.

Thus it's clear that the failed "Noble Experiment" triggered a cascade of adverse long term effects. Ironically, Harry Anslinger, the federal bureaucrats appointed to head the FBN in 1930, benefited from the same tactics J Edgar Hoover used used to protect his FBI. That America's founders would have been pleased by the federal police agencies the two bureaucrats worked protect is as unlikely as it is unknowable.

The surviving American policy of prohibition is expressed as the invidious War on Drugs, now enforced under the Controlled Substances Act of 1970. Its euphemistic invocation of "control" can't put lipstick on the prohibition pig, no one will mention, nor can it transform its increasingly costly policy failure into a "success."

Whether that reality will be appreciated quickly enough by enough citizens to bring about much needed change is not at all certain; it seems more likely that denial will continue to characterize our species' uncertain future while obscuring recognition of its all-too obvious dangers.

Doctor Tom ]]> Dr. Tom's Blog tjeffo 2012-03-18T17:14:41+00:00 http://www.doctortom.org/archives/2012/03/humanity_and_th.html The Impact of Scientific Thinking

Since the advent of empirical Science five or so centuries ago, our species has made spectacular progress in its attempts to understand and control its environment. Unfortunately that progress can now be seen to have been rather uneven: too much of the former and not enough of the latter. The most obvious result of our rapidly evolving technological prowess is a corresponding increase in the number of humans now inhabiting the planet; unfortunately, it's also likely that a majority are less content and more worried about their future than ever.

The reasons for that population explosion and its attendant discontent are both multiple and complex; my own opinion is that it's related to an evolutionary flaw in the development of the human brain, our organ of survival and cognition, which is also the source of the new ideas that have been impacting our planetary ecology at a progressive rate. The glitch I have in mind is the parallel evolution of our brain's emotional and cognitive centers, both of which had survival value and were thus retained in such close physical and synaptic proximity that an immediate emotional response to any cognitive stimulus ultimately became the human default, a concept first articulated by American neurologist Paul McLean in postulating the Triune Brain.

Pressure from Recent Developments

It's now generally accepted that the universe (cosmos) is more vast and timeless than could have been imagined even a few centuries ago; there's also increasing evidence that the survival of all species, including our own, has been shaped by unpredictable evolutionary processes that have been determining the survival of myriad complex organisms for at least 500 million years, a time span most humans still find either very troubling or impossible to believe. In any event, this rapidly accumulating flood of new information casts considerable doubt on still-extant religious beliefs in an omniscient deity primarily focused on individual human behavior.

The speed with which new scientific discoveries are forcing our species to confront complex and generally unwelcome ideas can be appreciated from the fact that the Darwinian intuition that led to the concept of evolution occurred less than 150 years ago and was validated relatively quickly; first, by Mendel's systematic studies of what came to be known as genes (although he would have disagreed with Darwin, had they ever met). After the structure of DNA was disclosed in 1953, progress became especially rapid; most educated people now have at least a nodding acquaintance genetic engineering, and the mapping of genomes. Some of the less predictable uses of DNA have tracking human migrations from Africa, and the positive identification of individuals, even down to providing unequivocal proff that we avenged 9/11 by assassinating Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan last May.

In stark contrast to those achievements, we have not learned to live in harmony despite the obvious danger that our disagreements, when magnified sufficiently, can easily lead to war, or that war in the nuclear age runs the risk of nuclear winter. Although doubted by skeptics, the nuclear winter hypothesis was (fortunately) not tested by an exchange of missiles when the actual danger had been greatest. For what it's worth, some confirmatory evidence was supplied by the eruption of Mount Pinatubo.

Perhaps the most important thing we can learn from recent history is how lucky we have been as a species to have flirted with disaster and been spared. I hope our good luck continues.

Doctor Tom ]]> Dr. Tom's Blog tjeffo 2012-03-02T16:47:26+00:00 http://www.doctortom.org/archives/2012/02/annals_of_human.html monopoly, the need to dominate whatever commercial, academic, or political venture they are engaged in. Although not fully expressed in everyone, that same need to control has often been prominent in charismatic leaders, who, through control of governments or important organizations, have exerted great impact by recruiting dedicated followers (Hitler and Gandhi are familiar examples, but there are many others).

Following the evolution of an effective Scientific Method roughly five centuries ago, the ability of governments to feed their populations, fabricate weapons and sponsor the invention of complex devices generated wealth and greatly enhanced the pace of “progress.” Unfortunately, those increased abilities were usually not accompanied by a matching increase in wisdom and restraint.

The human need to “control” has also increased human wealth, food supply, and population, especially during the Twentieth Century. Despite the record numbers killed by war, famine, epidemics, and natural disasters, the Earth’s human population increased four-fold during that hundred years and was, if anything, more politically unstable in 2000 than it had been in 1900; Ironically, not by wars between the “isms” that had struggled for dominance between 1919 and 1989, but resurrection of the religious differences that produced the Crusades in the Eleventh, Twelfth, and Thirteenth Centuries. The intensity of the residual hatred became apparent in 2001, when Muslim terrorists emulated Palestinian suicide bombers and Japanese “Bushido” warriors by combining hijacked Airliners with suicide in a devastating simultaneous attack on America and its economy.

Unfortunately, America’s own unsuccessful 14 year experiment with “Prohibition” of alcohol between 1920 and 1933 had inspired the rapid development of organized crime, which has since invaded other markets and institutions to a considerable degree. By 2000 we could boast the world’s most populous jail and prison populations, largely based on the federal bureaucracy’s conviction that arresting and incarcerating large numbers of “drug criminals” is good Public Health, to be preferred to actually understanding drug use as human behavior.

My own interest, and the source of much of my information, has grown directly from the unexpected opportunity provided by Proposition 215 to study the unique population of US drug users who began appearing in the mid-Sixties and has been growing steadily in number ever since. In fact, it is that growth and the failure of (federally compliant) “research” to understand the reasons behind it that seem to be the most important revelations of the study.

In essence, gaining an accurate understanding the complex relationships between human dishonesty, the noxious effect of childhood insecurity and the genesis of a "war on drugs" may be our biggest challenge as a species. Whether we are up to the job should start becoming apparent by November 2012.

Doctor Tom ]]> Dr. Tom's Blog tjeffo 2012-02-26T20:34:11+00:00