Beyond The Broken Spectrum

by Lester Grinspoon MD

CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts — A new study in the journal Neurology is being hailed as unassailable proof that marijuana is a valuable medicine. It is a sad commentary on the state of modern medicine that we still need “proof” of something that medicine has known for 5,000 years.

The study, from the University of California at San Francisco, found that smoked marijuana was effective at relieving the extreme pain of a debilitating condition known as peripheral neuropathy.

It was a study of HIV patients, but a similar type of pain caused by damage to nerves afflicts people with many other illnesses including diabetes and multiple sclerosis. (more…)

Everyone seems to have a different take on how to solve Americas health-care problem. But notice that every solution offered involves some elaborate new system of government controls. Different proposals include a public option, mandatory insurance for individuals, government-supported health-care exchanges, government-sponsored efficacy research, government-supported co-ops, and as many other ways of dictating consumer and producer behavior as can fit in a 1,000-page bill.

More government controls, we are told, are necessary to solve problems such as skyrocketing health-insurance prices, lack of competition among insurance companies, the inability of workers to keep their insurance policy when switching jobs, etc. Read More

In her 88 years, Florence Siegel has learned how to relax: A glass of red wine. A crisp copy of The New York Times, if she can wrest it from her husband. Some classical music, preferably Bach. And every night like clockwork, she lifts a pipe to her lips and smokes marijuana.

Long a fixture among young people, use of the country’s most popular illicit drug is now growing among the AARP set, as the massive generation of baby boomers who came of age in the 1960s and ’70s grows older.

The number of people aged 50 and older reporting marijuana use in the prior year went up from 1.9 percent to 2.9 percent from 2002 to 2008, according to surveys from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.

The rise was most dramatic among 55- to 59-year-olds, whose reported marijuana use more than tripled from 1.6 percent in 2002 to 5.1 percent.

Observers expect further increases as 78 million boomers born between 1945 and 1964 age. For many boomers, the drug never held the stigma it did for previous generations, and they tried it decades ago.

Some have used it ever since, while others are revisiting the habit in retirement, either for recreation or as a way to cope with the aches and pains of aging. Read More

A 42-year-old HIV patient with leukemia appears to have no detectable HIV in his blood and no symptoms after a stem cell transplant from a donor carrying a gene mutation that confers natural resistance to the virus that causes AIDS, according to a report published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine. Read More

A strange tale of oral sex, a knife fight and the most unlikely of pregnancies recently brought to light by the blogosphere has doctors touting the triumphant persistence of sperm.

In 1988, a 15-year-old girl living in the small southern African nation of Lesotho came to local doctors with all the symptoms of a woman in labor. But the doctors were quickly puzzled because, upon examination, she didn’t have a vagina.

“Inspection of the vulva showed no vagina, only a shallow skin dimple,” so doctors delivered a healthy baby boy via Caesarean, the authors wrote in a case report published in the British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology.

Her birth defect — called Mullerian agenesis or Mayer-Rokitansky-Küster-Hauser syndrome — didn’t necessarily surprise doctors, but her pregnancy did. Even the 15-year-old girl could not believe she was pregnant. Read More

Drug companies manipulated the World Health Organization into downgrading its definition of a pandemic so they could cash in on a swine flu outbreak, it is claimed.

An inquiry heard yesterday that the WHO allegedly softened its criteria for declaring a H1N1 flu pandemic last spring – just weeks before announcing there was a worldwide outbreak.

Critics said the decision was driven by pharmaceutical companies desperate to recoup the billions of pounds they had invested in researching and developing pandemic vaccines after the bird flu scares in 2006 and 2007.

Read more: Daily Mail

Former Law Enforcement Against Prohibition member Bradley Jardis has been removed from the organization due to his public stance that he would no longer arrest medical marijuana patients. Here is his announcement: (more…)

According to Rasmussen Reports, voters in Massachusetts turned out largely due to the health care issue, but were split in their opposition of the current legislation, with half saying that passing no legislation at all would be better. These numbers are surprising considering how “blue” the state is. Here’s hoping some politicians start listening up in D.C., but its likely we’ll need to clean house of both Republicans and Democrats. Both have failed to offer any good policy.

Here are some of the statistics provided:

Fifty-six percent (56%) of voters in the state say health care was the most important factor in their voting decision. Brown made it clear in the closing days of the campaign that he intended to go to Washington to vote against the health care plan proposed by President Obama and congressional Democrats.

Twenty-five percent (25%) of Massachusetts voters say the economy was most important.

Forty-seven percent (47%) favor the health care legislation before Congress while 51% oppose it. However, the intensity was clearly with those who are opposed. Just 25% of voters in Massachusetts Strongly Favor the plan while 41% Strongly Oppose it.

Fifty percent (50%) say it would be better to pass no health care legislation at all rather than passing the bill before Congress.

Fifty-three percent (53%) approve of the way that Barack Obama has handled his job as President. Thirty-nine percent (39%) approve of the way Deval Patrick has handled his job as governor of Massachusetts.

By DAVID L. NATHAN

Most Americans are paying too much for marijuana. I’m not referring to people who smoke it—using the drug generally costs about as much as using alcohol. Marijuana is unaffordable for the rest of America because billions are wasted on misdirected drug education and distracted law enforcement, and we also fail to tax the large underground economy that supplies cannabis.

On Monday, the New Jersey legislature passed a bill legalizing marijuana for a short list of medical uses. Outgoing Democratic Gov. Jon Corzine says he will sign it into law. This is a positive step, as cannabis has several unique medical applications. But the debate over medical marijuana has obscured the larger issue of pot prohibition.

As a psychiatrist, I treat individuals who often suffer from devastating substance abuse. Over many years of dealing with my patients’ problems, I have come to realize that we are wasting precious resources on the fight against marijuana, which more closely resembles legal recreational drugs than illegal ones. My conscience compels me to support a comprehensive and nationwide decriminalization of marijuana. (more…)

By Barbara H. Peterson

Original: http://farmwars.info/?p=2072

Controversy surrounding the use of marijuana, whether it is for recreational or medical purposes, is heating up.

The first state to legalize marijuana for medical purposes, California leads the country in decriminalizing the sale and use of cannabis. Other states are considering the issue… Now, a new initiative that will allow local governments to oversee and regulate cultivation, distribution, and sales — and to determine how and how much cannabis can be bought and sold within area limits — will be on the November 2010 ballot. National advocates say that regardless of the vote — signature gathering went fast and easy, according to reports — a major corner has been turned in national acceptance of marijuana use. (CSMonitor)

The real question is, why should a harmless plant that anyone can grow at home elicit such controversy. Why does the government care? Why criminalize it in the first place, and then keep it under control by regulating it after determining that people are going to use it anyway? The answer might lie here: (more…)

Article at MSNBC

The U.S. Senate today passed historic legislation to end the decade-long ban on implementing a medical marijuana law in Washington, D.C. This marks the first time in history Congress has changed a marijuana law for the better. Only Obama’s signature is needed for the change to become law. MPP

Researchers at the University of California-Berkeley have found that substituting marijuana for alcohol could help people overcome alcohol abuse, according to a report just published on PsychCentral.com, the largest and oldest Web-based independent mental health social network — http://psychcentral.com/news/2009/12/01/marijuana-to-control-alcohol-abuse/9863.html

A poll of 350 marijuana users found that 40 percent used cannabis to control their alcohol cravings, 66 percent as a replacement for prescription drugs and 26 percent for other, more harmful illegal drugs.  The study found that 65 percent of people reported using marijuana as a substitute because it has fewer adverse side effects than alcohol, illicit or prescription drugs, 34 percent because it has less withdrawal potential and 57.4 percent because cannabis provides better symptom management.

“Substituting cannabis for alcohol has been described as a radical alcohol treatment protocol,” said UC-Berkeley Researcher Amanda Reiman in the PsychCentral report.  “People might substitute cannabis, a potentially safer drug than alcohol with less negative side effects, if it were socially acceptable and available.”

News of the study comes as little surprise to SAFER (Safer Alternative For Enjoyable Recreation), a national organization dedicated to educating the public about the relative safety of marijuana compared to alcohol.

“Every objective study on marijuana has concluded that it is far less toxic, far less addictive, and contributes to far fewer social problems than alcohol,” said SAFER Executive Director Mason Tvert, who is a coauthor of the recently released book, Marijuana Is Safer: So why are we driving people to drink?

“It is irrational to allow the use of alcohol, but prohibit adults from making the rational, safer choice to use a less harmful substance,” Tvert said.  “If someone can overcome their incredibly damaging addiction to alcohol simply by using a substance as relatively benign as marijuana, by all means they should be allowed to do so.”

SAFER (Safer Alternative For Enjoyable Recreation) is a Colorado-based non-profit organization dedicated to educating the public about the relative safety of marijuana compared to alcohol.  For more information visit http://www.SAFERchoice.org

According to researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, a study they have published in the online journal PLoS ONE, demonstrate that human stem cells can be engineered into the equivalent of a genetic vaccine.

“We have demonstrated in this proof-of-principle study that this type of approach can be used to engineer the human immune system, particularly the T-cell response, to specifically target HIV-infected cells,” lead investigator Scott Kitchen, assistant professor of medicine in the division of hematology and oncology at the Devid Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, said in a release. “These studies lay the foundation for further therapeutic development that involves restoring damaged or defective immune responses toward a variety of viruses that cause chronic disease, or even different types of tumors.”

“They found a little bump on his rib cage and cut him open,” Simpson says. “He went from 200 pounds down to about 130. In 1972, we were having a drink and he collapsed right in front of me. I knew damn well it had to be the cancer coming back. They gave him six months to live, and he made it through three. I was 22 years old and didn’t know anyone who had died from cancer. He was down to about 50 pounds when he died on November 18, 1972. I used to shave him, and it was like trying to shave a skeleton.”

Two years after his cousin died, Simpson was listening to his car radio when he heard the results of a medical study at the University of Virginia claiming that THC reduced brain tumors in mice. “I stopped my car and just stared at the radio,” Simpson recalls. “At the time, I didn’t smoke pot or anything, although most of my friends did. The guy on the radio was laughing like a fool. Like this was all a big joke. I never heard anything more about it, so I thought it must be a joke.” (more…)