The Waste Land

Ten Top Indica Strains:

1. Amsterdam Flame

2. BC Sweet God

3. BC Sweet Tooth

4. California Indica

5. First Lady

6. Granddaddy Grape Ape

7. Hash Plant

8. Northern Lights

9. Purple Kush

10. Wappa

via Colorado Medical Marijuana: Top 10 Indica Medical Marijuana Strains.

Cannabis Medicine - 

Collected references to known scientific cannabis research, studies, and analysis. Periodically updated.

via My List: A Collection on “Cannabis Medicine” (cannabis,marijuana,medicine,science,research,MMJ) | Diigo.

You also may find the tag search useful: cannabis, marijuana, MMJ, etc. There are literally thousands of references available in my Diigo library.

What message is State and Federal government sending to the children by knowingly lying to them about cannabis, spreading disinformation and propaganda in the media and ignoring the scientific evidence that is readily available to anyone who can capably use a search engine? The hypocrisy — of demonizing and criminalizing cannabis, which has never killed anybody, while the government “regulates” how many tons of toxic and carcinogenic chemicals are dumped into our environment (and even our food) by any given industry — does not escape young people.

“It would be sending the wrong message to the children” is one of the standard responses to arguments in support of legalizing marijuana for medicinal or recreational use. I’m convinced that by keeping cannabis a Schedule One Controlled Substance, the Federal government is sending the wrong message to children. The DEA classifies marijuana as a Schedule One substance, which recognizes no medical value in cannabis, and yet there are over 50 scientific studies that prove cannabis has medicinal value.

The decades-long Federal government call for “more research” operates in a hypocritically circular fashion. When pro-cannabis groups push for drug law reform, the government says more research is needed. However, we lack sufficient research because of the current drug laws and the ideology within the government that prevents such research from taking place. Legitimate scientists, who seek to perform controlled empirical tests on cannabis, face a daunting gauntlet of bureaucratic hurdles that can last over a decade, and even then they almost always get turned down. Even when they are permitted to do the research, and their studies are published, the government conveniently ignores any studies that disprove the government’s own anti-cannabis ideology.

In the meantime, while big pharmaceutical companies, politicians, and lawyers wrestle over where to draw the so-called line in the sand, sick and dying people are deprived of their medicine, subject to arrest and home invasion by SWAT teams, or left to fend for themselves in the unsafe street drug market. Mexican drug cartels now control about 90% of the marijuana smuggled into the United States, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration. Of course, now that the southern border has become militarized, many of those same cartels are now growing cannabis right here in the U.S., typically on public forest lands in California.

We should not politicize pharmacology. What message does this send to the children? The children are not stupid. They can see with their own eyes the patients in their families and neighborhoods who have been helped by cannabis as medicine. What message does lying to children send to them? If the government is lying about cannabis, maybe they’re lying about everything else they say is bad for us, right?

In the past few years, we have seen marijuana from an array of perspectives on the government’s side of the war on drugs. If, as the DEA and anti-cannabis advocates like to assert, there are alternative FDA-approved medications in existence for treatment of many of the proposed uses of cannabis as medicine, then why was GW Pharmaceuticals recently granted a U.S. patent for Sativex, which is IDENTICAL to raw, organic cannabis, only in liquid form and costing many times what cannabis sells for in dispensaries or even on the street? There is no guarantee that Sativex won’t be abused by patients to get high recreationally, even if they can afford to buy it, since the medicine is administered by the patients themselves.

Doesn’t the fact that a patent was even granted prove that cannabis has medicinal value? But wait, GW Pharmaceuticals is not the only entity that holds a U.S. patent for cannabis as medicine. It turns out that the Department of Health and Human Services also holds a cannabis patent (#6630507), granted in 2003. As you read through this .pdf document you will discover beyond any doubt whatsoever that cannabis has a tremendous variety of medicinal values and applications specific and provable enough to be granted a U.S. patent.

Cannabis is one of the first plants to have been used as a medicine, for religious ceremonies and recreationally, the first accounts of its use for these purposes stretching back 5000 years (reviewed in Mechoulam, 1986). The Cannabis plant from which the cannabis drug is derived has a very long history of medicinal use, with evidence (.pdf) dating back at least to 2,737 BCE, possibly even earlier. And yet the federal government continues to claim, in spite of these facts, that cannabis has no medicinal value? How can they possibly say that cannabis has no medicinal value, while at the same time they hold a patent that describes in great detail so many of the proven medicinal qualities that actually DO exist in cannabis?

Since one part of the government applied for the patent of medical marijuana, and another part of the government approved that patent, it seems logical to conclude that the Federal government knows and has publicly admitted that marijuana has valid medicinal value, despite their hypocritical claims that it doesn’t. Thousands of our military veterans are dependent on all kinds of prescription narcotic drugs with horrible side effects while the Department of Veteran’s Affairs stubbornly refuses to utilize medical marijuana, even though it would be very helpful in many cases, particularly in cases of PTSD. The VA allows veterans in states with legal medical marijuana programs to use cannabis without repercussions, but other veterans are denied the benefits of a medicinal cannabis program solely on the basis of where they happen to live. What message does allowing people to suffer needlessly send to our children whose parents may be war veterans in need of cannabis as medicine, or who may one day be service members themselves?

“Cannabis will one day be seen as a wonder drug, as was penicillin in the 1940s. Like penicillin, herbal marijuana is remarkably nontoxic, has a wide range of therapeutic applications and would be quite inexpensive if it were legal. Even now, good-quality illicit or homegrown marijuana, which is, at the very least, no less useful a medicine than Sativex, is less expensive than Sativex or Marinol.” – Dr. Lester Grinspoon, professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, Los Angeles Times, May 5, 2006

This may shock you. After all, isn’t our government’s official position that marijuana is not a medicine but a dangerous, addictive substance that only causes harm? Every month, four Americans battling serious illnesses receive a metal canister from the U.S. government, containing about 10 ounces of marijuana in pre-rolled cigarettes. The Federal medical marijuana program — referred to as a Compassionate Investigational New Drug (IND) program — resulted from a lawsuit (Randall v. U.S) filed in 1976 by glaucoma patient Robert Randall, who successfully showed that his use of marijuana was a medical necessity. The marijuana these patients receive is grown on a farm at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, mostly from seeds of Mexican origin, rolled and packaged at the Research Triangle Institute in North Carolina under the supervision of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA). The program is administered by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The Federal government doesn’t want people to know. They don’t deny the existence of the program, but they sure avoid talking about it. It gets stranger: The IND is officially a research program, designed to find out if marijuana works as a medicine. The consent form patients were required to sign when they enrolled calls it a “study.” Yet the Federal government has never studied its own patients.

The extent of the Federal government’s hypocrisy on the issue of medicinal cannabis truly knows no bounds. How many of you just realized that what this actually means is that the Federal government has known that cannabis DOES have medicinal value, and has committed perjury in every single cannabis prosecution for the last 74 years through basing drug policy on something which they know is false? The government’s reasons for maintaining an outdated and harmful position on medical marijuana are running out. Why does the Federal government, which supplies cannabis to these four patients through a Federal program, want to throw other sick people in jail for following the advice of their doctor?

Society may wake up and question why would we want to put one out of every three high school seniors in prison and pay for them to stay locked up behind bars. Society may realize that is not a good use of resources, and therefore rethink the drug war. Our government’s blind commitment to ecological suicide for the sake of short-term profit for a small group of wealthy individuals with unwarranted power over policy is not a good model for the rest of the world to follow. The people are way ahead of the government. But how long will it take for government policy to catch up and deliver what the people demand?