[Vision2020] Discussing Marijuana via Social Media

Wed Sep 4 06:54:13 PDT 2013

Darrell,

Is the so-called 'War on Drugs' a success? I think it's as much a failure as our other wars on nouns, as destructive and pointless.

Sunil

Date: Tue, 3 Sep 2013 22:33:58 -0700
From: rforce2003 at yahoo.com
To: vision2020 at moscow.com
Subject: Re: [Vision2020] Discussing Marijuana via Social Media

I think you need to weigh the harm the substance does versus what is required to suppress it.  In the long stretch of human history, people have ingested various mood-altering substances, alcohol being one that was integrated into many cultures going back into prehistory. It happens to be a drug that can be easily produced from readily available substances by unskilled labor. We had some experience with prohibition of alcohol in the US, and democratically decided that the cost of general suppression was not what we were willing to pay; we'd settle for curbing the most egregious abuses, and live with the deleterious effects, estimated at $223 billion per year. The economic costs of tobacco smoking are estimated at $157 billion per year.
Marijuana is another drug with a long history, but was not as widespread culturally, indeed, in the US is was regarded as only being used by "those people". However, over the last fifty years use has become more widespread among the general population (roughly half have tried it). A small majority now support legalization, yet the cost to state and federal governments for marijuana suppression is an estimated $20 billion per year. The argument can be made that the relatively benign effects of the drug as compared to alcohol or tobacco doesn't warrant such an expenditure. Voters in Colorado, Washington, California and Alaska seem to agree.  à chacun son goût  Ron Force
Moscow Idaho USA
        From: Darrell Keim <keim153 at gmail.com>
 To: Art Deco <art.deco.studios at gmail.com> 
Cc: "vision2020 at moscow.com" <vision2020 at moscow.com> 
 Sent: Tuesday, September 3, 2013 2:49 PM
 Subject: Re: [Vision2020] Discussing Marijuana via Social Media

Absolutely, Art!  So the logical thing to do is to legalize more drugs, thereby increasing that toll.

On Tue, Sep 3, 2013 at 2:41 PM, Art Deco <art.deco.studios at gmail.com> wrote:

Its difficult for me to understand those bitching so much about marijuana given huge toll that alcohol consumption has on our society.  Just Google the costs of alcohol consumption on society to get a little hint.

w.

On Tue, Sep 3, 2013 at 5:11 PM, Darrell Keim <keim153 at gmail.com> wrote:

I had heard about it, but not realized it was available online.  Watching momentarily.  Personally, I don't have much issue with medical marijuana.  People in real pain should have access to relief.  What I don't like is the poor way it has been implemented in the various states that are trying.  If it is medical, it should be treated as such.  The drug should be dispensed from REAL pharmacies.

On Tue, Sep 3, 2013 at 1:56 PM, Saundra Lund <v2020 at ssl1.fastmail.fm> wrote:

Did you happen to catch Dr. Sanjay Gupta’s recent “Weed” documentary?  It really was quite interesting . . . and discussed how the “anti” crowd really has been who manipulates the science  J

 In case you missed it:

http://www.cnn.com/2013/08/08/health/gupta-changed-mind-marijuana

Why I changed my mind on weedBy Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN Chief Medical Correspondent

updated 8:44 PM EDT, Thu August 8, 2013

 (CNN) -- Over the last year, I have been working on a new documentary called "Weed." The title "Weed" may sound cavalier, but the content is not.

I traveled around the world to interview medical leaders, experts, growers and patients. I spoke candidly to them, asking tough questions. What I found was stunning.

Long before I began this project, I had steadily reviewed the scientific literature on medical marijuana from the United States and thought it was fairly unimpressive. Reading these papers five years ago, it was hard to make a case for medicinal marijuana. I even wrote about this in a TIME magazine article, back in 2009, titled "Why I would Vote No on Pot."

Well, I am here to apologize. 

I apologize because I didn't look hard enough, until now. I didn't look far enough. I didn't review papers from smaller labs in other countries doing some remarkable research, and I was too dismissive of the loud chorus of legitimate patients whose symptoms improved on cannabis.

Instead, I lumped them with the high-visibility malingerers, just looking to get high. I mistakenly believed the Drug Enforcement Agency listed marijuana as a schedule 1 substance because of sound scientific proof. Surely, they must have quality reasoning as to why marijuana is in the category of the most dangerous drugs that have "no accepted medicinal use and a high potential for abuse."

 They didn't have the science to support that claim, and I now know that when it comes to marijuana neither of those things are true. It doesn't have a high potential for abuse, and there are very legitimate medical applications. In fact, sometimes marijuana is the only thing that works. Take the case of Charlotte Figi, who I met in Colorado. She started having seizures soon after birth. By age 3, she was having 300 a week, despite being on seven different medications. Medical marijuana has calmed her brain, limiting her seizures to 2 or 3 per month.

I have seen more patients like Charlotte first hand, spent time with them and come to the realization that it is irresponsible not to provide the best care we can as a medical community, care that could involve marijuana.

We have been terribly and systematically misled for nearly 70 years in the United States, and I apologize for my own role in that.

 I hope this article and upcoming documentary will help set the record straight.

On August 14, 1970, the Assistant Secretary of Health, Dr. Roger O. Egeberg wrote a letter recommending the plant, marijuana, be classified as a schedule 1 substance, and it has remained that way for nearly 45 years. My research started with a careful reading of that decades old letter. What I found was unsettling. Egeberg had carefully chosen his words:

"Since there is still a considerable void in our knowledge of the plant and effects of the active drug contained in it, our recommendation is that marijuana be retained within schedule 1 at least until the completion of certain studies now underway to resolve the issue."

Not because of sound science, but because of its absence, marijuana was classified as a schedule 1 substance. Again, the year was 1970. Egeberg mentions studies that are underway, but many were never completed. As my investigation continued, however, I realized Egeberg did in fact have important research already available to him, some of it from more than 25 years earlier.

High risk of abuse

In 1944, New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia commissioned research to be performed by the New York Academy of Science. Among their conclusions: they found marijuana did not lead to significant addiction in the medical sense of the word. They also did not find any evidence marijuana led to morphine, heroin or cocaine addiction.

We now know that while estimates vary, marijuana leads to dependence in around 9 to 10% of its adult users. By comparison, cocaine, a schedule 2 substance "with less abuse potential than schedule 1 drugs" hooks 20% of those who use it. Around 25% of heroin users become addicted.

The worst is tobacco, where the number is closer to 30% of smokers, many of whom go on to die because of their addiction.

There is clear evidence that in some people marijuana use can lead to withdrawal symptoms, including insomnia, anxiety and nausea. Even considering this, it is hard to make a case that it has a high potential for abuse. The physical symptoms of marijuana addiction are nothing like those of the other drugs I've mentioned. I have seen the withdrawal from alcohol, and it can be life threatening.

I do want to mention a concern that I think about as a father. Young, developing brains are likely more susceptible to harm from marijuana than adult brains. Some recent studies suggest that regular use in teenage years leads to a permanent decrease in IQ. Other research hints at a possible heightened risk of developing psychosis.

Much in the same way I wouldn't let my own children drink alcohol, I wouldn't permit marijuana until they are adults. If they are adamant about trying marijuana, I will urge them to wait until they're in their mid-20s when their brains are fully developed.

Medical benefit

While investigating, I realized something else quite important. Medical marijuana is not new, and the medical community has been writing about it for a long time. There were in fact hundreds of journal articles, mostly documenting the benefits. Most of those papers, however, were written between the years 1840 and 1930. The papers described the use of medical marijuana to treat "neuralgia, convulsive disorders, emaciation," among other things.

A search through the U.S. National Library of Medicine this past year pulled up nearly 20,000 more recent papers. But the majority were research into the harm of marijuana, such as "Bad trip due to anticholinergic effect of cannabis," or "Cannabis induced pancreatitits" and "Marijuana use and risk of lung cancer." 

In my quick running of the numbers, I calculated about 6% of the current U.S. marijuana studies investigate the benefits of medical marijuana. The rest are designed to investigate harm. That imbalance paints a highly distorted picture.

The challenges of marijuana research

To do studies on marijuana in the United States today, you need two important things.

 First of all, you need marijuana. And marijuana is illegal. You see the problem. Scientists can get research marijuana from a special farm in Mississippi, which is astonishingly located in the middle of the Ole Miss campus, but it is challenging. When I visited this year, there was no marijuana being grown.

The second thing you need is approval, and the scientists I interviewed kept reminding me how tedious that can be. While a cancer study may first be evaluated by the National Cancer Institute, or a pain study may go through the National Institute for Neurological Disorders, there is one more approval required for marijuana: NIDA, the National Institute on Drug Abuse. It is an organization that has a core mission of studying drug abuse, as opposed to benefit.

Stuck in the middle are the legitimate patients who depend on marijuana as a medicine, oftentimes as their only good option.

Keep in mind that up until 1943, marijuana was part of the United States drug pharmacopeia. One of the conditions for which it was prescribed was neuropathic pain. It is a miserable pain that's tough to treat. My own patients have described it as "lancinating, burning and a barrage of pins and needles." While marijuana has long been documented to be effective for this awful pain, the most common medications prescribed today come from the poppy plant, including morphine, oxycodone and dilaudid.

Here is the problem. Most of these medications don't work very well for this kind of pain, and tolerance is a real problem.

Most frightening to me is that someone dies in the United States every 19 minutes from a prescription drug overdose, mostly accidental. Every 19 minutes. It is a horrifying statistic. As much as I searched, I could not find a documented case of death from marijuana overdose.

It is perhaps no surprise then that 76% of physicians recently surveyed said they would approve the use of marijuana to help ease a woman's pain from breast cancer.

When marijuana became a schedule 1 substance, there was a request to fill a "void in our knowledge." In the United States, that has been challenging because of the infrastructure surrounding the study of an illegal substance, with a drug abuse organization at the heart of the approval process. And yet, despite the hurdles, we have made considerable progress that continues today.

Looking forward, I am especially intrigued by studies like those in Spain and Israel looking at the anti-cancer effects of marijuana and its components. I'm intrigued by the neuro-protective study by Lev Meschoulam in Israel, and research in Israel and the United States on whether the drug might help alleviate symptoms of PTSD. I promise to do my part to help, genuinely and honestly, fill the remaining void in our knowledge.

Citizens in 20 states and the District of Columbia have now voted to approve marijuana for medical applications, and more states will be making that choice soon. As for Dr. Roger Egeberg, who wrote that letter in 1970, he passed away 16 years ago.

I wonder what he would think if he were alive today. 

 From: vision2020-bounces at moscow.com [mailto:vision2020-bounces at moscow.com] On Behalf Of Darrell Keim

Sent: Tuesday, September 03, 2013 1:32 PM
To: vision2020 at moscow.com
Subject: [Vision2020] Discussing Marijuana via Social Media

 I enjoyed this article about why talking drug use prevention is so difficult on the internet.  Certainly matches my own findings.  My father was also roundly attacked when he lobbied against M legalization in his state.

 This article from Sue Rusche of What About The Children campaign was published to show just how inane are comments from the drug user community on the internet. The sad part is that many young people use Facebook and Twitter and can be easily influenced by the comments they read on these and similar sites.  Parents need to educate their youngsters so that they know how biased and full of untruths such comment from drug users can be. NDPA

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Six days after The Huffington Post published my latest article, browsers had logged in 156 comments. The post was titled Marijuana Legalization Proponents Deny Health Harms Just Like the Tobacco Industry Did; 153 of the 156 comments proved the point. 

Just 30 people made 80 percent (125) of the comments. Contributing the most were truthaboutmmj (19); kevin hunt2012 (12); Andrew swanteni (9); Blows Against the Empire and ConnieInCleveland (6 each); RMForbes, SchumannFu, and Volteric (5 each); JohnThomas, Tomaniac, and WowFolksAreDumb (4 each); average dude, FlyingTooLow, JD Salinger, Matthew Fairbrother, McMike55, moldy, Paul Paul, and susierr (3 each). Eleven people contributed 2 comments each; 28
 contributed 1 each. Only one person, Jan Beauregard, PhD, a Virginia psychotherapist whose specialties include addictive disorders, agreed that marijuana has health harms. She contributed three comments. 

Clicking a link in a commenter’s name will take you to Huff Post’s Social News and a collection of all the comments that person has made about Huff Post stories. Commenters apply for a spot on Social News by linking it to their Facebook accounts, which magnifies Huff Post’s reach. Call it Huff Post squared. Huff Post cubed occurs if commenters also link Social News to their
 Twitter accounts. Huff Post awards badges to commenters based on the number of comments they make on Huff Post’s stories and the number of Facebook Friends and Twitter Followers they have. The more comments, friends, and followers, the higher level badges they earn. WowFolksAreDumb, for example, who must hold some kind of record, has written more than 10,000 comments since joining Social News in May 2012 and has earned four badges–Level 2 Networker, Level 2 Superuser,
 Level 1 Crime Solver, and Moderator. 

Huff Post has brilliantly tapped into social media to expand its audience exponentially. But this brave new world comes at a cost. Few editors live in this world. Opinions triumph over facts. Quantity trumps quality. Truth loses. 

Juxtapose this with two major problems of current science: 1) the public cannot access most published studies and 2) scientific disciplines are so specialized that public access would hardly matter. A PhD is needed to understand the complexity of new knowledge scientists are developing today, and a PhD in one discipline does not guarantee understanding of knowledge developed in another. Scientists can’t speak each other’s languages anymore, so specialized have various disciplines become. An astronomer couldn’t explain the genome to you any better than a geneticist could explain the cosmos. 

Without access to comprehensible science, science illiteracy rules, particularly in the area of the science that underlies addictive drugs. Perhaps the most puzzling argument that runs through many of the comments about my post is one that rejects later work which contradicts earlier studies. WowFolksAreDumb, for example, writes, “According to Dreher 1994, there are no prenatal or neonatal differences between babies from mothers who did use cannabis during pregnancy and babies from mothers who did not.” In addition to the 2012 study I wrote about, more than 50 other studies about the harmful effects of marijuana on the developing
 fetus have been published since 1994, but WowFolksAreDumb claims the 1994 study negates them all. Maxpost, Midnight Toker, goes a step further. He interprets Dreher’s study to mean: “Pregnant women SHOULD smoke DOPE!!!” 

Commenters attacked all the studies I wrote about, particularly the study indicating a link between marijuana use and testicular cancer. Steve Hager dismissed it this way: “I believe the testicular cancer study involved 6 people, maybe it was only 3. Worthless, really.” That study actually involved 163 young men diagnosed with testicular cancer and a control group of 292 healthy men of the same age and ethnicity and asked them about their drug use. The investigators found that compared to those who had never used marijuana, men who had used the drug were twice as likely to have testicular cancer. It’s difficult to understand why Mr.
 Hager couldn’t trouble himself to check how many people were involved in the study since I provided links to both the account of it published by Science Daily and the abstract of the study itself. Both clearly state the number of research subjects.

The collision of social media with current, complex science produces a chasm where scientific truth can be manipulated easily – and aggressively. I emailed Dr. Beauregard to thank her for supporting the marijuana science I had written about. She emailed back, “I have found many of the same facts, but the comments are more than I can stand and the backlash is horrific. I only posted a few things and have had literally over 50 people email me with hostile, emotional comments based on personal experience as a user.” 

And that, in a nutshell, is the heart of the problem. When it comes to marijuana, users dominate not just Huff Post, but the Internet as well. They relentlessly assault anyone who reports that a marijuana study might show a detrimental effect. Few have time to put up with this, not therapists like Dr. Beauregard who treats marijuana addiction, not scientists who conduct the studies, not writers who report the science. With marijuana, what takes place on the Internet is a shouting match; those who shout loudest win.

After this experience, I’ve learned something else about the drug: marijuana not only makes you lie, it makes you rude.

Source: www.nationalfamilies.org  National Families in Action March 29, 2013 

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-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)

art.deco.studios at gmail.com

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 List services made available by First Step Internet,

 serving the communities of the Palouse since 1994.

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=======================================================
 List services made available by First Step Internet,
 serving the communities of the Palouse since 1994.
               http://www.fsr.net
          mailto:Vision2020 at moscow.com
=======================================================

=======================================================
 List services made available by First Step Internet,
 serving the communities of the Palouse since 1994.
               http://www.fsr.net
          mailto:Vision2020 at moscow.com
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