cannabis
oracknows | June 4, 2017This is the sort of story that I really hate but feel obligated to discuss. I hate these stories because they usually portend the unnecessary death of a cancer patient, often a child with cancer whose parents refuse chemotherapy or who refuses chemotherapy and is unfortunate enough to have a parent who either has alternative medicine proclivities herself, lacks the guts to tell the child that he's getting treated for his own good and he doesn't have a choice in the matter, or, in a couple of cases that I've discussed, conflates using indigenous people's medicine instead of chemotherapy as a…
oracknows | April 2, 2017It's been a while since I've written about the burgeoning business of selling marijuana as a cure for whatever ails you. As I've written before, there exists a mystical faith that is very much like herbalism that marijuana is a magical plant that can cure, well, almost anything, including cancer, glaucoma, autism, ADHD, and many other conditions, when in fact the evidence is rather shaky for most, if not all, of these claims. Regarding cancer, the usual claim is not that smoking marijuana cures the disease, but rather that cannabis oil isolated from marijuana cures cancer, a claim that Rick…
oracknows | August 28, 2015I must admit that I'm surprised. Pleasantly surprised, but quite surprised. The reason is that yesterday the Department of Licensing and Regulatory Affairs Director Mike Zimmer rejected the recommendation of the Michigan Medical Marijuana Review Panel to add autism to the list of qualifying conditions for which cannabis can be prescribed in the state of Michigan. I didn't expect this outcome, but I am pleased.
Although I've changed my mind over past stands and am now in favor of legalizing marijuana for recreational use, I have been harshly critical of the "medical marijuana" movement. Indeed…
oracknows | August 6, 2015When I first started writing about the claims made for medical marijuana and the cannabis oil derived from it, it didn't take long for me to characterize medical claims for cannabis as the "new herbalism," as opposed to pharmacognosy, the branch of pharmacology devoted to the study of natural products. The reason is simple. Although I support legalization of marijuana for recreational use, when I look at how medical marijuana has been promoted as a "foot-in-the-door" prelude to legalization, I see testimonials and flimsy evidence ruling over all. I see all the hallmarks of alternative…
oracknows | March 25, 2015It's been a while since I discussed medical marijuana, even though it's a topic I've been meaning to come back to since I first dubbed medical marijuana to be the equivalent of herbalism and discussed how the potential of cannabinoids to treat cancer has been, thus far, unimpressive, with relatively modest antitumor effects. The reason I refer to medical marijuana as the "new herbalism" is because the arguments made in favor of medical marijuana are very much like arguments for herbalism, including arguments that using the natural plant is superior to using specific purified cannabinoids,…
aardvarchaeology | February 9, 2015Medical marijuana is just a backward strategy to get recreational marijuana legalised. It's like the potheads twenty years ago who would praise hemp's excellent properties as a fibre and fuel source. They didn't care about any other fibre crops. It was a transparent ruse.
A medical intervention's legality should be pushed by worldwide medical consensus, not by a regional cultural predisposition to enjoy the compound's recreational use. Medical marijuana is a non-issue in European medicine.
That said, I believe the enormous public money put into the customs, legal and punitive systems to…
oracknows | August 18, 2014
About five weeks ago a month ago, I finally wrote the post I had been promising to write for months before about medical marijuana. At the time, I also promised that there would be follow-up posts. Like Dug the Dog seeing a squirrel, I kept running into other topics that kept me from revisiting the topic. However, recently the New York Times gave me just the little nudge I needed to come back and revisit the topic, first by openly advocating the legalization of marijuana, then by vastly overstating the potential medical benefits of pot (compare the NYT coverage with my post from last month…
gregladen | October 21, 2011Although one can not be certain, all the evidence points to the fact that William Shakespeare smoked pot. This is not a new story. My good friend and colleague, Dr. Francis Thackeray, who has never smoked pot in his life but who has acted in Shakespeare's plays numerous times, led a research team that put 2 and 2 together and came up with narcotic literary munchies. In Shakespeare's time, land owners were required to grow pot in order to provide fibers for making the rope needed hoist the sails and flags over the increasingly powerful British Navy and merchant vessels. One of the better…
terrasig | April 20, 2009While I was all caught up today with thinking about the 95th anniversary of the Ludlow Massacre and the 10th anniversary of the Columbine High School shootings, I was reminded of some lighthearted goings-on in Colorado today that take away some of the gloom on this Monday. (The Ludlow post is getting great traffic, by the way, but my historical posts on tragedies fail to generate much commenting for some odd reason.).
My good friends at Denver's Westword independent weekly paper tweeted me last week with this headline on from their blog, The Latest Word:
CU Chancellor, obviously high, sends…