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Tell that to the families with children with epilepsy being successfully treated for seizures and other symptoms using cannabis oil.

Just as soon as you provide adequate evidence in the form of unambiguous medical studies confirming its effectiveness for the conditions. Right now the evidence for cannibidiol is largely anecdotal and the effectiveness or lack thereof is unclear.

Even if it does work it doesn't follow that because a demonstrably small number of people get genuine medical relief I'm supposed to believe that everybody people seeking marijuana are actually doing so for legitimate medical reasons. You must be either high yourself or dumb if you believe that. I had a dispensary open up (briefly) right next door to my office about 3 years ago. I assure you that NOBODY (or near as makes no difference) that was showing up was the slightest bit ill. These were people looking to get high. The medical exemption was largely an effort for most people to make an end run around federal and state laws against the substance so they could get high. Nothing more.

Your information is extremely prejudiced, and out of date.

Prejudiced? Hardly. I don't give a shit at all if people want to smoke weed recreationally. I just want them to be honest about it and stop pretending that it has anything to do with medicine for all but a tiny handful of cases.

There are many people with debilitating diseases and conditions that cannabis can provide treatment or relief from.

"Many"? Define many. I'll concur that the number is greater than zero. However the real number is a LOT less than the number seeking the product through. My wife is a physician and has been asked plenty of times for a prescription for marijuana by someone with no relevant medical condition.

You may want to look into getting a dog. They're more reliable than a 2 year old with a panic button. I get what you're thinking and it's good that you want to watch out for your family, but, I think a proactive approach may be wiser here.

I read about these guys, it may be something you want to look into. These dogs have the ability to detect a seizure is coming before it happens.

http://www.epilepsy.com/get-he...

"The Epilepsy Foundation", and of course they have branches in every State and many geographical regions within States (LA has a branch, Eastern Pennsylvania, Michigan, Northern Cal, Idaho, etc..). Need me to Google that for you or can you do that all by yourself?

Nowhere in the article does it state that the dog was hungry.

I don't mean to imply anything, but dogs are used to detect other medical conditions.

Look - if you're one of the morbidly obese, YOU caused your own health problems, not me, not someone else. And as the doctor pointed out in one of the links, the people who died in their hospital from H1N1 were huge, with the health problems that go along with it - if H1N1 hadn't gotten them, something else probably would have within the next 6 months, but it's no surprises that fat slobs are at higher risk.

Everyone else is sick and tired about how so many of the uber-fat, rather than actually trying to shed their excess poundage, want "handicapped status." That's as ironic as someone killing their parents and then asking for mercy because they're an orphan. Want 2 seats on the plane? Pay for them. After all, when you want 2 extra-large pizzas, you pay for both of them.

It's the same with smokers who get cancer and then say "It's not fair! Why me?"

Part of the blame for the epidemic of obesity has to go to food producers who use too much HFCS, just like part of the blame for cancer has to go to the cigarette companies, but they can't claim victim status when they're both the principal architect and a willing, informed participant in bringing about their own situation. This is not something they don't have control over. If they aren't willing to control what they put in their mouth, then they have to accept the consequences, and one of those consequences is higher mortality from any opportunistic infection.

What are they waiting for? A vaccine to cure obesity? Obesity isn't a "disease", though watching the morbidly obese at feeding time WILL make many sick. We see it often enough in restaurants - 4 people come in, somehow manage to sit on the chairs without breaking them, and proceed to eat everything in sight. First thing people do is look in the parking lot to see if there's a car with [$INSERT_EVEN_FATTER_STATE] license plates.

It's having a "spill-over effect" on the general population. Too many of us have forgotten what a person who's not overweight even looks like. Saying "I'm not fat" when they're sedentary, their BMI is over 25, and their waste is bigger than their chest. Yeah, riiiight. Or saying "You need to put on some weight" when the person's BMI is over 25, and they really could afford to lose (and are trying to shed) a few pounds.

H1N1 isn't a serious threat. HFCS, obesity, tobacco - THOSE are threats that make H1N1 look like a case of the hiccups.

Death toll from obesity catches up with tobacco http://www.foodnavigator-usa.com/Financial-Industry/Death-toll-from-obesity-catches-up-with-tobacco
Smokings Global Death Toll tp:wwwcbsnewscomstories20030912healthmain572833shtml

Almost 5 million people die because of smoking each year.

And now H1N1 is FINALLY sending us the common-sense message that those extra pounds, even if they don't make us officially "morbidly obese", put us at risk

The past four deaths have occurred in the past week, as hospitals in the valley report being inundated with patients with flu-like symptoms and doctors race to understand more about the new virus.

Most ICU patients have been overweight, he said, which is puzzling: Their weight isn't causing other health conditions that the federal government says puts people at higher risk of severe influenza complications, such as cardiovascular disease or diabetes, he said.

"I really don't consider being overweight a disease, at least in the patients we're seeing," Dean said. "It's not like they're so [obese] they've gone into heart failure. Somehow, the disease is striking them."

So, they're not "that" fat, but they're big enough that they obviously got more than a few bowls of Crisco in common. Why is this so unexpected? We've been saying for decades that extra pounds are a health risk.

The first time was when I was 11, and the surgeon ended up not removing enough (this was at Children's Hospital of Detroit), because I started having seizures 5 years later. So at 17, I went to the Cleveland Clinic and I had the rest of the area taken out, along with a miniscule amount of the right frontal lobe taken out. The only permanent effect I still have is that I have no "right" peripheral vision in both of my eyes. Which isn't really that severe. Any other problems I had, like fear recognition (linked to the amygdala, which was partially removed), hunger, and such were short term, and were expected.

If you are curious about how this stuff works, its an interesting read. http://professionals.epilepsy.com/page/surgery_cortical.html

The second surgery was also a reason why I decided to give up on religion, but that is a whole other story by itself. Let's just say that as an 11 year old child, I put my faith in a God to stop fear and pain. As a 17 year old teenager, I gave up on that God, and put the faith in myself, and it worked. Yeah, it might sound a little simplistic, and maybe surgeons knew more than before, but that kind of logic is the same kind that religions use to function, and that exact logic was what showed me that gods don't exist.

Like, they have fits. (cf Socrates; Dostoevsky and Kierkegaard; Byron, Shelly, and Tennyson; Ian Curtis.)

..and so I'll provide an answer

There is actually a lot of evidence backing my point...

This is hardly "insider" stuff--it is "popular science" material my friend. Hormones affect sleep, sleep affects hormones and so on...it is all linked and involves more than cognitive abilities are physical alertness. Sleep deprivation (especially long-term/chronic) can affect growth, metabolism, aging, sex drive...everything. There is no way a single drug that merely keeps you physically and mentally alert without sleep would be healthy if used chronically.