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Marijuana Could Prevent Alzheimer's, New Study
Chickan writes "'A puff a day might keep Alzheimer's away, according to marijuana research by professor Gary Wenk and associate professor Yannic Marchalant of the Ohio State Department of Psychology. Wenk's studies show that a low dosage in the morning of a certain canavanoid, a component in marijuana, reversed memory loss in older rats' brains. In his study, an experimental group of old rats received a dosage, and a control group of rats did not. The old rats that received the drugs performed better on memory tests, and the drug slowed and prevented brain cell death.' My fine university's dollars at work!" Maybe it works even better in combination with brain-preserving sips of coffee.
Hey, where's the roadside test for vicodin? Prescription codeine or morphine? Dextromethorphan?
I didn't bother to get into this discussion because the answer is obvious. Those chemicals are developed by commercial entities which pay big money to politicians to ensure that they are the only painkillers marketable to the masses. When an effective substance can be procured for next to nothing, they want to keep it off the market.
Plus, my original post, especially the part about the color of someone's tongue was, well, tongue-in-cheek.
There's a justification if you happen to be someone I want to harm. It gives me a way to sic the government on you.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Marijuana, Schedule I:
Findings required (from Controlled Substances Act):
(A) The drug or other substance has high potential for abuse.
(B) The drug or other substance has no currently accepted medical use in treatment in the United States.
(C) There is a lack of accepted safety for use of the drug or other substance under medical supervision.
None of these conditions are met for marijuana, so why isn't its Schedule I classification being challenged in court?
Murphey's fighting Occam, and we're in the stands.
I actually have some data from my sociology class that could support his claim. I don't have a reference to give you, except that the story is found in "The Human Experience" reader. I don't have it handy, or I'd give you a more exact reference, but the gist of the article was that all victimless crimes - not just marijuana, but also things like prostitution - serve to keep peoples' eyes off of the rich. It's typically the poor who are driven by desperation to do many of the victimless crimes (though, I suppose that could be argued in the case of marijuana, but there's still a significant portion of marijuana smokers who are poor or middle class).
In essence, when someone is arrested for marijuana or another victimless crime, it goes on their permanent record. It keeps the poor poor, because these people find it difficult if not impossible to find a steady job with a criminal record, and so, in order to survive, and with the mentality in place that "I'm already a criminal, so I can't really fall any further," these people often begin resorting to thievery and other crimes that are not victimless, and are sent to jail. Because the poor have been driven to these crimes, the eyes of the general population are drawn to them, and they say, "The poor are the criminals of our society. The poor cause all of our problems." Their eyes are diverted nicely from the problems of the rich as the enforced problems of the poor seem to carry more weight.
So, in that regard, it does help keep rich people rich. Or at least, it keeps them in power, which, in a roundabout way, keeps them rich.
The person who wrote the article was a professor teaching a class on the American justice system. Ironically, as an exercise, he asked the students to develop a prison system with the express intention of keeping the rich in power (before explaining all of the above to them), and what they developed was almost an exact copy of the American justice system.
wild tobacco is almost hallucinogenic and non-addictive whereas commercial tobacco is just addictive because of its extreme nicotene content.
Sorry, but that's simply incorrect. From "Growing the Hallucinogens":
And Wikipedia's entry on wild tobacco:
Note that article quotes a nicotine content of 6.5% for Y1, while the entry for Nicotiana Rustica claims 9%; in other words, the wild variety contains more nicotine than the cultivar specifically bred for a high nicotine content by tobacco companies.
Finally, New World Encyclopedia's entry on tobacco:
The hallucinogenic compound in wild tobacco is nicotine. It isn't addictive is because it simply isn't possible to smoke wild tobacco in the same quantities as the cured tobacco used in cigarettes without dying; or, looking at it the other way, cigarettes are addictive because they aren't strong enough to have a hallucinogenic effect, so you can chain smoke them and remain conscious.
Blank until
I always thought that marijuana has never been legalized, is because no one can ever remember where they left the petitions!!!
Hemp AKA marijuana was legal to begin with in the US. Many of the USA'a Founding Fathers were farmers who grew hemp. The first three presidents of the USA George Washington, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson all grew hemp on their farms. Thomas Jefferson once said farmers should be required to grow hemp, however he couldn't propose such a law because he knew that it would violate the farmers' rights. Hemp was only made illegal with the passage of the Marijuana Tax ACT of 1937. Yet even then it wasn't compleatly illegal. During WWII the federal government's Department of Agriculture produced the movie "Hemp for Victory" and showed it to farmers to encourage them to grow hemp. Besides the oil from hemp seeds, hemp was used to make cloth, cords, and rope.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Alan Ginsberg wrote a reasonably scholarly treatise a few decades ago called "The Marijuana Papers" detailing the campaign of Harry J. Ainslinger to portray marijuana smokers as some deranged combination of heroin and speed addict. Nobody knew any differently, and the media channel was rather narrow in the late 30's when Ainslinger used the weed as a plank in his senatorial campaign. We would somehow need to unravel and counter that in order to repeal the damage. I'd suggest you're right, that some form of education campaign is in order here.
And marijuana wasn't actually rendered illegal in subsequent legislation, it was simply given an egregiously high federal tax per ounce on its sale. By avoiding the tax, traffickers were able to be pursued by federal rather than state authorities, thus its entrenchment in federal pursuit.
It was postulated that since the perception was that only blacks smoked hemp, the idea of this "social disease" being transmitted cross-culturally implied a form of sanction for racism, and thus appealed to the fearful white anglo-saxon protestant (WASP) that made up most of Ainslinger's voter demographic in 1938.
Anyway, if you can find a copy it makes very interesting reading.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
This is a misnomer anyway. The old studies showing that marijuana causes memory loss were refuted long ago. In fact, almost all of the supposed negative effects of marijuana use were reported by one biased research team and their work can generally be dismissed outright.
There is a short term memory impairment caused by consistent regular high dose usage but it returns in an extremely short period of time after discontinuing marijuana use. The memory effects of years of marijuana use are reversed after as little as a month of discontinuing use.
The real negative side effects of marijuana use are 'a false sense of well being' *scratches head over that being considered negative*, the aggravation of already existing heart conditions, and the ability to cause and/or exacerbate lung conditions/cancer. The last is actually caused by the inhalation of smoke and can be avoided by using other means of ingestion.
Whole marijuana, like any other herb, will NEVER be considered a legal treatment for any condition by the AMA or FDA for Alzheimer's or anything else. The medical profession as a whole does not recommend natural supplements and herbs, they prefer prescription medications that are composed of purified and isolated chemicals.
The best that can be hoped is that prohibition and prosecution will be stopped against those using, posessing, distributing, and selling what is a fairly harmless herbal supplement. Addiction rates and known side effects (and liklihood of incidence) pale in comparison to over the counter medications like ephedrine, cough syrup, and asprin; not to mention prescription medications.