WAR ON DRUGS or is it a WAR ON US???

roots69

Rising Star
BGOL Investor
Prison for You. Profit for Me. Systemic Racism Effectively Bars Blacks from Participation in Newly-legal Marijuana Industry


“Although the butterfly and caterpillar are completely different, they are one and the same.”


Historically, blacks have been prosecuted and convicted across the United States at significantly higher rates when compared to whites for marijuana-related crimes, despite the fact that studies indicate marijuana use by whites and blacks is relatively equal. Further, individuals with lower economic means were dually susceptible to conviction as a result of less vigorous legal representation.

Now, laws have legalized marijuana for medicinal purposes in twenty-six states, along with a small portion of states (seven) legalizing marijuana for recreational use. Yet retroactive ameliorative relief is not widely available to those who were convicted under circumstances that are now legal, and as a result, stains remain on the records of a disproportionate number of blacks. Marijuana has become a big business, often being compared to the Gold Rush and referred to as the Green Rush. However, regulations across states that are a part of this Green Rush effectively wall out *524 those once convicted (overwhelmingly blacks) for participating in, and profiting from, the very same industry.

This Comment will discuss the history of racial disparity in enforcement of marijuana laws across the United States; the effect of state-sanctioned legalization of marijuana use, possession, and sale in limited states; the stance of the United States in general as it applies to policy on retroactive relief when laws change; the different avenues states have taken thus far to address how changes in the law should affect those already convicted; evidence of the big business opportunities emerging in legal marijuana markets; and the barriers to entry that exist--particularly for blacks--who have been disparately negatively impacted by the war on drugs.”

* * *

The American dream, as described by James Truslow Adams, “that life should be made richer and fuller for everyone and opportunity *545 remain open to all” has proven to be truly a dream in the realm of legal-marijuana opportunities. Arguably the United States' fastest growing and most lucrative new industry--marijuana-related business opportunities--are not available to most. This is especially true for blacks who are currently and historically were disproportionately targeted for marijuana-related offenses, despite equal use across racial lines. Whether it be a prior or current felony conviction, the fear of being targeted for arrest in an industry that remains federally illegal, a steep financial hurdle, or a farming requirement that can only be met by a select few, there are plenty of roadblocks to getting a piece of the Green Rush. In sum, “[h]ere are white men poised to run big marijuana businesses, dreaming of cashing in big-- big money, big businesses selling weed--after 40 years of impoverished black kids getting prison time for selling weed, and their families and futures destroyed.” Without rapid and deliberate intervention by lawmakers and voters, this playing field will continue to be set unfairly, thus continuing to perpetuate systemic racism in the United States.
 

roots69

Rising Star
BGOL Investor
Drug Wars in Black And White


Over the past two decades, we have waged war on drugs. Yet it is not likely to be news to any reader of this Symposium on race and criminal justice that the primary casualties of that war have been African Americans and other individuals of color. The debate over the racial complexion of the war against drugs often devolves into a clash of fundamental assumptions that are difficult purchase illegal drugs from members of their own race. houses" should attract disproportionate attention. Perhaps the predominantly white students of college campuses use as crime to finance his drug use.the criminal justice system, statistics that purport to validate enforcement decisions to focus on inner city communities of color. Ultimately, however, the criminal justice system is destined to find crime only where it losing weight to enhancing sexual or athletic performance to simply being happier--the 1990s saw a growth in the use of ingestible substances to deal with almost every type of problem imaginable.

In the absence of a strong cultural norm of self-restraint with respect to drug use generally, the justification for the current war against drugs rests heavily on an epidemiological form of morality that turns on the risks of harm that flow from the use of a drug by a given population. Notions about the harmfulness of a drug have always been inextricably intertwined with the race of those who use it, and drug use by minorities is usually seen as more harmful than drug use by whites in our society. The unparalleled severity of the current war against drugs rests, however, on greatly exaggerated notions of harm, particularly with respect to crack cocaine. For all its moralism and quasi-religious fervor, the crucial and inequitable premise of our current drug war is that whites can "handle their drugs" better than African Americans can. The result has been a drug war that is unprecedented in both its punitiveness and in its racially disparate impact--the criminal justice equivalent of total war.

These exaggerated notions of the harms of illegal drug use by African Americans are a perverse result of the liberality with which mainstream society views legal drugs. Our increasingly laissez-faire approach to legal drugs has produced profound anxieties about the absence of norms of self-restraint, and mainstream society exorcises those anxieties by overpunishing those who use illegal drugs. Race is the essential lubricant that makes this dysfunctional compromise work. The "otherness" of African Americans and other persons of color enables mainstream society to imagine the use of illegal drugs to be so much more harmful than legal drugs even though they are increasingly being used for related purposes.

The remainder of this article proceeds in two parts. Part II provides some background for the drug wars of the 1920s and lays out the statistical case that the drug wars of the twenties were both far less punitive and far less disparate in terms of its impact on whites and African Americans than our current drug war. Part III explores the cultural dynamics of the current war against drugs and the role that race plays in those dynamics. The conclusion briefly touches on the policy implications of this analysis for judges and legislators.
 

roots69

Rising Star
BGOL Investor
Crack as Proxy: Aggressive Federal Drug Prosecutions and the Production of Black--White Racial Inequality



In this article, we empirically examine jurisdictional variations in federal crack prosecutions to measure whether aggressive crack prosecutorial practices are associated with racial inequality in federal caseload characteristics and outcomes. Building on theories that address the production of inequality in institutional settings, we hypothesize that U.S. Attorneys' offices that are more proactive in charging defendants with crack, relative to other kinds of drugs, and relative to case strength and seriousness, will demonstrate higher rates of black--white racial inequality in case outcomes across the entire criminal caseload. Consistent with theories of institutional racism, our findings demonstrate that aggressive crack prosecutions at the district level are a strong predictor of black--white inequality in conviction rates across the entire criminal caseload, and a much more modest predictor of inequality in final sentence outcomes. We conclude by discussing the importance of organizational-level empirical analyses for more effectively uncovering the conditions under which inequality can and does flourish in legal settings, and suggest possible future lines of inquiry along these lines.

Crack cocaine first appeared in the major urban areas of New York, Miami, San Diego, and Los Angeles in the early 1980s, setting in motion a wave of new legislation and law enforcement practices that spread throughout the nation (Fagan and Chin 1989). Although the emergence of crack was associated with a number of social harms (Fryer et al. 2013), the political and legal response to its threat was disproportionately punitive, particularly at the federal level (Provine 2007; Reinarman and Levine 1997; Sklansky 1995). Most infamously, Congress passed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, a provision of which incorporated a 100-1 powder--crack cocaine disparity whereby, for *774 instance, offenses involving just 5 g of crack cocaine were subject to the same 5-year mandatory minimum sentence as offenses involving 500 g of powder cocaine. Two years later, it made possession of crack cocaine subject to a 5-year mandatory minimum prison sentence. No other simple drug possession offense mandated a prison sentence at all under the federal code (Pub. L. No. 100-690 1988).

A number of scholars have argued that the federal war on crack, including the on-the-ground deployment of crack laws, has functioned as a tool of racial subjugation while justified through the logics of public safety and crime control (Alexander 2010; Dvorak 2000; Lynch 2013; Provine 2007; Tonry and Melewski 2008). Congressional debates about crack reiterated racially coded media narratives about the dangerous “urban” poor addicted to crack (Dvorak 2000; Provine 2007), unfit black mothers raising crack babies (Roberts 1997), and other threats posed by crack-related criminality. These narratives were in direct contrast to how whites' cocaine and freebase use, which predated crack cocaine but received little media and political attention, was both portrayed and sanctioned. In short, the federal reaction to crack was “not merely a rational response to a new threat to public health and public order” (Reinarman and Levine 1997: 19); it was also racially “coded” in its over-reliance on punitive criminal law to address the problem of crack (Dvorak 2000).

Yet, while the 1980s' federal drug statutes mandated harsh penalties for crack defendants across all the U.S. federal districts, those statutes have not been uniformly deployed. Rather, prosecutors in some districts have been much more proactive in pursuing crack cases, and their attendant lengthy sentences, than in others. Moreover, as the crack panic subsided, and public health and policy experts pointedly criticized the purely punitive approach to crack as ineffectual and even counterproductive, federal law enforcement's imperative to pursue crack convictions, especially in lower-level cases, became harder to justify (Sklansky 1995; U.S. Sentencing Commission 2002). Thus, over time, the prosecutorial choice--at the federal district level--to continue to aggressively pursue crack cases seemed increasingly driven by factors other than public safety concerns.

In this article, we assess the racial legacy effects of the 1980s' federal crack “war.” Specifically, we examine jurisdictional variations in federal crack prosecutions from 2002-2012 to measure whether aggressive crack prosecutorial practices are associated with institutionally patterned inequality. We posit that, in the wake of the crack panic, those federal districts that have been more proactive in prosecuting crack offenses, relative to other kinds of drugs, and relative to case strength and seriousness, will demonstrate higher rates of black-- *775 white racial inequality in case outcomes across the entire criminal caseload. In this sense, we ask whether prosecutorial practices related to crack function as a proxy indicator--a metaphorical “miner's canary” (Guinier and Torres 2002)--of racial discrimination in the federal criminal justice system. Using data from the U.S. Sentencing Commission and the executive office of the U.S. Attorneys, we present novel group-level variable specifications to better capture the key mechanisms that may contribute to racial inequality in the federal criminal justice system.

In the next section, we provide a background sketch of the 1980s crack “frenzy” and its role in federal drug legislation. We then detail developments in federal crack policy and adjudication practices over time to provide context for our underlying research question that asks whether and how the post-crack panic deployment of federal crack laws is associated with racial disparities in federal criminal caseload outcomes. Following that, we describe our conceptual and theoretical approach, which foregrounds organizational-level production of inequality. Then, we present our methods and results, which examine whether federal crack-related prosecutorial practices are associated with broader racial inequality in criminal justice outcomes. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings for understanding institutionalized bias in complex organizations such as federal courts.

[. . .]

In this study, we endeavored to take the lessons of socio-legal scholarship that examines how criminal law is implicated in institutionalized racism, and apply them to federal court processes, where empirical examinations have largely focused on individual-level analyses of the problem of sentence disparities. The first line of scholarship has expressed deep concern for the dramatic and obvious racially disproportionate impact of crack laws and policies, which seem to be deployed as tools of racial control and subjugation (see, e.g., Alexander 2010; Butler 1998; Provine 2007; Tonry 1995). The second line of research has, with some notable exceptions, treated the on-the-books sentencing laws as race-neutral, and has looked only for bias in that gap between their intended application and their actual application (for discussion, see Murakawa and Beckett 2010; Van Cleve and Mayes 2015). In recent years, critical efforts to complicate that narrow empirical approach have begun to *802 emerge. Thus, scholars have re-specified predictor and outcome variables to better capture early-stage discretionary processes (Fischman and Schanzenbach 2012; Rehavi and Starr 2014; Shermer and Johnson 2010; Starr and Rehavi 2013), and have developed more robust models that account for broader social and legal contexts (Johnson et al. 2008; Lynch and Omori 2014).

The study we present here was done in that vein of exploration, and comes with several important limitations. Given the nature of the data, analyses such as this one cannot directly measure the behavior of individual legal actors, much less their intentions or sentiments. Rather, the relationships we uncover are just that--associations between key factors that suggest where we might direct further attention by marshaling techniques that can more directly uncover on-the-ground processes that give rise to inequality. Along those lines, we envision future analyses that aim to tease out the more complex interplay between within- and between-jurisdictional relationships over time. Nonetheless, we think this exploration offers both substantive and methodological insights that advance both fields upon which it builds.

Most importantly, we have demonstrated that beyond the stark racial inequality in who gets prosecuted and convicted for crack offenses in the federal system, crack prosecutorial practices themselves are associated with patterns of racial inequality across the criminal caseload. That is, in places that have prosecuted crack with gusto, black citizens are disproportionately likely to be federally charged and convicted across the board, relative to whites. It stands to reason that discriminatory practices would not be neatly contained within the crack case context. Rather, the willingness to aggressively wield federal crack laws where less draconian state options exist, and where the “malign effects” (Tonry and Melewski 2008: 1) are well-known, signals a broader tendency toward racialized social control through criminal law.

To that end, several of our findings in regard to our contextual control variables are intriguing, and suggest possible future lines of research. For instance, we note that racial and ethnic diversity in the community tempers conviction rate inequality, as does economic disadvantage. Thus, districts with wealthier and more homogeneous populations disproportionately over-prosecute black members of the community. This is consistent with structural theories of racism that suggest institutions like the legal system are deployed to maintain race-based power structures (Bonilla-Silva 1997; Massey 2007).

We also note that our control for “year” works in opposite directions in the two sets of models. Specifically, conviction rate inequality increased after key legal decisions that returned sentencing discretion to judges, while sentencing rate inequality decreased in the same years. These findings should be interpreted in tandem, as they are likely part of a larger story about prosecutorial response *803 to the shift from mandatory sentencing guidelines. As several scholars have documented, prosecutors' charging and adjudication practices changed in light of the U.S. v. Booker (2005) decision, which rendered the guidelines advisory, and the Gall v. U.S. (2007), and Kimbrough v. U.S. (2007) decisions, which made clear that judges could use their discretion to sentence outside of the guidelines. In the post-Booker period, prosecutors have been more likely to pursue cases that trigger mandatory minimums and sentencing enhancements, where prosecutorial discretionary power to dictate particular outcomes has not been diminished (Fischman and Schanzenbach 2012; Lynch and Omori 2014) and they have been disproportionately likely to charge black defendants with mandatory minimum-eligible charges (Rehavi and Starr 2014).

Conversely, the diminution of inequality in sentence lengths in the same period may indicate that the return of some discretion to judges, post-Booker, has resulted in a corrective on bias in this system. Indeed, as Fischman and Schanzenbach (2012) observed, a significant portion of the observed racial disparity in post-Booker sentencing occurs when judicial sentencing discretion butts up against mandatory minimum sentencing floors. Moreover, in the later years of our sample, the reduction in sentencing inequality in the models that include crack cases is likely directly due to the remediation that came with both Sentencing Commission and congressional reforms to crack sentencing policy (Steiker 2013). Taken together, these findings may indicate a troubling pattern of adaptation: as prosecutors have lost some discretionary power at the back end of the criminal court process, they have used their substantial charging powers to disproportionately bring black defendants in through the front end. However, because sentencing length inequality and conviction rate inequality are largely uncorrelated, there remains much more to tease out as to how both prosecutorial and judicial practices have evolved post-Booker.

Finally, although we do not expressly focus on policing, it is the key point of entry into the criminal justice system, reliant upon discretionary law enforcement that sometimes devalues communities of color for the accrual of system benefits and incentives (Lynch 2011; Ouziel 2017). In that sense, we hope this study prompts further inquiry to identify signifiers at the point of entry into the system as a method for predicting and uncovering broader patterns of institutional racism in given locales. Thus, practices such as the racially stratified issuance of discretionary, low-level infraction citations (Department of Justice 2015); race-and spatially-based stop and frisk law enforcement tactics (Fagan 2010); and racially selective drug law enforcement dragnets (Beckett et al. 2006; Lynch et al. 2013) may each function themselves as miners' canaries (Guinier and Torres 2002), warning of wider spread inequality in the entire system.
 

roots69

Rising Star
BGOL Investor
Black Men as Non-citizens: After the War on Drugs



The reconfigured goal, in our opinion, should not be to rid society of illegal substances or controlled substances. This is one of the big mistakes of the war on drugs and controlled substance policy in the United States since 1914, when prohibition was first implemented. Our goal is to address the issue of the war on drugs and how it impacts the lives of African-American men with legal and/or sociopolitical advocacy and direct assistance on a variety of levels. It is our contention that African-American men, entangled in the criminal justice system under the auspices of the war on drugs, have been rendered colonial citizens in their own country. This assertion is made by the evidence presented in the number of black men who are incarcerated and who continue to be incarcerated under the current criminal justice policy in the United States.

*805 While the efforts to address substance abuse in the United States might actually have a good foundation, the results state otherwise. As the poet Aimé Césaire might have noted: what has happened to a segment of the African-American population is neither "evangelization," a "philanthropic enterprise," a "desire to push back the frontiers of ignorance, disease, and tyranny," "a project undertaken for the greater glory of God," nor is it "an attempt to extend the rule of law." The system, despite its professed intent, is a very destructive program of criminal justice and social digression for a significant subset of the population, which has both direct and indirect links to racial oppression.

A. Alexander's New Jim Crow

If one accepts Michelle Alexander's notion that the war on drugs is the "New Jim Crow," as she posits in her book of the same name, then one reasonable solution is another anti-Jim Crow-like approach, as the country witnessed in the 1960s. This would be an effort to destroy the system. Racial segregation (America's racial apartheid system--the first Jim Crow) was dismantled with direct legal action, political agitation and lobbying, community organizing, civil disobedience, and fervent and constant protest. The system (Jim Crow) also required entry components after the legal system was dismantled. This provided an opportunity for those once denied access to the system. Affirmative action is an example of an effort by the government that provided blacks with entry into the system, which was long denied to them by their own country through public and private repression. Thus, just as black Americans required the dismantling of the Jim Crow system, they also required a path to true citizenship through entry programming.

Unfortunately, a Jim Crow solution is not likely forthcoming with respect to the many African-American men and women incarcerated by the war on drugs. First, it is not likely that African Americans on a mass scale will collectively and passionately embrace this cause as the cause of the moment as they did the quest of civic equality in the twentieth century. While there is disappointment and growing opposition to the war on drugs and what it is doing to African Americans, it does not *806 produce the same anger and desire to protest as the struggle against racial discrimination and segregation did in the twentieth century. As stated above in reference to the Rockefeller drug laws, many blacks were in support of Rockefeller's call for a new approach to drug enforcement.

There will be no marches, protests, or righteous indignation because millions of African-American men are incarcerated on drug charges. Perhaps millions more are on the way to prison if the war on drugs is not changed, but the idea that a groundswell of civil disobedience, advocacy, and political organizing is looming is not likely. In addition, even with protests and struggle, the government would have to acknowledge the mistake of its war on drugs policy and take ownership of the problems it has created. This, in our opinion, is also unlikely to occur. There is no evidence that the United States has the will to decriminalize narcotics (marijuana, heroin, and cocaine for starters), release millions of individuals from prison quickly or immediately, or devote billions of taxpayer revenue to implementing re-entry programs for those who have gone to prison in the war on drugs. In our opinion, only outright documented evidence of an intentional racial motive in the execution of the war on drugs would bring about bold action on the part of the United States collectively to assist African Americans in this manner. Such evidence, if it exists or is revealed, could also have some impact on the status of many non-African Americans incarcerated in the system.

B. Human Rights Watch

Reginald%20Dwayne%20Betts.jpg
Even though it is unlikely that a Jim Crow-like movement will germinate, terminating the war on drugs through public pressure, protest, and organizing, it is notable that a program to end the war on drugs in the United States has already been proposed. It is also quite credible in content.

Human Rights Watch, an international non-governmental organization financed by George Soros for purposes of global research, provides a potential shift in policy that could form the foundation for a new post-war on drugs policy. Their report, Targeting Blacks: Drug Law Enforcement and Race in the United States, released in 2008, is a comprehensive approach to the problem detailed in this Article, namely the fate of African-American men in the criminal justice system. If a *807 program were to be implemented, the proposals of Human Rights Watch are ideal for our goals.

According to the report, African-American men in 2006 were 53.5% of those incarcerated for drug crimes. They were 11.8 times more likely to enter prison for drug offenses than white men, and of all African-American men in prison, nearly forty percent were in prison for drug crimes. These statistics are especially troubling considering that whites comprise six times the drug offenders as blacks, yet black men are the individuals who are finding themselves incarcerated.

The recommendations of Human Rights Watch are designed to address the destructive results of the drug wars and to stop the destructive cycle for blacks as a result of so many men being removed from their communities and being underdeveloped. Prison time, in other words, is for the most part a time of underdevelopment. Human Rights Watch recommends the adoption of "community based sanctions and other alternatives to incarceration for low-level drug offenders," as well as "more resources [for] substance abuse treatment" and ""outreach" related to prevention of drug addiction. Most importantly, Human Rights Watch calls for the "elimination of] mandatory minimum sentences for all drug offenses," a proposal that forms the core of any logical program of reform. The report also recommends "investments in community, educational, health, and social programs" and the adoption of ""public health based strategies" to address drug abuse. The report by Human Rights Watch also seeks to address racial discrimination in conjunction with the war on drugs. A comprehensive analysis of racial disparities in drug enforcement from arrest through incarceration is recommended first. Second, all stakeholders involved should work together to ensure that the policies implemented do not burden communities traditionally affected by the policies in a racially disproportionate manner.

These recommendations are important because they seek to uncover any racial intent in policy making. In addition, these policies recognize the potential long-term damage that current drug enforcement policy is *808 causing and can cause. The report also recommends the enactment of policies that do not result in racial bias or racial discrimination. This recommendation is based upon the United Nations' human rights law, specifically, the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. This recommendation would prohibit laws that would restrict human rights and fundamental freedoms. Considering the "colonial" status of many black men as a result of convictions under current drug enforcement policy, this proposal would counteract policies that repress basic rights and privileges in the United States.

To supplement these race-based proposals, Human Rights Watch also recommends the elimination of any policies that, in fact, promote racial discrimination against blacks. In theory, if accepted this final recommendation would likely eliminate many of the drug enforcement laws throughout the country considering the statistical disparities that exist now in the system towards black men.

C. Re-entry

With incarceration and the eventual release from incarceration arises the need for re-entry into society. Re-entry is more of an issue now because of the huge increase in the prison population over the past forty years. Any scenario that results in the end of current drug enforcement policy and/or the release of many of the incarcerated from prison would require significant efforts at re-entry. Eumi K Lee, Associate Clinical Professor of Law, explains the importance of re-entry in general in the following manner:

Given this incredibly high recidivism rate, successful prisoner reentry is of the utmost importance in unraveling this crisis.

Indeed, the failure to integrate back into society is part of the self-reinforcing cycle that underlies the crisis. Prisoners enter the correctional institution, often with existing mental health or substance abuse issues, which are left untreated.

The challenges faced by, black men leaving incarceration and entering communities are numerous. They include the general stigma of *809 being incarcerated and racial attitudes, difficulties earning income or obtaining gainful employment, little if any access to financial credit, deteriorated social bonds and connections, and limited access to housing, health care, and education. The fact that many black men are challenged in all of these areas upon their release from incarceration is precisely how they become non-citizens. Some have their parental rights challenged, while their voting rights, right to sit on juries, ability to receive loans for education, and certain types of employment are denied. Military service, driver's licenses, passports, and many other basic indicators of real citizenship are also negatively affected. To release the formerly incarcerated into the community without a personalized plan for transition, as well as an overall effort to prevent disenfranchisement, is part of the destruction of current drug enforcement policy as well as the path to recidivism. If anything, the end of current drug enforcement policy should entail an end to many of these barriers. While states differ on how they treat these various issues, this does not mean that coordinated efforts to address these post-release barriers are impossible.

D. No Entry

Considering that overall we have doubts that there will be a concentrated effort to alter drug enforcement policy, there is no other alternative but for African Americans, if they are committed to addressing this policy issue, to try to alter the effects of it on their own. In sum, it is largely the task of African Americans to reduce the number of African-American men entering the criminal justice system.

As stated previously, the federal government is not likely to decriminalize marijuana, heroin, or cocaine. It is also unlikely that the federal and state governments will begin to release those who are imprisoned on drug charges in mass quantities. It is also questionable whether there will be a concerted effort to provide for re-entry into the community and restore individuals convicted of drug crimes to full citizenship status. Considering all of these problems, African Americans have no choice but to address the problems presented by controlled substances and the policy towards controlled substances themselves. This includes both re-entry efforts and efforts to prevent incarceration in *810 the first place. If this task appears difficult, this is true. However, it is not impossible. Self-help organizing amongst African Americans is part of their history.

1. Self-Help Tradition

The problems presented by drug use, abuse, addiction, and the enforcement of laws prohibiting possession can be addressed through self-help efforts. In other words, it was not always the case that the challenges of social, political, and economic policy and status in the United States were addressed by government efforts. African Americans, as a result of their status as second-class citizens in the United States, were forced to address many issues on their own.

In William Pollard's doctoral study, Study of Black Self Help, a brief history of this tradition is revealed and examined. According to Pollard, in the period from the 1890s to the early twentieth century, the fate of many African Americans would have been tragic but for the persistence of the many black men and women who chose to assist other blacks ("uplifting the race," Pollard calls it) as opposed to pursuing personal gratification. Pollard states that the work of blacks engaged in self-help activities included work with "delinquents." Some of the self-help efforts at the time centered on race pride, but much of the work involved the young, the aged, and those too ill to care for themselves. There were various institutions involved in self-help efforts in black communities, including churches, social welfare organizations, clubs, fraternal organizations, secret societies, and educational institutions. There were, according to Pollard, specific efforts to address the lack of reformatories for black youth, demonstrating again some degree of focus upon those African Americans who had strayed into illegal activities.

2. Organizations

Historically, African Americans have formed organizations to assist with problems associated with African Americans in times of great strife. These organizations have had dedicated missions and have been quite successful. In the early twentieth century, major organizations were *811 formed due to the fact that African Americans were denied civic equality and citizenship rights in the United States. The current problem where many African-American men have been (or will be in the future) rendered colonial citizens in their own country due to drug enforcement policy presents a similar but more complex problem.

However, in the last century, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People ("NAACP") was formed in 1909 during the Progressive Era to seek racial equality in the United States for the nation's blacks. While the NAACP wasn't a pure black self-help organization (whites initially ran the organization), its formation can be traced to a black self-help organization known as the Afro-American League.

T. Thomas Fortune, a New York-based newspaper editor and publisher, is largely responsible for the creation of the National Afro-American League. In 1887, using the editorial pages of his newspaper, The Freeman, Fortune called upon African Americans to "form an organization to fight for the rights denied them." The organization's goal was to address racial equality and racial oppression, issues that were quite prevalent at the time. While the organization was unsuccessful, it led to the formation of a successor organization--the National Afro-American Council, an entity dedicated to the same goals. While these organizations evolved into multiracial organizations, African Americans created these organizations.

The National Afro-American Council was more successful than its predecessor. It benefited first of all by the involvement of Booker T. Washington, who attended meetings of the council. Washington, the so-called leader of black Americans in his day, was always closely associated with self-help causes in Black America historically. He was often described as a "conservative" and a "compromiser," but, despite his outwardly expressed views, he also worked behind the scenes to oppose racial inequality and segregation.

*812 In contrast, T. Thomas Fortune, the official leader of the council, was far more militant and impatient with racial progress. Fortune, who became a close confidant of Washington, did not necessarily agree with Washington's views but did agree with Washington as to the final goal that needed to be achieved: racial equality for blacks in the United States.

There are also less known self-help efforts by African Americans historically worth noting that are likely more applicable. One such effort occurred because of late nineteenth century and early twentieth century efforts by blacks in the city of Buffalo, New York, who sought to address education for their children when the city of Buffalo refused to take the necessary steps. The black community of Buffalo had already taken steps earlier in the century regarding reading and writing with their children when racial segregation denied their children educational opportunities. By 1837, the blacks in Buffalo formed the Young Ladies Literary Society and the Debating Society to address their concerns regarding reading and writing with their children. The blacks in Buffalo also formed other organizations to address the lack of black history educational outlets in the city and to educate the public on "heated political issues." The educational efforts in Buffalo organized within the black community were started due to racial prejudice and demand for the services. These services also included vocational training, self improvement, and efforts to assist black students locate jobs. Overall, the blacks in Buffalo were attempting to uplift the community on their own, "politically, socially, and economically."

There were other cities where problems in the black community were addressed within the community by blacks. Chicago, during the Progressive Era of the early twentieth century, also found blacks attempting to deal with serious problems on their own by forming self-help organizations. Black charity organizations began to appear more *813 and more during the Progressive Era. The influx of blacks to urban areas, the growth of a black middle class, and lack of access to other services forced blacks to form their own service organizations in Chicago to address issues of concern to blacks at the time. One example of an organization formed during the Progressive Era by blacks to address a specific problem among blacks in Chicago was the Chicago Home for the Aged and Infirm Colored People in 1898. It was the first of the charitable organizations formed by blacks at this time.

In Chicago, blacks also formed the Louise Juvenile Home for the Dependent and Neglected Children in 1907 and the National League for the Protection of Colored Women in 1906 to assist young women arriving to the city seeking employment and a new start. This latter organization was created with the specific purpose of stopping the exploitation of young women. This was yet another example of African Americans deciding to address problems within their community on their own.

E. The Power of Governors and States

When his second term as President was reaching an end, President Bill Clinton pardoned a twenty-nine year old African-American woman named Kemba Smith. Smith was entering her seventh year in prison, set to serve twenty-four years as a result of a conviction on a conspiracy charge to distribute crack cocaine. Smith was in college when she pled guilty and had no criminal record. Smith was, to a certain degree, the perfect prisoner in the nation's flawed drug enforcement policy. Her crimes were non-violent and indirect; yet, as a result of her desire to take responsibility for her mistakes, she was sentenced to twenty-four years in prison.

President Clinton's decision to pardon Smith was both appropriate and symbolic. But, more importantly, his decision is representative of another tool at the disposal of society to weaken current drug enforcement policy: executive clemency and pardon power. This power is mostly available to governors of the various states in the current drug enforcement environment. While there is no large usage of the tactic, *814 some instances are notable. This power is especially noteworthy considering the fact that states continue to face budget problems stemming from over-incarceration and related state correctional services. Numerous states have taken steps to reduce their correctional budgets, and seeking to reduce prison populations is one tactic. Pardons and clemency are not a major part of such an effort, but they do send a symbolic message regarding outdated and failed drug enforcement policy from those who understand it first-hand.

For example, in his first twelve years in office, Governor George Pataki of New York pardoned numerous individuals. Nearly all of the individuals pardoned had been convicted under the state's drug enforcement Jaws passed by Rockefeller. In December 2002, Governor Pataki granted clemency to four individuals incarcerated under the state's Rockefeller drug laws. By 2005 Pataki had granted clemency to thirty-one individuals; twenty-seven of those individuals had been incarcerated as a result of the Rockefeller drug laws.

Just recently, Governor Jerry Brown of California pardoned seventy-nine individuals in one day, many for minor drug crimes. This decision by Governor Brown is the kind of concerted effort that is needed from more governors. In order to begin to address the problems stemming from drug-related laws, governors should pardon or offer clemency to more individuals, especially if they are in prison for non-violent drug possession offenses.

While the actions of governors on this issue might be a small contribution to the effort to change drug enforcement policy, governors across the country have the potential to impact and express a symbolic message by using their pardon and clemency power much more in *815 situations where individuals have received long sentences for non-violent drug offenses.

Brian G. Gilmore is Clinical Associate Professor of Law at Michigan State University College of Law and poet.

Reginald Dwayne Betts is author of the collection of poems Shahid Reads His Own Palm and the memoir A Question of Freedom. In 2012, President Obama appointed Mr. Betts to the Coordinating Council of the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. He is a first year law student at the Yale School of Law.*
 

roots69

Rising Star
BGOL Investor
The Scandal of Racist Marijuana Arrests—and What To Do About I

The federal government has subsidized the criminalization of millions of young people simply for having a small amount of pot.

“Whites Smoke Pot, but Blacks Are Arrested.” That was the headline of a column by Jim Dwyer, the great Metro desk reporter for The New York Times, in December 2009. Although Dwyer was writing about New York City, he summed up perfectly two central and enduring facts about marijuana use and arrests across the country: whites and blacks use marijuana equally, but the police do not arrest them equally. A third important fact: the vast majority (76 percent) of those arrested and charged with the crime of marijuana possession are young people in their teens and 20s.


Sources for the information in this article can be found atthenation.com/marijuana and at the site of the Marijuana Arrest Research Project, which is run by author Harry Levine and civil liberties attorney Loren Siegel.

Over the last fifteen years, police departments in the United States made 10 million arrests for marijuana possession—an average of almost 700,000 arrests a year. Police arrest blacks for marijuana possession at higher rates than whites in every state and nearly every city and county—as FBI Uniform Crime Reports and state databases indisputably show. States with the largest racial disparities arrest blacks at six times the rate of whites. This list includes Alabama, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Nebraska, Nevada, New York and Wisconsin.

Big city police departments are among the worst offenders. Police in Los Angeles, Chicago and New York have arrested blacks for marijuana possession at more than seven times the rate of whites. Since 1997, New York City alone has arrested and jailed more than 600,000 people for possessing marijuana; about 87 percent of the arrests are of blacks and Latinos. For years, police in New York and Chicago have arrested more young blacks and Latinos for simple marijuana possession than for any other criminal offense whatsoever.

Other large urban areas that make huge numbers of racially biased arrests include Atlanta, Baltimore, Buffalo, Cleveland, Dallas–Fort Worth, Detroit, Fort Lauderdale, Houston, Las Vegas, Memphis, Miami, Nashville, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Tampa and Washington, DC. And across the United States, one-third of marijuana arrestees are teenagers; 62 percent are age 24 or younger; and most of them are ordinary high school or college students and young workers.

The essential study of these possession arrests and their pervasive racial bias is The War on Marijuana in Black and White, an extraordinary book-length report released by the ACLU earlier this year. It found that police arrest blacks for marijuana possession at higher rates than whites in poor, middle-class and wealthy communities (with richer counties showing the greatest bias). The glaring racial disparities in marijuana arrests are “as staggering in the Midwest as in the Northeast, in large counties as in small, on city streets as on country roads…. They exist regardless of whether blacks make up 50% or 5% of a county’s overall population.”

Young whites (age 18 to 25), however, use marijuana more than young blacks, and government studies comparing marijuana use among whites and blacks of all ages have found that both groups use it at a similar rate.

* * *

Why are marijuana arrests so racially skewed? Such dramatic and widespread racial disparities are clearly not the product of personal prejudice or racism on the part of individual police officers. This is not a problem of training or supervision or rogue squads or bad apples. It’s a systemic problem, a form of institutional racism created and administered by people at the highest levels of law enforcement and government.

Most people arrested for marijuana possession were not smoking it: they typically had a small amount hidden in their clothing, vehicle or personal effects. The police found the marijuana by stopping and searching them (often illegally), or by tricking them into revealing it.

Police departments concentrate their patrols only in certain neighborhoods, usually ones designated as “high crime.” These are mainly places where low-income whites and people of color live. In these neighborhoods, police stop and search the most vehicles and individuals while looking for “contraband” of any type to make an arrest. The most common item that people in any neighborhood possess that will get them arrested—and the most common item that police find—is a small amount of marijuana.

Police officers patrolling in middle- and upper-middle-class neighborhoods typically do not search the vehicles and pockets of white people, so most well-off whites enjoy a de facto legalization of marijuana possession. Free from the intense surveillance and frequent searches that occur in other neighborhoods, they have little reason to fear a humiliating arrest and incarceration. This produces patterns, as in Chicago, where whites constitute 45 percent of the population but only 5 percent of those arrested for possession.

The result has been called “racism without racists.” No individual officers need harbor racial animosity for the criminal justice system to produce jails and courts filled with black and brown faces. But the absence of hostile intent does not absolve policy-makers and law enforcement officials from responsibility or blame. As federal judge Shira Scheindlin recently determined in two prominent stop-and-frisk cases, New York City’s top officials “adopted an attitude of willful blindness toward statistical evidence of racial disparities in stops and stop outcomes.” She cited the legal doctrine of “deliberate indifference” to describe police and city officials who “willfully ignored overwhelming proof that the policy…is racially discriminatory and therefore violates the United States Constitution.”

Racially biased marijuana enforcement stretches far beyond New York City—and its pernicious effects extend far beyond the degrading experience of being arrested and jailed. Most serious are the lifelong criminal records produced by a single arrest. Twenty years ago, misdemeanor arrest records were papers stored in dusty file cabinets. Now they are computerized and instantly available for $20 or less from commercial database firms—and easily found by a Google search for the phrase “criminal records.” (Try it yourself.) Employers, landlords, schools, banks and credit card companies rule out applicants on the basis of these now universally available records, which have been aptly described as a “scarlet letter” and a “new Jim Crow.” The substantial damage caused by criminal records from the millions of marijuana arrests has also been willfully disregarded by top officials almost everywhere, including in Congress and the White House.




Learn More!!!!
 

roots69

Rising Star
BGOL Investor
Your Rockefeller Public School System is a complete joke...and it was intended that way




systemmadebroken67b67.jpg

“In our dream we have limitless resources, and the people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hand. The present educational conventions fade from our minds; and, unhampered by tradition, we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive rural folk. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning or of science. We are not to raise up among them authors, orators, poets, or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians. Nor will we cherish even the humbler ambition to raise up from among them lawyers, doctors, preachers, statesmen, of whom we now have ample supply."


- Rev. Frederick T. Gates, Business Advisor to John D. Rockefeller Sr., 1913 [1]

The current American school system took root around the turn of the century. In 1903, John D. Rockefeller founded the General Education Board, which provided major funding for schools across the country and was especially active in promoting the State-controlled public school movement.

Rockefeller Education Board, 1915

The General Education Board was not interested in encouraging critical thinking. Rather, its focus was on organizing children and creating reliable, predictable, obedient citizens. As award-winning former teacher John Gatto puts it, “school was looked upon from the first part of the 20th Century as a branch of industry and a tool of governance.” The Rockefellers, along with other financial elite and their philanthropic organizations (such as the Gates, Carnegies, and Vanderbilts) have been able to mold society by funding and pushing compulsory state schooling for the masses.



Rockefellerquote291dc.png



Here’s a timeline to show the radical shift in education and the influence of the financial elite.

Pre 1840: Literacy Rates High, Schools Predominantly Private and Locally Controlled

Up until the 1840’s, the American school system was mainly private, decentralized, and home schooling was common. Americans were well educated and literacy rates were high.

1852: Massachusetts Passes First Mandatory Attendance Law

1902: John D. Rockefeller Creates the General Education Board

At the ultimate cost of $129 million, the General Education Board provided major funding for schools across the nation and was very influential in shaping the current school system.

1905: Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching is Founded

1906: NEA Becomes a Federally Chartered Association

1913: Frederick T. Gates, Director of Charity for the Rockefeller Foundation, Writes “In our dream…the people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hand”

Frederick T. Gates wrote in The Country School of Tomorrow, Occasional Papers Number 1:

“In our dream we have limitless resources, and the people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hand. The present educational conventions fade from our minds; and, unhampered by tradition, we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive rural folk. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning or of science. We are not to raise up among them authors, orators, poets, or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians. Nor will we cherish even the humbler ambition to raise up from among them lawyers, doctors, preachers, statesmen, of whom we now have ample supply."

1914: National Education Association (NEA) Alarmed by the Activity of the Carnegie and Rockefeller Foundations

At an annual meeting in St. Paul Minnesota, a resolution was passed by the Normal School Section of the NEA. An excerpt stated:

“We view with alarm the activity of the Carnegie and Rockefeller Foundations—agencies not in any way responsible to the people—in their efforts to control the policies of our State educational institutions, to fashion after their conception and to standardize our courses of study, and to surround the institutions with conditions which menace true academic freedom and defeat the primary purpose of democracy as heretofore preserved inviolate in our common schools, normal schools, and universities.”

1917: NEA Reorganizes and Moves to Washington DC

The NEA is the largest labor union in the U.S., representing public school teachers and other school faculty and staff. It generally opposes merit pay, school vouchers, accountability reforms, and more.

1918: Every State Requires Students to Complete Elementary School

1932: “Eight Year Study” – Largely funded by Carnegie Corporation of New York and the General Education Board

This laid the groundwork for education reform and the schooling system we have today.

1946: Rockefeller Foundation grants the General Education Board $7.5 billion

1953: Reece Committee of the US House of Representatives Reveals Agenda of Carnegie Endowment and Rockefeller Foundation on Education

“It seems incredible that the trustees of typically American fortune-created foundations should have permitted them to be used to finance ideas and practices incompatible with the fundamental concepts of our Constitution. Yet there seems evidence that this may have occurred.”

-Norman Dodd, Director of Research, Special Committee to Investigate Tax-Exempt Foundations, 1954 [2]

1968: Edith Roosevelt’s Article “The Foundation Machine” Indicts Carnegie Funded Textbooks

Carnegie funded “Programmed Textbooks” were distributed to “culturally deprived areas.” Edith Roosevelt stated that “these young children are being indoctrinated with a pattern of anti-social ideas that will completely and violently alienate them from the mainstream of American middle-class values.”

1979: US Department of Education Created

1986: Carnegie Teaching Panel Charts New Teacher Framework & Provides $900,000 in Grants for Reforms

2003: 14% of American Adults are Illiterate

The National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL) administered tests which revealed 14% of US residents would have extreme difficulty with reading and written comprehension. In 2003, some 30 million American adults had Below Basic prose literacy, 27 million had Below Basic document literacy, and 46 million had Below Basic quantitative literacy.



0047_bill_gates_common_core1f937.jpg

Public-School-Indoctrination-Center-Lana-Wong5d742.jpg

dumbingdownofamerica4c620.gif

schooling-by-david-deesbd59c.jpg

carlinfe8b8.jpg
 

roots69

Rising Star
BGOL Investor
The Truth About the Rockefeller Drug Empire: The Drug Story




  • In the 30's, Morris A. Bealle, a former city editor of the old Washington Times and Herald, was running a county seat newspaper, in which the local power company bought a large advertisement every week. This account took quite a lot of worry off Bealle's shoulders when the bills came due.

    But according to Bealle's own story, one day the paper took up the cudgels for some of its readers that were being given poor service from the power company, and Morris Bealle received the dressing down of his life from the advertising agency which handled the power company's account. They told him that any more such "stepping out of line" would result in the immediate cancellation not only of the advertising contract, but also of the gas company and the telephone company.

    That's when Bealle's eyes were opened to the meaning of a "free press", and he decided to get out of the newspaper business. He could afford to do that because he belonged to the landed gentry of Maryland, but not all newspaper editors are that lucky.

    Bealle used his professional experience to do some deep digging into the freedom-of-the-press situation and came up with two shattering exposes — "The Drug Story", and "The House of Rockefeller." The fact that in spite of his familiarity with the editorial world and many important personal contacts he couldn't get his revelations into print until he founded his own company, The Columbia Publishing House, Washington D.C., in 1949, was just a prime example of the silent but adamant censorship in force in "the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave". Although The Drug Story is one of the most important books on health and politics ever to appear in the USA, it has never been admitted to a major bookstore nor reviewed by any establishment paper, and was sold exclusively by mail. Nevertheless, when we first got to read it, in the 1970s, it was already in its 33rd printing, under a different label - Biworld Publishers, Orem, Utah.

Rockefeller Drug Empire and its 68 subsidiaries, showed operating profits in 1961 of $23,463,719 after taxes, on net assets of $43,108,106 - a 54% profit. Squibb, another Rockefeller-controlled company, in 1945 made not 6% but 576% on the actual value of its property.

That was during the luscious war years when the Army Surgeon General's Office and the Navy Bureau of Medicine and Surgery were not only acting as promoters for the Drug Trust, but were actually forcing drug trust poisons into the blood streams of American soldiers, sailors and marines, to the tune of over 200 million 'shots'. Is it any wonder, asked Bealle, that the Rockefellers, and their stooges in the Food and Drug Administration, the U.S. Public Health Service, the Federal Trade Commission, the Better Business Bureau, the Army Medical Corps, the Navy Bureau of Medicine, and thousands of health officers all over the country, should combine to put out of business all forms of therapy that discourage the use of drugs.

"The last annual report of the Rockefeller Foundation", reported Bealle, "itemizes the gifts it has made to colleges and public agencies in the past 44 years, and they total somewhat over half a billion dollars. These colleges, of course, teach their students all the drug lore the Rockefeller pharmaceutical houses want taught. Otherwise there would be no more gifts, just as there are no gifts to any of the 30 odd colleges in the United States that don' t use therapies based on drugs.

"Harvard, with its well-publicized medical school, has received $8,764,433 of Rockefeller's Drug Trust money, Yale got $7,927,800, Johns Hopkins $10,418,531, Washington University in St. Louis $2,842,132, New York's Columbia University $5,424,371, Cornell University $1,709,072, etc., etc."

And while "giving away" those huge sums to drug-propagandizing colleges, the Rockefeller interests were growing to a world-wide web that no one could entirely explore. Already well over 30 years ago it was large enough for Bealle to demonstrate that the Rockefeller interests had created, built up and developed the most far reaching industrial empire ever conceived in the mind of man. Standard Oil was of course the foundation upon which all of the other Rockefeller industries have been built. The story of Old John D., as ruthless an industrial pirate as ever came down the pike, is well known, but is being today conveniently ignored. The keystone of this mammoth industrial empire was the Chase National Bank, now renamed the Chase Manhattan Bank.

Not the least of its holdings are in the drug business. The Rockefellers own the largest drug manufacturing combine in the world, and use all of their other interests to bring pressure to increase the sale of drugs. The fact that most of the 12,000 separate drug items on the market are harmful is of no concern to the Drug Trust...


The Rockefeller Foundation


  • The Rockefeller Foundation was first set up in 1904 and called the General Education Fund. An organization called the Rockefeller Foundation, ostensibly to supplement the General Education Fund, was formed in 1910 and through long finagling and lots of Rockefeller money got the New York legislature to issue a charter on May 14, 1913.

    It is therefore not surprising that the House of Rockefeller has had its own "nominees" planted in all Federal agencies that have to do with health. So the stage was set for the "education" of the American public, with a view to turning it into a population of drug and medico dependents, with the early help of the parents and the schools, then with direct advertising and, last but not least, the influence the advertising revenues had on the media-makers.

    A compilation of the magazine Advertising Age showed that as far back as 1948 the larger companies in America spent for advertising the sum total of $1,104,224,374, when the dollar was still worth a dollar and not half a zloty. Of this staggering sum the interlocking Rockefeller-Morgan interests (gone over entirely to Rockefeller after Morgan's death) controlled about 80 percent, and utilized it to manipulate public information on health and drug matters - then and even more recklessly now.
Censorship


  • "Even the most independent newspapers are dependent on their press associations for their national news," Bealle pointed out, "and there is no reason for a news editor to suspect that a story coming over the wires of the Associated Press, the United Press or the International News Service is censored when it concerns health matters. Yet this is what happens constantly."

    In fact in the '50s the Drug Trust had one of its directors on the directorate of the Associated Press. He was no less than Arthur Hays Sulzberger, publisher of the New York Times and as such one of the most powerful Associated Press directors.

    It was thus easy for the Rockefeller Trust to persuade the Associated Press Science Editor to adopt a policy which would not permit any medical news to clear that is not approved by the Drug Trust "expert", and this censor is not going to approve any item that can in any way hurt the sale of drugs.

    This accounts to this day for the many fake stories of serums and medical cures and just-around-the-corner breakthrough victories over cancer, AIDS, diabetes, multiple sclerosis, which go out brazenly over the wires to all daily newspapers in America and abroad.

    Emanuel M. Josephson, M.D., whom the Drug Trust has been unable to intimidate despite many attempts, pointed out that the National Association of Science Writers was "persuaded" to adopt as part of its code of ethics the following chestnut: "Science editors are incapable of judging the facts of phenomena involved in medical and scientific discovery. Therefore, they only report 'discoveries' approved by medical authorities, or those presented before a body of scientific peers."

    This explains why Bantam Books, America's biggest publisher, made a colossal mistake in its initial enthusiasm and optimism sending review copies of SLAUGHTER OF THE INNOCENT to the 3,500 "science writers" on its list, instead of addressing them to the literary book reviewers who are not subject to medical censorship. One single censor decreed NO and SLAUGHTER OF THE INNOCENT sank in silence.

    Thus newspapers continue to be fed with propaganda about drugs and their alleged value, although according to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) 1.5 million people landed in hospitals in 1978 because of medication side effects in the U.S. alone, and despite recurrent statements by intelligent and courageous medical men that most pharmaceutical items on sale are useless at best, but more often harmful or deadly in the long run.

  • The truth about cures without drugs is suppressed, unless it suits the purpose of the censor to garble it. Whether these cures are effected by Chiropractors, Naturopaths, Naprapaths, Osteopaths, Faith Healers, Spiritualists, Herbalists, Christian Scientists, or MDs who use the brains they have, you never read about it in the big newspapers.

    To teach the Rockefeller drug ideology, it is necessary to teach that Nature didn't know what she was doing when she made the human body. But statistics issued by the Children's Bureau of the Federal Security Agency show that since the all-out drive of the Drug Trust for drugging, vaccinating and serumizing the human system, the health of the American nation has sharply declined, especially among children. Children are now given "shots" for this and "shots" for that, when the only safeguard known to science is a pure bloodstream, which can be obtained only with clean air and wholesome food. Meaning by natural and inexpensive means. Just what the Drug Trust most objects to.

    When the FDA, whose officials have to be acceptable to Rockefeller Center before they are appointed, has to put an independent operator out of business, it goes all out to execute those orders. But the orders do not come directly from Standard Oil or a drug house director. As Morris Bealle pointed out, the American Medical Association (AMA) is the front for the Drug Trust, and furnishes the quack doctors to testify that even when they know nothing of the product involved, it is their considered opinion that it has no therapeutic value.
Persecution


  • Wrote Bealle:

    "Financed by the taxpayers, these Drug Trust persecutions leave no stone unturned to destroy the victim. If he is a small operator, the resulting attorney's fees and court costs put him out of business. In one case, a Dr. Adolphus Hohensee of Scranton, Pa., who had stated that vitamins (he used natural ones) were vital to good health, was taken to court for 'misbranding' his product. The American Medical Association furnished ten medicos who reversed all known medical theories by testifying that 'vitamins are not necessary to the human body'. Confronted with government bulletins to the contrary, the medicos wiggled out of that one by declaring that these standard publications were outdated!"

    In addition to the FDA, Bealle listed the following agencies having to do with "health" —. i.e., with the health of the Drug Trust to the detriment of the citizens —. as being dependent on Rockefeller: U.S. Public Health Service, U.S. Veterans Administration, Federal Trade Commission, Surgeon General of the Air Force, Army Surgeon General's Office, Navy Bureau of Medicine & Surgery, National Health Research Institute, National Research Council, National Academy of Sciences.

    The National Academy of Sciences in Washington is considered the all-wise body which investigates everything under the sun, especially in the field of health, and gives to a palpitating public the last word in that science. To the important post at the head of this agency, the Drug Trust had one of their own appointed. He was none other than Alfred N. Richards, one of the directors and largest stockholders of Merck & Company, which was making huge profits from its drug traffic.

  • When Bealle revealed this fact, Richards resigned forthwith, and the Rockefellers appointed in his place the President of their own Rockefeller Institution, Detlev W. Bronk.
America's Medico-Drug Cartel


  • The medico-drug cartel was summed up by J.W Hodge, M.D., of Niagara Falls, N.Y., in these words:

    "The medical monopoly or medical trust, euphemistically called the American Medical Association, is not merely the meanest monopoly ever organized, but the most arrogant, dangerous and despotic organisation which ever managed a free people in this or any other age. Any and all methods of healing the sick by means of safe, simple and natural remedies are sure to be assailed and denounced by the arrogant leaders of the AMA doctors' trust as fakes, frauds and humbugs.

    Every practitioner of the healing art who does not ally himself with the medical trust is denounced as a 'dangerous quack' and impostor by the predatory trust doctors. Every sanitarian who attempts to restore the sick to a state of health by natural means without resort to the knife or poisonous drugs, disease imparting serums, deadly toxins or vaccines, is at once pounced upon by these medical tyrants and fanatics, bitterly denounced, vilified and persecuted to the fullest extent."

    The Lincoln Chiropractic College in Indianapolis requires 4,496 hours, the Palmer Institute Chiropractic in Davenport a minimum of 4,000 60-minute classroom hours, the University of Natural Healing Arts in Denver five years of 1,000 hours each to qualify for a degree. The National College of Naprapathy in Chicago requires 4,326 classroom hours for graduation. Yet the medico-drug cartel spreads the propaganda that the practitioners of these three "heretic" sciences are poorly trained or not trained at all —. the real reason being that they cure their patients without the use of drugs. In 1958, one of those "ill-trained" doctors, Nicholas P. Grimaldi, who had just graduated from the Lincoln Chiropractic College, took the basic science examination of the Connecticut State Board along with 63 medics and osteopaths. He made the highest mark (91.6) ever made by a doctor taking the Connecticut State Board examination.
Colonization


  • Rockefeller's various "educational" activities had proved so profitable in the U.S. that in 1927 the International Educational Board was launched, as Junior's own, personal charity, and endowed with $21,000,000 for a starter, to be lavished on foreign universities and politicos, with all the usual strings attached. This Board undertook to export the "new" Rockefeller image as a benefactor of mankind, as well as his business practises. Nobody informed the beneficiaries that every penny the Rockefellers seemed to be throwing out the window would come back, bearing substantial interest, through the front door.

  • Rockefeller had always had a particular interest in China, where Standard Oil was almost the sole supplier of kerosene and oil "for the lamps of China". So he put up money to establish the China Medical Board and to build the Peking Union Medical College, playing the role of the Great White Father who has come to dispense knowledge on his lowly children. The Rockefeller Foundation invested up to $45,000,000 into "westernizing" (read corrupting) Chinese medicine.

    Medical colleges were instructed that if they wished to benefit from the Rockefeller largesse they had better convince 500 million Chinese to throw into the ashcan the safe and useful but inexpensive herbal remedies of their barefoot doctors, which had withstood the test of centuries, in favor of the expensive carcinogenic and teratogenic "miracle" drugs Made in USA, which had to be replaced constantly with new ones, when the fatal side-effects could no longer be concealed; and if they couldn't "demonstrate" through large-scale animal experiments the effectiveness of their ancient acupuncture, this could not be recognized as having any "scientific value". Its millenarian effectiveness proven on human beings was of no concern to the Western wizards.

    But when the Communists came to power in China and it was no longer possible to trade, the Rockefellers suddenly lost interest in the health of the Chinese people and shifted their attention increasingly to Japan, India and Latin America.
The Image


  • "No candid study of his career can lead to other conclusion than that he is victim of perhaps the ugliest of all passions, that for money, money as an end. It is not a pleasant picture.... this money-maniac secretly, patiently, eternally plotting how he may add to his wealth.... He has turned commerce to war, and honey-combed it with cruel and corrupt practices.... And he calls his great organization a benefaction, and points to his church-going and charities as proof of his righteousness. This is supreme wrong-doing cloaked by religion. There is but one name for it —. hypocrisy."

    This was the description Ida Tarbell made of John D. Rockefeller in her "History of the Standard Oil Company", serialized in 1905 in the widely circulated McClure's Magazine. And that was several years before the "Ludlow Massacre", so JDR was as yet far from having reached the apex of his disrepute. But after World War II it would have been hard to read, in America or abroad, a single criticism of JDR, nor of Junior, who had followed in his father's footsteps, nor of Junior's four sons who all endevoured to emulate their illustrious forbears. Today's various encyclopedias extant in public libraries of the Western world have nothing but praise for the Family. How was this achieved?

    Ironically, the two apparently most NEGATIVE events in the career of JDR brought about a huge POSITIVE change in his favor, to a degree that he himself could not foresee. To wit:

    In the year when according to the current Encyclopaedia Britannica (long become a Rockefeller property and transferred from Oxford to Chicago), Rockefeller had "retired from active business", namely in 1911, he had been convicted by a U.S. court of illegal practices and ordered to dissolve the Standard Oil Trust, which comprised 40 corporations. This imposed dissolution was to provide his Empire with added might, to a degree that was unprecedented in the history of modem business. Until then, the Trust had existed for all to see - an exposed target. After that, it went underground, and thereby its power was cloaked in security, and could keep expanding unseen and therefore unopposed.

    The second apparently negative experience was a certain 1914 event that persuaded JDR, until then utterly contemptuous of public opinion, to gloss over his own image.
"The Ludlow Massacre"


  • The United Mine Workers had asked for higher wages and better living conditions for the miners of the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, one of the many Rockefeller-owned companies.

    The miners —. mostly immigrants from Europe's poorest countries —. lived in shacks provided by the company at exorbitant rent. Their low wages ($1,68 a day) were paid in script redeemable only at company stores charging high prices. The churches they attended were the pastorates of company-hired ministers; their children were taught in company-controlled schools; the company libraries excluded books that the Bible-thumping Rockefellers deemed "subversive", such as "Darwin's Origin of the Species." The company maintained a force of detectives, mine guards, and spies whose job it was to keep the camp quarantined from the danger of unionization.

    When the miners struck, JDR, Jr., then officially in command of the company, and his father's hatchet man, the Baptist Reverend Frederick T. Gates, who was a director of the Rockefeller Foundation, refused even to negotiate. They evicted the strikers from the company-owned shacks, hired a thousand strike-breakers from the Baldwin-Felts detective agency, and persuaded Governor Ammons to call out the National Guard to help break the strike.

    Open warfare resulted. Guardsmen, miners, their women and children, who since their eviction were camping in tents, were ruthlessly killed, until the frightened Governor wired President Wilson for Federal Troops, who eventually crushed the strike, The New York Times, which then already could never be accused of being unfriendly to the Rockefeller interests, reported on April 21, 1914.

    "A 14-hour battle between striking coal miners and members of the Colorado National Guard in the Ludlow district today culminated in the killing of Louis Tikas, leader of the Greek strikers, and the destruction of the Ludlow tent colony by fire."

    And the following day:

    "Forty-five dead (32 of them women and children), a score missing and more than a score wounded is the known result of the 14-hour battle which raged between state troops and coal miners in the Ludlow district, on the property of the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, the Rockefeller holding. The Ludlow is a mass of charred debris, and buried beneath it is a story of horror unparalleled in the history of industrial warfare. In the holes that had been dug for their protection against rifle fire, the women and children died like trapped rats as the flames swept over them. One pit uncovered this afternoon disclosed the bodies of ten children and two women."
Thorough Facelift


  • The worldwide revulsion that followed was such that JDR decided to hire the most talented press agent in the country, Ivy Lee, who got the tough assignment of whitewashing the tycoon's bloodied image.

    When Lee learned that the newly organized Rockefeller Foundation had $100 million lying around for promotional purposes without knowing what to do with it, he came with a plan to donate large sums - none less than a million - to well-known colleges, hospitals, churches and benevolent organizations. The plan was accepted. So were the millions. And they made headlines all over the world, for in the days of the gold standard and the five cent cigar there was a maxim in every newspaper office that a million dollars was always news.

    That was the beginning of the cleverly worded medical reports on new "miracle" drugs and "just-around-the-corner breakthroughs" planted in the leading news offices and press associations that continue to this day, and the flighty public soon forgot, or forgave, the massacre of foreign immigrants for the dazzling display of generosity and philanthropy financed by the ballooning Rockefeller fortune and going out, with thunderous press fanfare, to various "worthy" institutions.
The Purchase of Public Opinion


  • In the following years, not only newsmen, but whole newspapers were bought, financed or founded with Rockefeller money. So Time Magazine, which Henry Luce started in 1923, had been taken over by J.P. Morgan when the magazine got into financial difficulties. When Morgan died and his financial empire crumbled, the Thorough FaceliftHouse of Rockefeller wasted no time in taking over this lush editorial plum also, together with its sisters Fortune and Life, and built for them an expensive 14-story home of their own in Rockefeller Center —. the Time & Life Building.

    Rockefeller was also co-owner of Time's "rival" magazine, Newsweek, which had been established in the early days of the New Deal with money put up by Rockefeller, Vincent Astor, the Harrimann family and other members and allies of the House.



      • For all his innate cynicism, JDR must have been himself surprised to discover how easily the so-called intellectuals could be bought. Indeed, they turned out to be among his best investments.

        By founding and lavishly endowing his Education Boards at home and abroad, Rockefeller won control not only of the governments and politicos but also of the intellectual and scientific community, starting with the Medical Power —. the organization that forms those priests of the New Religion that are the modern medicine men. No Pulitzer or Nobel or any similar prize endowed with money and prestige has ever been awarded to a declared foe of the Rockefeller system.

        Henry Luce, officially founder and editor of Time Magazine, but constantly dependent on House advertising, also distinguished himself in his adulation of his sponsors. JDR's son had been responsible for the Ludlow massacre, and an obedient partner in his father's most unsavory actions. Nonetheless, in 1956 Henry Luce put Junior on the cover of Time, and the feature story, soberly titled "The Good Man", included hyperboles like this:

        "It is because John D. Rockefeller Junior's is a life of constructive social giving that he ranks as an authentic American hero, just as certainly as any general who ever won a victory for an American army or any statesman who triumphed in behalf of U.S. diplomacy."

        Clearly, Time's editorial board wasn't given the choice to change its tune even after the passing of Junior and Henry Luce, since it remained just as dependent on House of Rockefeller advertising. Thus, when in 1979 one of Junior's sons, Nelson A. Rockefeller died —. who had been one of the loudest hawks in the Vietnam and other American wars, and was personally responsible for the massacre of prisoners and hostages at Atticia prison - Time said of him in it obituary, without laughing: "He was driven by a mission to serve, improve and uplift his country."

        Perhaps it was all this that Prof. Peter Singer had in mind when telling the judges in Italy that the Rockefeller Foundation was a humanitarian enterprise bent on doing good works. One of their best works seems to be sponsoring Prof. Peter Singer, the world's greatest animal friend and protector who claims that

        and for more than 20 years refuses to mention that legions of medical doctors are of the opposite view.


      • Another interesting revelation in the article of Time was that many years ago already Singer "was pleasantly surprised when Britannica approached him to distill in about 30,000 words the discipline that is, at its heart, the systematic study of what we ought to do." So now we touch the subject of sponsorisation and patronage. They don't always mean immediate cash but, more important, long-term profits.

        Many decades ago the Encyclopedia Britannica moved from Oxford to Chicago because Rockefeller had bought it to add much needed luster to the University of Chicago and its medical school, the first one he had founded. Peter Singer, "the world's greatest animal defender" who keeps a door permanently open to vivisection and the lucrative medical swindle, gets millions of dollars free publicity thanks to the worldwide engagement of the Rockefeller Foundation and the media makers who are in no position to oppose it.

        From the article in Time we also learned that Singer's mother had been a medical doctor in the old country, which could mean that little Peter started assimilating all the Rockefeller superstition on vivisection with his mother's milk.
      1888480_748046825235426_1139962487_n.jpg






 

roots69

Rising Star
BGOL Investor
Thank President Nixon, the DEA & US Prison Industry for Classifying Marijuana as a Schedule I Drug
nixon_president_marijuana-400x250.png


There is a history of ignoring scientific facts on marijuana. The demonization of cannabis was perpetuated with decisions made by President Richard Nixon and is carried forward through today’s DEA. But the tides are shifting.

Cannabis was not always illegal, in the US, or elsewhere. Chinese Emperor Fu Hsi once recommended marijuana as medicine. The Hebrews once wrote of it as a ‘holy anointing oil.’ The Egyptians used it as an anti-inflammatory agent; the Indians, an anesthetic. It was once grown in our own country profusely.

In 1970, cannabis was placed temporarily in Schedule I, the most dangerous controlled substances group, pending the results of a commission created by Richard Nixon to study cannabis and its medicinal effects. In 1972, this commission, the National Commission on Marijuana and Drug Abuse, recommended that cannabis prohibition end, which would remove it from Schedule I. Instead, Nixon disregarded the compelling results of his own appointed commission. Four decades later, cannabis remains a Schedule I classification along with heroine and cocaine.

The Commission’s report acknowledged that, decades earlier, “the absence of adequate understanding of the effects of the drug” combined with “lurid accounts of [largely unsubstantiated] ‘marijuana atrocities’” greatly affected public opinion and labeled the stereotypical user as “physically aggressive, lacking in self-control, irresponsible, mentally ill, and perhaps most alarming, criminally inclined and dangerous.” However, the Commission found that the drug typically inhibited aggression “by pacifying the user… and generally produc[ed] states of drowsiness, lethargy, timidity and passivity.”

Nixon’s Commission recommended decriminalization of simple possession, finding:

“[T]he criminal law is too harsh a tool to apply to personal possession even in the effort to discourage use. It implies an overwhelming indictment of the behavior which we believe is not appropriate. The actual and potential harm of use of the drug is not great enough to justify intrusion by the criminal law into private behavior, a step which our society takes only with the greatest reluctance.”

Read: Members of Congress Ask President to Re-Schedule Marijuana

Despite these facts, last year, over 850,000 people in America were arrested for marijuana-related crimes. Busting people for possession is big business for the DEA and local law enforcement agencies. Police unions, prison guard unions, private corporations which run prison corporations, alcohol and beer companies, and Big Pharma also want to continue to see marijuana classified as a Schedule I drug.

California Correctional Peace Officers Association recently spent a whopping $1 million to defeat a measure that would have “reduced sentences and parole times for nonviolent drug offenders while emphasizing drug treatment over prison.” The DEA also continuously obstructs research into medical marijuana and hemp cultivation.

A report, “The DEA: Four Decades of Impeding and Rejecting Science,” released by the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) and DPA, calls on the DEA to end its “unjustifiable” monopoly of the supply of research grade marijuana available for federally approved research.

If Nixon had just listened to his own commission, we might not be in the position to have to fight the DEA and their cronies today.
 

roots69

Rising Star
BGOL Investor
The Rockefellers, The Flexner Report, The AMA, and their Effect on Alternative Nutritional (botanical) Medicine
My post on February February 27 talked about the Rockefellers, and their financialrise which started by William Avery Rockefeller peddling opiates. It also spoke of their monopoly and control of pharmaceutical companies.

Today I was made aware of the Flexner Commission.

John D. Rockefeller wanted to gain control of education, including the medical education systems. He did that with the help of Fred Gates. Fred Gates was a Baptist pastor, who left that post to become secretary of the American Baptist Education Society. Rockefeller was a devout Baptist himself, so the two were destined to meet. Rockefeller donated $600,000 to the Baptist-based Chicago University, under the suggestion of Fred Gates. (Now known as the University of Chicago Medical Center.)

In 1901 the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research was founded. One of the names on the board of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research was Simon Flexner. It was Simon Flexner’s brother, Abraham Flexnor, who had one of the biggest hands in medical education reform. (Interestingly, Abraham Flexner was born in Kentucky, one of the largest growers and suppliers of hemp during WWII.)

Abraham Flexner was on the staff of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.

“As mentioned previously, the Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations traditionally worked together almost as one in the furtherance of their mutual goals, and this certainly was no exception. The Flexner brothers represented the lens that brought both the Rockefeller and the Carnegie fortunes into sharp focus on the unsuspecting and thoroughly vulnerable medical profession.” (He Who Pays The Piper – Creation of the Modern Medical (drug) Establishment; G. Edward Griffin)

(This is where the web of control and monopolization seems to be even more intertwined.)

The American Medical Association was founded in 1847 and incorporated in 1897. In the early 1900s the AMA realized that there needed to be some changes in medical education. Medical practice and education in some areas left a lot to be desired (poor training and understaffed medical schools). It created the Council on Medical Education, with the purpose of evaluating countrywide medical training and making improvements where needed. However, they didn’t have enough money to do this. Enter Rockefeller and Carnegie and their funding and popularity. The president of the Carnegie Foundation, Henry Pritchett, met with the AMA and offered to take over the entire Council on Medical Education project.

Here was the classical “philanthropic formula” at work again. Have others pay a major portion of the bill (the AMA had already done most of the work. The total Carnegie investment was only $ 10,000), reap a large bonus from public opinion (isn’t it wonderful that these men are taking an interest in upgrading medical education!), and gain an opportunity to control a large and vital sphere of American life.” (He Who Pays The Piper – Creation of the Modern Medical (drug) Establishment; G. Edward Griffin)

“—In the 1800′s the American Medical Association (AMA) resented their competitors who drove down the cost of medical care and drew away customers;
—The AMA called upon the strong arm of government force to vanquish the competition, it did so through regulating medical schools;
—A report was commissioned calling for the standardization of medical education, this was the Flexner Commission;
—The report of the Commission concluded that there were too many doctors and medical schools in America and recommended reducing the number of schools. The public outcry generated by the report convinced congress to declare the AMA the only body with the right to grant medical school licenses in the United States.” (Campaignforrealhealth.com)

In 1910 the Flexner Report was published. It pointed out medical inadequacies, but it also did much more than that.

(Instead of going into more deep jargon, I’ll just give you the condensed version from here on out.)

In the late 1800s and early 1900s there were many schools that taught Eclectic medicine (botanical and herbal medicine), Holistic medicine, and Naturopathy. These schools were not in line with the pharmaceutical drug-pushing agenda of the Rockefellers and AMA. Because these schools did not sit well with the Flexnor report, they were not allowed accreditation.

Flexner clearly doubted the scientific validity of all forms of medicine other than that based on scientific research, deeming any approach to medicine that did not advocate the use of treatments such as vaccines to prevent and cure illness as tantamount to quackery and charlatanism. Medical schools that offered training in various disciplines including eclectic medicine, physiomedicalism, naturopathy, and homeopathy, were told either to drop these courses from their curriculum or lose their accreditation and underwriting support. A few schools resisted for a time, but eventually all complied with the Report or shut their doors.” (wikipedia)

The last Eclectic medical school closed in 1939.

Holistic health, botanicals and herbs, and nutritional therapy were not part of the agenda of the Rockefellers and AMA. Remember, also, that this was the time when the Rockefellers had the monopoly on pharmaceuticals and when Hemp was a huge threat to their pharma and oil investments.

Billions of dollars have been donated to American medical schools, but those dollars have not just been from Rockefeller and Carnegie. Funds also have come from Ford Foundation, Kellogg Foundation, The Macy Foundation, and others. It also appears that the main focus is study and research into pharmacology. (Where is the study of herbs, plants, nutrition, holistic health????)

Proper nutrition was not taught in medical schools as a preventative for disease; instead, drugs and pharmaceuticals were made to be part of the program to treat the symptoms, as opposed to getting to the root cause of the disease.

While doctors are forced to spend hundreds of hours studying the names and actions of all kinds of man-made drugs, they are lucky if they receive even a portion of a single course on basic nutrition. Many have none at all. The result is that the average doctor’s wife or secretary knows more about practical nutrition than he does.” (He Who Pays The Piper – Creation of the Modern Medical (drug) Establishment; G. Edward Griffin)

The Flexner report had a huge effect on alternative medicines. And where did it all start? William Avery Rockefeller and his family monopoly and investments in pharmaceuticals – and their hand in prohibiting hemp farming in the USA.

Where does hemp come into play in all this? Hempseed and hempseed oil have incredible nutritional and medicinal value. Almost any condition or disease can in some way be treated or cured with hemp. A diet rich in hemp, with the perfect ratio of Omega fatty acids, amino acids, vitamins, anti-oxidants, and nutrient density can be one of the preventative steps in delaying disease.

Hemp? Or chemical drugs?

I choose Hemp.
 

roots69

Rising Star
BGOL Investor
People Who Are Anti-Hemp ~ Uninformed, Unprincipled, or Just Afraid Of The Truth?






Enjoy today’s ramblings!

I used to be anti-hemp. No, really. It’s true. However, my anti-hemp stance was strictly from lack of knowledge. I didn’t even KNOW there was such thing as industrial hemp. I didn’t know that hemp and marijuana were 2 different plants. All I ‘knew’ was what I heard now and then, “Hemp is pot! Pot is bad! Hemp is marijuana! It’s immoral!” Of course, we all can see that I am now one of the Informed ones.

In order to be Informed, one must have an open mind. One must be open to new ideas, open to learning, open to study, open to see all points of view – medical, scientific, social, political, economical, etc.

Next are those who are Unprincipled. Is that harsh? Maybe, but true. There are many companies, corporations, entities, and people who are anti-hemp because hemp would threaten their investments. The pharmaceutical business makes anywhere from $18 billion to $35 billion a year. I am not anti-pharmaceutical per se, but I am anti-medicine when it is known to be dangerous, or prescribed when it doesn’t need to be – especially when there is a healthier or natural alternative such as hemp.

What about law enforcement? Again, I am not anti-law enforcement, but I AM pro-ethical/moral law enforcement. How many in law enforcement believe the propaganda? How many ‘get’ that hemp prohibition is unethical? (I am a big fan of L.E.A.P, by the way.)

Professional lobbyists are hired by corporations, groups, or individuals, and their job is to influence the official decision-makers in the government. We can be certain that investors in timber, oil, pharmaceuticals, chemicals, and agriculture have lobbyists on their side making sure that hemp farming in the U.S. remains under the chains of prohibition.

Who is afraid for the Truth? It could the the Uninformed, it could be the Unprincipled, or it could be those who fear change or a return to what was once the norm.

I know people who are very set in their beliefs. Sure, beliefs are a basis of strength for some. But what happens when someone’s beliefs are challenged? “If the truth as I know it is not REALLY true, then what else is not true?” That can really shake some people up. They have to re-think their position. And some will simply stay with what they believe no matter what because change is frightening.

What we need to do is continue the hemp dialogue, continue teaching, and continue working toward the goal of ending hemp prohibition. We MUST work together to bring hemp back to where it belongs – farmed again on American soil.
 

roots69

Rising Star
BGOL Investor
Hemp History – Hemp Banned in Politics and Religion in the Middle Ages (History is Repeating Itself)






I am continuing my foray into history, specifically hemp history. My favorite read? The Emperor Wears No Clothes (Jack Herer). And surprisingly, the Middle Ages also saw politics and the church controlling/banning/ostracizing hemp.

“The Politics of Paper

The masses of people, “the commons,” were kept in check through a dual system of fear and enforced ignorance. All learning except the most rudimentary was controlled and strictly regulated by the priests.

The commons (about 95% of the people) were forbidden to learn to read or write – not even an alphabet – and often were punished or put to death for doing so.

The people were also forbidden to learn Latin, the language of the Bible. This effectively enabled the few priests who could read to interpret the scriptures any way they pleased for about 1,200 years, until the Reformation in Europe, circa 1600.

To prohibit knowledge, people were literally kept in the dark, without a piece of paper to write on. The monasteries preserved and guarded hemp’s secrets. They saw that cannabis held two threats to this policy of absolute control: papermaking and lamp oil.

Something had to be done.” (The Emperor Wears No Clothes, Jack Herer)

My first thought after reading this was, “Wow. This sounds so familiar!” If you saw my previous articles about the Rockefellers, Hearst, oil, timber, and the prohibition of hemp, you will remember that they did the same thing. Hemp was a threat to their investments, so they (and their lobbyists and their money) succeeded in running rampant propaganda against hemp which ultimately led to hemp farming in the U.S. being banned without a permit from the DEA (the permit being nearly impossible to get). The underlying factors were: 1) Money and 2) Control.

“Cannabis Medicines Forbidden

While embracing wine as a sacrament, and tolerating beer and hard liquor, the Inquisition outlawed cannabis ingestion in Spain in the 12th century, and France in the 13th. Many other natural remedies were simultaneously banned. Anyone using hemp to communicate, heal, etc. was labeled “witch.”

Saint Joan of Arc, for example, was accused in 1430-31 of using a variety of herbal “witch” drugs, including cannabis, to hear voices.” (The Emperor Wears No Clothes, Jack Herer)

Again, sound familiar? Natural remedies were banned, yet beer and hard liquor were tolerated. Read on:

“Church Sanctioned Legal Medicines

Virtually the only legal medical cures allowed the people of Western Europe by the Roman Catholic Church Fathers at this time were:

1. (a.) Wearing a bird mask for plague. (b.) Setting fractured bones or cleaning burns.

2. Bleeding pints and even quarts of blood from all flu, pneumonia or fever patients (victims) which was the most used treatment in Europe and America by doctors until the beginning of the 1900s. It does not work! And did not work no matter how much blood they took.

3. Praying to specific saints for a miraculous cure, e.g., St. Anthony for ergotism (poisoning), St. Odilla for blindness, St. Benedict for poison sufferers, and St. Vitus for comedians and epileptics.

4. Alcohol for a variety of problems.

In 1484, Pope Innocent VIII singled out cannabis healers and other herbalists, proclaiming hemp an unholy sacrament of the second and third types of Satanic mass. This persecution lasted for more than 150 years.” (The Emperor Wears No Clothes, Jack Herer)

Now, back then they didn’t replace natural remedies with chemical drugs like we do today, yet, as you can see, the remedies that WERE allowed were just as dangerous (or more), or ineffective, as chemical drugs. (Have you actually read the 3-page list of warnings and side-effects that come with chemical medications today?) You can also see that they didn’t look for specific causes of illness (when applicable), but that’s another story.

They say history repeats itself. And I am definitely seeing that today.

I am looking for ward to the day when (like our own previous history in the U.S.) hemp will be embraced for the wonderful economic, health, and medicinal properties that it possesses. Perhaps soon, our history will repeat itself and hemp will be legally grown in the U.S., used as ‘money’, used as medicine, fuel, paper, and more.
 

roots69

Rising Star
BGOL Investor
The Marihuana Tax Act Of 1937 ~ Anslinger, Oil, the Birth of Synthetics, and the Death of Hemp Farming




Congress signed The Marihuana Tax Act of 1937 in August of that same year. The Marihuana Tax Act, however, was not strictly created to prohibit marihuana.

It was in the 1930s that Rockefeller (Standard Oil), DuPont, Dow, Hearst, and others were realizing huge profits from their investments and monopolies on oil, pharmaceuticals, chemicals, and timber. They also realized that industrial hemp was an enormous threat to their investments. Industrial hemp was an excellent source of food oil, fuel, medicine, paper, and textiles.

Below are excerpts from transcripts from Henry Anslinger (head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics and nephew of Andrew Mellon, U.S. Secretary of the Treasury) at a meeting of the Ways and Means Committee. These statements were made, and also used as propaganda by Hearst (who had owned timber and paper mills) in order to influence members to pass the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937.

STATEMENT OF H. J. ANSLINGER,
COMMISSIONER OF NARCOTICS, BUREAU OF NARCOTICS, DEPARTMENT OF THE TREASURY

MR. ANSLINGER: Mr. Chairman, my name is H. J. Anslinger; I am Commissioner of Narcotics in the Bureau of Narcotics, in the Treasury Department.

Mr. Chairman and distinguished members of the Ways and Means Committee, this traffic in marihuana is increasing to such an extent that it has come to the be cause for the greatest national concern.

This drug is as old as civilization itself. Homer wrote about, as a drug that made me forget their homes, and that turned them into swine. In Persia, a thousand years before Christ, there was a religious and military order founded which was called the Assassins and they derived their name from the drug called hashish which is now known in this country as marihuana. They were noted for their acts of cruelty, and the word “assassin” very aptly describes the drug.

The plant from which the drugs comes is a hardy annual, growing from 3 to 16 feet in height.

Marihuana is the same as Indian hemp, hashish. It is sometimes cultivated in backyards. Over here in Maryland some of it has been found, and last fall we discovered three acres of it in the Southwest.

As I say, marihuana is the same as Indian hemp, and is sometimes found as a residual weed, and sometimes as the result of a dissemination of birdseed. It is known as cannabin, cannabis Americana, or Cannabis Sativa. Marihuana is the Mexican term for cannabis indica. We seem to have adopted the Mexican terminology, and we call it marihuana, which means good feeling. In the underworld it is referred to by such colorful, colloquial names as reefer, muggles, Indian hay, hot hay, and weed. It is known in various countries by a variety of names.

MR. LEWIS: In literature it is known as hashish, is it not?

MR. ANSLINGER: Yes, sir. There is a great deal of use of it in Egypt, particularly. It was found years ago in Egypt. The traffic has grown so that something like 14 percent of the population are addicts. In India it is sold over the counter to the addicts, direct, and there it is known as bhang and ganja.

At the Geneva Convention is 1895 the term “cannabis” included only the dried flowering or fruiting top of the pistillate plant as the plant source of the dangerous resin, from which the resin had not been extracted. That designation was used in the uniform State act. “but research that has been made during the past few months has shown that this definition is not sufficient, because it has been found by experiment that the leaves of the pistillate plant as well as the leaves of the staminate plant contain the active principle up to 50 percent of the strength prescribed by the United States Pharmacopoeia.

So we have urged the States to revise their definition so as to include all parts of the plant, as it now seems that the seeds and portions other than the dried flowering tops contain positively dangerous substances.

We were anticipating a challenge in one of the States of that old definition. There was a case in Florida recently in which a defendant appealed to a higher court on the ground that the prosecution had not proven that this was the dried flowered top of the pistillate plant.

In medical schools, the physician-to-be is taught that without opium he would be like a one-armed man. That is true, because you cannot get along without opium.

But here we have drug that is not like opium. Opium has all of the good of Dr. Jekyll and all the evil of Mr. Hyde. This drug is entirely the monster Hyde, the harmful effect of which cannot be measured.

MR. DINGELL: I want to be certain what this is. Is this the same weed that grows wild in some of our Western States which is sometimes called the loco weed?

MR. ANSLINGER: No, sir, that is another family.

MR. DINGELL: That is also a harmful drug-producing weed, is it not?

MR. ANSLINGER: Not to my knowledge. It is not used by humans.

THE CHAIRMAN: In what particular sections does this weed grow wild?

MR. ANSLINGER: In almost every state in the Union today.

MR. REED: It is not Indian hemp?

MR. ANSLINGER: It is Indian hemp. We have some specimens here.

MR. VINSON: When was this brought to your attention as being a menace among our own people?

MR. ANSLINGER: About ten years ago.

MR. VINSON: Why did you wait until 1937 to bring in a recommendation of this kind?

MR. ANSLINGER: Ten years ago we only heard about it throughout the Southwest. It is only in the last few years that it has become a national menace. It has grown like wildfire, but it has only become a national menace in the last three years. It is only in the last two years that we have had to send reports about it to the League of Nations. **Note: It was Rockefeller who supported the League of Nations**

MR. VINSON: We did not have to have any convention adopted by the League of Nations in order to legislate on this subject?

MR. ANSLINGER: No; but it was covered in one of the conventions.

MR. ANSLINGER: It is only in the last two years that we have a report of seizures anywhere but in the Southwest. Las year, New York State reported 195 tons seized, whereas before that I do not believe that New York could have reported one ton seized.

Let me quote from this report to the League of Nations:

This discussion disclosed that, from the medical point of view in some countries the use of Indian hemp in its various forms is regarded as in no way indispensable and that it is therefore possible that little objection would be raised to drafting limitations upon medical use of derivatives.

That is only last year.

Here is what Dr. J. Bouquet, hospital pharmacist at Tunis, and inspector of pharmacists at Tunis, says. He is the outstanding expert on cannabis in the world. He says:

To sum up, Indian hemp, like many other medicaments, has enjoyed for a time a vogue which is not justified by the results obtained. Therapeutics would not lose much if it were removed from the list of medicaments.

That comes from the greatest authority on cannabis in the world today.

MR. MCCORMACK: What are its first manifestations, a feeling of grandeur and self-exaltation, and things of that sort?

MR. ANSLINGER: It affects different individuals in different ways. Some individuals have a complete loss of sense of time or a sense of value. They lose their sense of place. That have an increased feeling of physical strength and power.

Some people will fly into a delirious rage, and they are temporarily irresponsible and may commit violent crimes. Other people will laugh uncontrollably. It is impossible to say what the effect will be on any individual. Those research men who have tried it have always been under control. They have always insisted upon that.

MR. MCCORMACK: Is it used by the criminal class?

MR. ANSLINGER: Yes, it is. It is dangerous to the mind and body, and particularly dangerous to the criminal type, because it releases all of the inhibitions.

MR. ANSLINGER: No, sir: he would not touch that. Dr. Walter Bromberger, a distinguished psychiatrist in New York has made this statement:

Young men between the ages of 16 and 25 are frequent smokers of marihuana; even boys of 10 to 14 are initiated (frequently in school groups); to them as other; marijuana holds out the thrill. Since the economic depression the number of marihuana smokers has increased by vagrant youths coming into contact with older psychopaths.”

It was this propaganda, these statements, made before a very small meeting of Congress. After 30 minutes, the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937 was enacted, mainly with the support and by strategic moves by Rockefeller, Hearst, DuPont, Dow, and other corporate entities who were threatened by industrial hemp.

Reefer Madness, the marihuana propaganda film, was made in 1936, a precedent to the above hearings. The statements above by Anslinger were along the same lines as the dialogue before and during the film.

It was corporate greed and influence upon (and within) the government that allowed industrial hemp farming to be prohibited and replaced with foreign and domestic fossil fuels, synthetic chemicals and fibers, and heavy use of timber.

The propaganda is still with us, but I (and others) will continue to speak and educate about the TRUTH of hemp.
 

roots69

Rising Star
BGOL Investor
The Rockefellers – From Drug And Oil Monopoly To War On Drugs And Hemp Prohibition




Many people believe the Rockefellers began their fortune with oil. However, it was wealth from drugs that enabled them to invest in oil and create their vast fortune.

In the 19th century it was William Avery Rockefeller who hawked remedies and medications; medications that had opiate bases. He was literally a traveling salesman, a ‘hack doctor’ and a trickster. He was, in fact, a drug dealer.

He called himself a ‘cancer specialist’, and eventually, with the sales of his elixirs and growing ‘snake oil fortune’, was able to give large amounts of money to his son, John Davison Rockefeller, who used that money to start an oil business.

John Rockefeller saw that oil was going to bring in even bigger profits than ‘snake oil elixirs’. He played the railroad companies against each other, eventually gaining ‘control’. The railroads and cheap transportation were key to transporting the oil; refiners who could ship his oil for less would put the others out of business.

“By the turn of the century Rockefeller’s company, Standard Oil Company, refined more than 90 percent of the oil in the United States and two-thirds of the oil in the world. Rockefeller’s personal fortune was equal to some 2 percent of the GNP of the entire United States.

Rockefeller’s only son, John Davison Rockefeller, Jr., used the fortune to launch a number of crusades of his own, including financing a large part of the movement to prohibit alcohol in the United States . Although his crusade against alcohol ultimately failed, he was not discouraged from public enterprises. He built Rockefeller Center at the height of the Depression as a monument to the family’s enterprise, and encouraged his second-eldest son, Nelson, to enter public life.

Nelson first learned the techniques of propagating and controlling information when he was appointed coordinator of inter-American affairs at the age of thirty-two by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and given the responsibility of running a $150-million propaganda agency in Latin America. To gain complete control over the media of Latin America, Rockefeller engineered a ruling from the United States Treasury which exempted from taxation the cost of advertisements placed by American corporations that were “cooperating” with Rockefeller in Latin America. This tax-exempt advertising eventually constituted more than 40 percent of all radio and television revenues in Latin America. By selectively directing this advertising toward newspapers and radio stations that accepted “guidance” from his office, he was effectively able to control the images that the newspapers and radio stations of Latin America projected about America during World War 11. By 1945 more than 75 percent of the news of the world that reached Latin America originated from Washington, where it was tightly controlled and shaped by Rockefeller’s office. In developing this mode of psychological warfare, Rockefeller learned not only the vulnerabilities of the press but the techniques of manipulating news. By supplying a daily diet of some 30,000 words of “news”-including editorials, articles, news photographs, and “exclusive features”-to the media of Latin America, Rockefeller came to appreciate the reality that journalists acted mainly as messengers of dramatic and titillating stories, rather than as any sort of independent investigators. As long as Latin Americans were spoon-fed manufactured anecdotes and dramatic happenings that fell within the generally accepted definition of “news,” they would not question the interest or politics that lay behind the disclosure of this information to them. This education in the management and manipulation of news was to prove invaluable to Nelson Rockefeller in his political career after World War II.” (Agency of Fear – Opiates and Political Power in America, Edward Jay Epstein)

It was this manipulation of the media that also had a hand in hemp prohibition.

Rockefeller Jr. wanted marijuana gone. He knew that it was a huge threat to his oil industries and chemical investments. The strategy of controlling narcotics was his edge to getting hemp farming prohibited. With the help of his father, he was able to use his business sense to strategize and prohibit some medications, which gave him control over the whole medical system. Prohibiting only certain medications guaranteed that HIS pharmaceutical companies would continue to flourish.

Because hemp was known to be an excellent alternative to fossil oil, and known to have excellent healing properties, it was a tremendous threat to oil and pharmaceutical investments.

“Despite Industrial Hemp having 50,000 uses, Dupont, Rockefeller, Hearst, Mellon and their constituents cornered the industrial and medicinal market with political propaganda…so big business and capitalistic politics thrived and outlawed the hemp plant that had sustained the United States of America, since the days of our founding fathers and all for someone else’s selfish monopolistic goals.[Malmo-Levine, David]…Henry Ford achieved his dream, but he was denied any true public recognition and any further industrial hemp progression. Every citizen of America was denied Henry Ford’s hemp dream of a car made from the soil.” (Voteindustrialhemp.com)

Thus, the propaganda flourished, hemp was classified as ‘marijuana’ and the propaganda film ‘Reefer Madness’ was created.

Simply put, money and greed stifled the plant that could heal our bodies, our economy, our environment. It was replaced by products that do the exact opposite.

It was the greed of a few that kept this plant – hemp – from many.
 

roots69

Rising Star
BGOL Investor
How Israel became the global leader in cannabis research




Israeli researchers have explored the plant’s seemingly limitless beneficial uses for decades while the US remained stubbornly in a prohibition dark age.

As the United States struggles with the basics of cannabis research, such as providing proper cannabis to researchers, other countries have leapt ahead. One of the foremost is Israel, where many in the marijuana field believe the most innovative research is happening.

“Israel isn’t just at the forefront of medical cannabis research,” writes Swiss medical cannabis company Cibdol. “It is out in front by some margin.” U.S. News and World Report referred to Israel as “The Holy Land of medical marijuana.”

That’s due in large part to Raphael Mechoulam, a biochemist and professor at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He played a major role in finding the basic chemical components of marijuana.

Marijuana research in Israel.
Mechoulam began research on medical marijuana in the 1960s. Part of a family that left Eastern Europe for Israel in 1949, Mechoulam earned a doctorate in Israeli and did postdoctoral work at the Rockefeller Center in New York. In the 1960s, he picked cannabis as a research topic after getting a junior faculty position at the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot.

Asked in a 2007 interview published in Addiction magazine why he chose to study cannabis, he said that “on reading the old literature on cannabis I was surprised to note that from a modern point of view the field was ripe for a reinvestigation. In the early 1960s it was almost totally neglected.”

Looking back at older research, he was surprised to learn that no one had every isolated the active constituents of cannabis in pure form. He set out to do just that, even though marijuana was illegal at the time in Israel.

Ignorance, Networking Spark Groundbreaking Weed Research
Part of the reason Mechoulam moved forward with his plan to conduct cannabis research is because he didn’t know any better. In the interview, he said he was blissfully unaware that marijuana was a taboo research subject.

He went to the administrative director at the Weizmann Institute and asked if he knew anyone with the police. The director, after realizing that Mechoulam “was not trying to settle some minor traffic ticket but was requesting starting material for research,” called the head of the investigative branch at police headquarters.

That’s because the two had served in the Israeli Army together. The administrative director assured the head of investigations that Mechoulam was “reliable.” Based on that alone, Mechoulam was called to Tel Aviv and given five kilograms of “superb, smuggled Lebanese hashish.”

It was only later the professor realized both he and the head of investigations “had broken quite a few laws,” Mechoulam said in the interview. “Luckily, being ‘reliable’, I just had to apologize.”

It’s hard to imagine that happening today, and unimagineable in the U.S. Mechoulam moved to Hebrew University in 1966. He said for 40 years he has received hashish from the Israel Ministry of Health with no difficulties, adding that working in a small country “certainly has its positive aspects.”

Israel today
What happened next is well-known in the marijuana industry. Mechoulam and other researchers isolated CBD and THC in marijuana, leading to more research on the psychological and physical impact of both on humans. By the 1990s, there was government-backed research in Israel, decades ahead of most other countries.

In 2017, the School of Pharmacy at Hebrew University founded the Multidisciplinary Center for Cannabinoid Research. The center, which employs 27 cannabis researchers, lauds Mechoulam’s early work, which “heralded in a new age with a promising new vision for humankind.”

The center focuses marijuana research into these areas:

  • Cancer
  • Pain
  • Inflammation and stress management
  • Immunity
  • Metabolism
  • Drug delivery and nanotechnology
  • Pharmaceutical chemistry
  • Neuroscience
  • Plant science and genetics
While not the only country ahead of the U.S. in research, Israel is certainly considered the one that is the farthest ahead. And with the European Review of Medical and Pharmacological Sciences reporting advances in marijuana research in Italy and other European countries, the U.S. runs the risk of falling even farther behind.

Source: https://www.greenentrepreneur.com/article/332807
 

roots69

Rising Star
BGOL Investor
Why William Randolph Hearst Provided the Platform to Create the Devastating Marijuana Prohibition?

Home Around the world North America Why William Randolph Hearst Provided the Platform to Create the Devastating Marijuana Prohibition?
As the failed cannabis prohibition slowly coming to an end, many people coming across marijuana only now wonder: Why was it prohibited in the first place?Young folks that don’t know as much about the stigmatized past, all they can see is a plant that is nothing short of a medical miracle… and for some reason, it is against the law to possess and use it.

Cannabis has been prohibited for 80 years this year, despite its unmatched safety profile and effectiveness as a medicine. Who would have done this 80 years ago and what was the motivation behind it? Who is responsible for withholding the safest therapeutic substance from humanity? It is well known that Harry Anslinger is largely responsible for this crime, however, Anslinger did not do it alone. The most notable co-offender is William Randolph Hearst, the all powerful media mogul of the time.

harry.jpg


Anslinger was a bureaucrat cementing prohibition into the American and later the world history (through his influence in the United Nations), while Hearst was a business person whose media empire provided a platform to spread misinformation on cannabis.

Cannabis presented a huge threat to a portfolio of budding business at the time, including the paper industry, due to hemp fibres superiority and sustainability compared to timber fibre.WR Hearst spent his life building his media empire, while he was also heavily invested in the timber business at the time. Competition from hemp fibre was threatening Hearst’s business interest for a good reason. Fibre from hemp is not only better for producing paper, but it also takes only about 6 months to grow, while the same amount of timber fibre might take 3 or more years to produce. Hemp is simply producing better fibre cheaper.

William_Randolph_Hearst.png


Hearst was not alone in terms of his business interest being threatened by the prospects of hemp. Rockefeller was another powerful wealthy business person of these times, who had a different set of reasons to fear cannabis. Rockefeller was leading the development of the new pharmaceutical industry, and medical herbs, most especially something so effective and widely used as cannabis meant a massive competition for new pharmaceutical products.

Rockefeller did not like competition, most of us would have heard his famous quote:

“Competition is a sin.”

Cannabis was not only one of the most commonly used, safest and most effective medication at the time, but it was also easy to grow, therefore it made it hard to generate profit on for pharmaceuticals.

Besides Rockefeller’s pharma, another area that hemp threatened was the budding synthetic plastic industry that the DuPont Chemical Company had just begun to push. Hemp fibre was not something that DuPont wanted to see competing with synthetic petroleum based plastics.

industrial_hemp.png


In the early 1930’s, the Great Depression hit America very hard creating the most severe economic downturn since the industrial revolution. Suddenly, thriving businesses found themselves in very tough financial situations and in their efforts to avoid further risk and damage to their business interests from a plant they felt the urge to do something about it quickly … even if it resulted in a serious crime against humanity.

Apart from the business interest, another drive for Hearst to use his influential position controlling the media in the United States to spread lies about cannabis was his racist world view.

Hearst was known for his hatred towards Mexicans, largely due to his loss of 800,000 acres of timber plantation that he blamed on the Mexican General, Pancho Villa.

He was well aware how the human psyche worked and knew that presenting Mexicans as the scapegoats in the midst of the economic downswing would help him not only spread his hatred against Mexicans and other communities of colour but would also help to sell his newspapers and magazines.

Image_The_Devil_s_Weed.jpg


Hearst’s role in prohibition was substantial, as changing the public opinion on cannabis was no small task. Cannabis was such an effective medicine and provided crucial fibre supply that fuelled the US Military’s might.They actually introduced a new name for cannabis, the misspelt Mexican made up word of ‘marijuana’ to be able to dissociate it from cannabis and to be able to demonize and ultimately outlaw cannabis for their financial and political interests.Cannabis prohibition has nothing to do with the plant’s effects on their users, obviously, all the Reefer Madness propaganda was based on deliberate misleading lies.The government and the public were aware of the benefits of hemp and even in the 1930’s, the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission’s Report as well as the Panama Canal Zone Military Investigation into Marijuana by the US Military studied the effects of cannabis on users and both reports advised against restricting public access to the plant.

cannabis-ban.jpg


Hearst deliberately used his influential media portfolio to spread misinformation on cannabis. He had access to every segment of the population through his popular newspapers and magazines and utilised these outlets aggressively to change public opinion.Nobody really knew that this crazy dangerous new drug ‘marijuana’ was actually cannabis or hemp until it was later federally prohibited by the Marijuana Tax Act in 1937.

80 years of devastating marijuana prohibition is directly responsible for the death of millions of people, ruining lives and families and creating major health issues such as the current opioid crisis in the United States… all due to the financial interest and racial hatred of half a dozen or so individuals, one of whom happened to control the media at the time.

Great times to be alive to finally see this unfair and unjust corrupt marijuana prohibition deal crumble.
 

roots69

Rising Star
BGOL Investor
John D. Rockefeller’s American Cancer Society Never Meant to ‘CURE’ Cancer

american_cancer_society_logo-696x432.jpg




Did you realize that all conventional methods of killing cancer have only a 3% overall ‘cure’ rate? Chemotherapy and radiation not only have low cure rates, but they also kill healthy cells and often make cancer worse, when this is completely unnecessary because most cells can be reverted into healthy, non-damaging cells with the right treatment.

That’s not something the American Cancer Society (ACS) and Susan G. Komen for the Cure want you to know, though. They are in bed with Big Pharma, and financed by the legacy of John D. Rockefeller who started the ACS in 1913.

An Unfortunate History
The ACS was begun as a business model – not a means to ‘cure’ people from life-threatening illness. It’s also a brilliant way to wash dirty money. The ACS, in fact, receives more money in contributions every few minutes than the Independent Cancer Research Foundation (ICRF) (which has 90% ‘cure rates’) receives in a full year!!

John D. Rockefeller is also the son of the founder of the pharmaceutical industry in the US. Sterling Drug, Inc., the largest holding company in the Rockefeller Drug Empire and its 68 subsidiaries, showed profits in 1961 of $23,463,719 after taxes, on net assets of $43,108,106 – a 54% profit.


Squibb, another Rockefeller-controlled company, made not 6%, but 576% on the actual value of its property in 1945. At this time, the Army Surgeon General’s Office and the Navy Bureau of Medicine and Surgery were also heavily promoting vaccines to the tune of 200 million ‘shots’ per year.

Furthermore, the Rockefeller’s Trust to promote the pharmaceutical industry is also evidenced in their well-publicized donations to Harvard Medical School (more than $8 million in donations), Yale (who received more than $7 million), John Hopkins (more than $10 million in donations), Washington University in St. Louis (more than $2 million), Columbia University (who received more than $5 million in donations), and Cornell (more than $1.7 million).

The Rockefeller Foundation itself was also set up in 1904 by something called the General Education Fund – which we can only assume now was meant to ‘educate’ the masses in illness and death.

By May of 1915, the Supreme Court tried to stop this illegal drug racketeering, but even though the trust was ordered to be dismantled, the Rockefellers were already above the law.

It is this very unsavory history that has brought us to the pharmaceutical paradigm we are mesmerized with today. Sadly, our government Supreme Court, minor courts, and politicians somehow decided ‘if you can’t beat them, join them,’ and now we have – from teaching hospitals and universities, to research endowments and 501c3s, promoting a 3% ‘cure’, when there are abundantly better ways of treating cancer.

These institutions also promote an idea that cancer cells cause damage to DNA, but in the 1930s, it was proven that cancer cells could be turned back into healthy ones – before DBA was even discovered!

The industry tried very hard to discredit the studies of Dr. Royal Rife, who discovered that cancer could be treated more holistically. The AMA had a field day with his 1987 book, entitled The Cancer Cure That Worked. In 1934, Mr. Royal Rife and his associates opened 2 small clinic in California and treated sixteen cases of cancer with treatments that lasted only three minutes. Rife’s treatments rendered no adverse side effects and were 100% effective, but his is not the only story of successful cancer treatment that has been suppressed.

Since the 1900s, multiple cancer treatments that cost little or nothing have been suppressed by the legacy of the Rockefeller’s shady business. From cannabis oil miracles to Essiac tea, as soon as someone starts to interfere with Big Pharma’s money with sound solutions, you can bet they are getting a one-way ticket out of town, harassed, smacked with lawsuits, and even pronounced the sentence of death.

It is time to end their reign. They are not kings, but criminals.
 

roots69

Rising Star
BGOL Investor
Secrets Of The Elite: Why Forbes’ Rich List Doesn’t Include The Wealthiest Families On The Planet

Permit me to issue and control the money of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws.

This is a House of Rothschilds maxim, widely attributed to banking tycoon Mayer Amschel Rothschild in 1838 and said to be a founding principle for the highly corrupt banking and political system we have today. Along with the Rockefellers, the Rothschild dynasty is estimated to be worth well over a trillion dollars. How are these powerful families linked to the ongoing crisis of global wealth inequality, why are so many people unaware of their existence, and why doesn’t Forbes ever mention them in their annual list of the world’s wealthiest people?

Global wealth inequality is out of control, and it’s no accident
In January 2014, Oxfam announced that the richest 85 people on the planet share a combined wealth of $110 trillion. The figure was based on Forbes’s rich list 2013, and it equates to 65 times the total wealth of the entire bottom half (3.5 billion) of the world’s population. While some deluded commentators welcomed this as “fantastic news,” the rest of us were disgusted. Winnie Byanyima, Oxfam’s executive director, said at the time: “It is staggering that in the 21st Century, half of the world’s population own no more than a tiny elite whose numbers could all fit comfortably on a double-decker bus.”

Two months later, following Oxfam’s calculation and having published the new 2014 rich list, Forbes journalist Kasia Morena did some fact-checking. She found that the number of billionaires owning the same as the poorest 3.5 billion had dropped from 85 to 67: which demonstrates an enormous widening of the global inequality gap in just one year.

Fast-forward to 2015, and another Oxfam investigation. The anti-poverty charity warned in January that if nothing is done to tackle global wealth inequality- by forcing corporations to pay their taxes and closing off-shore tax havens, for example- the richest 1% will own more than everybody else in the world combined by 2016. In a paper called Wealth: Having it all and wanting more, Oxfam outlined how the richest 1 percent have seen their share of global wealth increase from 44% in 2009 to 48% in 2014, and will likely surpass 50% in 2016. Winnie Byanyima again warned that the explosion in inequality is holding back the fight against global poverty at a time when one in nine people do not have enough to eat, and more than a billion people still live on less than $1.25 a day.

The organization also outlined how 20 percent of billionaires around the world have interests in the financial and insurance sectors, a group that saw their cash wealth increase by 11 percent in the last 12 months. Billionaires listed as having interests in the pharmaceutical and healthcare sectors saw their collective net worth increase by 47 percent, and the industry spent more than $500 million lobbying policy makers in Washington and Brussels in 2013 alone.

“Do we really want to live in a world where the one percent own more than the rest of us combined?” Byanyima asked. “The scale of global inequality is quite simply staggering, and despite the issues shooting up the global agenda, the gap between the richest and the rest is widening fast.”

Meet the people who own 50% (and counting) of the world’s wealth
Here is Forbes’s (real-time) list of the 66 billionaires who (officially) own half of all global assets, and will soon own more than the rest of Earth’s seven billion population combined. They range from CEOs of large corporations to oil and gas tycoons and Silicon valley entrepreneurs. The list details name, net worth, percentage change since the 2015 results, their age, industry and nationality. Bill Gates is ranked first at $469 billion, and James Simons at #66 with the $14 billion he made from hedge funds.

But where are the world’s Royal families? And more to the point, where are the Rothschilds and the Rockefellers? These two families have an unimaginable amount of wealth that surpasses the trillion mark- they are the only trillionaires in the world, and yet they are missing from Forbes’s list every single year, along with the handful of other men commonly believed to own our politicians, our media, our corporations, our scientists, and even our money supply.


Five of the most powerful and wealthiest men in the world belong to the Rothschild and Rockefeller dynasties. How much power do they hold, and why do we hear so little of them?
The Rothschild and Rockefeller Dynasties: With great power comes great secrecy
Forbes’s rich list doesn’t include members of Royal families or dictators who hold their wealth through a position of power, or who control the riches of their country. In this way, the real people pulling the strings are able to work in absolute secrecy without any media attention at all (unless it is carefully-constructed positive propaganda, like this article on the philanthropy of the Rothschilds, of course). Forbes’s policy to exclude heads of state from the rich list explains why the Queen of England is absent, although nobody has the slightest idea of her wealth in any case: her shareholdings remain hidden behind Bank of England Nominee accounts. As the Guardian newspaper reported in May 2002: ‘The reason for the wild variations in valuations of her private wealth can be pinned on the secrecy over her portfolio of share investments…Her subjects have no way of knowing through a public register of interests where she, as their head of state, chooses to invest her money. Unlike [British politicians and Lords], the Queen does not have to annually declare her interests and as a result her subjects cannot question her or know about potential conflicts of interests…’

The same can be said for the Rothschilds and Rockerfellers, whose European forebears were richer than any Royal family at the time. The families are believed to have set up and own the Federal Reserve (G Edward Griffin’s The Creature From Jekyll Island and this research by journalist Dean Henderson are recommended reading if you want to get deeper into this topic). Could this be why the families, whose power in manipulating global affairs for the past few hundred years cannot be underestimated, are protected by Forbes’s ‘don’t even go there’ policy? Retired management consultant Gaylon Ross Sr, author of Who’s Who of the Global Elite, was apparently told in 1998 that the combined wealth of the Rockefeller family was approx $11 trillion and the Rothschilds $100 trillion…what might that figure have reached 17 years later? One can hardly begin to imagine, but maybe money isn’t the most important thing to your average trillionaire, anyway…

“The only problem with wealth is, what do you do with it?” was a rhetorical question posed by none other than John D. Rockefeller. Well, if Aaron Russo’s testimony is to be believed, all the Rockefeller riches in the world certainly won’t be used to benefit the human race…

Russo’s Rockefeller revelations: False flags, power grabs, and an enslaved population

Russo, a film-maker and activist who directed America: From Freedom to Fascism, claimed that Nick Rockefeller told him about ‘an event that would allow us to invade Afghanistan and Iraq’ some eleven months before 9/11, and foretold the fact that the ‘War on Terror’ would be a hoax wherein soldiers would be looking in caves for non-existent enemies (see video). In the interview, Russo claims that he first met lawyer Nick Rockefeller after being introduced by a mutual attorney friend. The two men hit it off, and later down the line Rockefeller apparently confided in Russo privately what his family had planned for the world: never-ending war, global population reduction, economic collapse, widespread chaos and disorder on such a scale that people would actually welcome the ultimate ‘solution’: a one-world government. He was speaking in October 2000, and most of his predictions have now come to pass- including 9/11 and the subsequent War on Terror.

Russo claimed that Rockefeller asked him to be on the Council For Foreign Relations (CFR), but the man who spent his career fighting for freedom and exposing the Fed Reserve supposedly told Rockefeller that he couldn’t possibly go along with these sinister plans for mankind. “As much as I like you Nick, I don’t believe in enslaving people. We’re on opposite sides of the fence,” Russo told Nick. To which Rockefeller apparently replied: “Why do you care about those people? Take care of your own life; do the best you can for you and your family.” Russo concludes: “There was just a lack of caring; it was just cold.”

He goes on, “I used to say what the point, Nick? You have all the money in the world, you have all the power in the world, whats the end goal?” Rockefeller is said to have responded bluntly: “To get everyone chipped.” According to this theory, the families who own the banking system are bored of their wealth, it is no longer enough. To control society itself is the ultimate end-game. According to Russo, Rockefeller told him that a global government would slowly phase out paper money from circulation, with its eventual aim being to microchip the population, turning us all into slaves of the NWO.

These are wild claims indeed, and from a journalistic point of view, they cannot be verified one way or the other. But it’s worth noting that just before Russo died in August 2007, he filmed a moving message to all Americans. In it, he talked about how vital it is for people to continue to resist national ID cards and microchips, and fight for their individual freedoms against those who would enslave us. It’s also worth pointing out that it’s not only activists like Russo and scare-mongering patriots like Alex Jones who have tried to ‘out’ the Rothschilds and Rockefellers. The problem is, all those who do so are silenced.

Ashley Mote, a member of the European Parliament serving British independence party UKIP, asked the following question in Brussels, and retribution was swift: “Mr President, I wish to draw your attention to the Global Security Fund, set up in the early 1990s under the auspices of Jacob Rothschild. This is a Brussels-based fund and it is no ordinary fund: it does not trade, it is not listed and it has a totally different purpose. It is being used for geopolitical engineering purposes, apparently under the guidance of the intelligence services. I have previously asked about the alleged involvement of the European Union’s own intelligence resources in the management of slush funds in offshore accounts, and I still await a reply. To that question I now add another: what are the European Union’s connections to the Global Security Fund and what relationship does it have with European Union institutions?”

This is exactly the kind of question the European public would like an answer to. Yet Mote did not receive one. Instead, the 79 year old politician was sacked from his own party, and later arrested and sent to jail for allegedly claiming false expenses during his time as an MEP. Mote claimed throughout his trial that he was ‘targeted for being anti-Europe’, and said the money he claimed was used to pay third-party whistleblowers in a quest to uncover corruption and fight for democracy and transparency in European politics.

Like everything else relating to the people who really run the show, the truth is out there…but it’s almost impossible to pin down.



knowyourenemy.jpg
 

roots69

Rising Star
BGOL Investor
Who Benefits the Most from Cannabis Being Illegal? [ANSWERED]
The answer is quite revealing.



marijuanabreak__Who_Gains_the_Most_Out_of_Cannabis_Being_Illegal-768x494.jpg



Marijuana has been a Schedule I drug since 1970, while the ‘War on Drugs’ officially began in 1971 after Richard Nixon declared drug abuse as ‘public enemy number one’ in a special address to the Congress on Drug Abuse Prevention and Control. While Tricky Dicky was waging his own personal war, there was an actual war going on in Vietnam that claimed thousands of lives. It is inconceivable to think that marijuana belongs in the same category as heroin. The latter is truly deadly, although it once enjoyed a degree of legality for medicinal use that weed hopes to attain one day!

That the war on drugs has been an utter failure is undeniable – while the government fights against illicit narcotics, it has allowed deadly opioids to slip through the net and kill tens of thousands of people. Meanwhile, over 574,000 people were arrested in 2015 for possession of small amounts of weed intended only for personal use. It is normal for people to end up in prison for weeks because they can’t pay the fine.

In 2016, over 650,000 people were arrested for weed possession in the United States. With cannabis now legal for medicinal use in 29 states plus D.C. and recreational use in nine states, we expect the number of arrests to fall dramatically, especially since possession of small amounts of marijuana has been decriminalized in most states.


Why is Marijuana Illegal Anyway?
Officially, weed is illegal because it offers ‘no medicinal value’ and ‘is extremely addictive.’ In reality, there are thousands of studies showing that marijuana has medical benefits, and decades worth of data to back up the assertion that pot isn’t addictive, nor ‘a gateway drug.’ In contrast, ‘legal’ opioids are incredibly addictive, with almost 100 people dying because of them every single day.

The other reason weed is illegal is to protect society from the threats of “mayhem, murder, and looting” that would unquestionably occur if marijuana was made legal on a federal level. If you believe Reefer Madness (and sadly, a lot of people do), smoking pot will cause you to go insane and go on a murderous rampage. Oddly enough, none of the nine states where weed is legal for recreational use has become a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Anyone who has been to Colorado since marijuana became legal, for example, will tell you that it’s ‘rather nice’ and doesn’t resemble the Mad Max movies at all.

Historically, marijuana has also been linked with narcotics such as heroin and morphine. Sadly, though, too many individuals have failed to educate themselves and frankly, media coverage only aids this level of ignorance. Even today, millions of Americans place drugs into ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ categories, with the normal drugs including alcohol, opioids, nicotine, and caffeine. The abnormal drugs include cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine, and weed, the latter usually said to be a ‘gateway’ to the other, more dangerous drugs.

Unfortunately, there is a racist element to the ban on marijuana as well. The anti-weed movement escalated as early as the 1930s, and it was at this time that America also indulged in a strong anti-Chicano sentiment. There was a large influx of Mexican-Americans and marijuana was their drug of choice. As Americans didn’t want Mexican-American subculture to develop, it made sense to view weed in a negative light.

Also, we can’t underestimate the power of inertia when it comes to public policy – if something is banned for a very long time, the general public takes it for granted that it is the right thing to do. Did you know that same-sex intercourse was banned in most American states for over 200 years? It was only in 2003, when the Supreme Court ruled such bans unconstitutional, that this crazy law was taken off the books.

Likewise, cannabis has been banned for over a century, so most people are okay with it and don’t wish to rock the boat. In contrast, there was widespread anger over alcohol prohibition when it was introduced in 1919, but once it became clear that it was a failed experiment, prohibition was repealed just 14 years later.

Who Really Benefits from the Prohibition of Marijuana?
The notion that society as a whole benefits from the cannabis ban is complete BS. The average person is not helped by the prohibition of weed, and millions of people are actually hindered by it. From people who need it to help ease symptoms of pain, to cultivators trying to earn an honest living, the weed ban has no positive effects – unless of course you fall into one of the following categories.


Big Pharma
No prizes for guessing the biggest beneficiary of the federal ban on weed. The ban makes it impossible to conduct the double-blind clinical trials that are necessary to gain FDA approval for any drug. As a result, Big Pharma can continue to produce its death pills backed by little more than a handful of tiny and dubious studies, while marijuana has tens of thousands of studies on its side, and still remains illegal.

When the question of legalizing weed was asked in Arizona, a company called Insys Therapeutics made sure the answer was ‘no’ by donating over $500,000 to the anti-cannabis movement. Insys had recently developed a crappy synthetic cannabinoid compound called Dronabinol, and needed to protect its investment. Unfortunately, as fate would have it Insys got what they wanted.

Harold Woodbridge is a retired police officer, and he is staunchly in the pro-weed camp. He believes America would be better off relaxing prohibition laws, and according to him, Big Pharma is the second biggest opponent of cannabis legalization, behind only state Police Unions. He recognizes without question that the natural herb can replace everything from Vicodin to Advil, so in other words, makes it pretty obvious that legal weed would put a lot of pharmaceutical companies out of business.

Police Unions & Private Prisons
This has less to do with any supposed impact on crime, and more to do with the enormous federal drug war grants that police unions receive. Back in 2010, for example, a police union lobbyist named John Lovell led the effort to defeat Proposition 19, which was a measure to make weed legal in the state of California. In the process, he helped police departments claim millions of dollars in federal weed eradication grants.

Also, in 2009 and 2010, police associations in California looked for over $7.5 million worth of Federal money to conduct a Campaign Against Marijuana program. But heere’s the thing: A significant amount of the cash went straight into the paychecks of police officers.

In addition to police unions, private prison corporations really don’t want pot legalized. Think of the hundreds of thousands of poor souls that get arrested for marijuana possession every year — prisons would be virtually empty if it wasn’t for weed!

In 2015, for example, before the legalization of cannabis for recreational use, over 2,100 people were jailed for weed offenses in California, while almost 4,400 of them received prison terms for ‘marijuana plus’ offenses (this is the name given to the phenomenon where minor weed crimes are included in the sentence).

The legalization of weed in California means that private prison companies will miss out on a fortune. And if legalization happens all over the country, they would likely just end up concocting some other ridiculous reason to put people in jail for profit. Sound crazy? Well, it is.


Criminals
Clearly, as long as weed remains illegal in 21 states and on a federal level, criminal gangs will be interested in it. Admittedly, if marijuana became legalized, organized crime syndicates would try and muscle in on the territory of others in a bid to establish ‘legitimacy.’ However, they would almost certainly place their focus on other drugs such as cocaine and heroin. In 2016, for instance, illegal weed sales topped $46 billion in the United States. Although the market has shrunk recently, it is still a more than worthwhile enterprise for criminals.

If you cast your mind back to the prohibition era for a minute, you will note that organized crime rose drastically between 1919 and 1933. These gangs only cared about money which meant trifling issues such as worker safety and product quality were irrelevant. At the end of the day, the fact of the matter is that as long as weed remains illegal, criminals will continue producing low-grade pot, and continue “earning” billions of dollars for it.

The Alcohol Industry
Companies that sell the most popular legal drug in the world would suffer a major setback if weed were allowed to become a rival. In fact, it’s no secret that the Beer and Beverage Distributors of California contributed a significant amount of money to the anti-marijuana legalization movement.

Additionally, in Las Vegas casino owner Sheldon Adelson donated $2 million to the Nevada anti-weed legalization campaign, but ultimately failed in his mission, as cannabis became legal for recreational use in the state on January 1, 1997.

Mason Tvert of the Marijuana Policy Project, a pro-cannabis group, made an interesting observation on Adelson’s behavior. According to him, Adelson wants you to be a guest in his casino, as long as you’re getting drunk and playing Blackjack. However, if you like smoking weed at home, Adelson wants you in jail.

And finally, research suggests that the alcohol industry is actually wasting their money on their anti-pot efforts. According to 2015 tax records in Colorado, for example, the alcohol industry has actually grown in the state – in spite of the fact that marijuana became legal for recreational use in 2014.

Final Thoughts on Who Really Profits from Marijuana Prohibition
If someone tries to tell you that weed is illegal for the ‘greater good,’ you have our permission to punch them in the mouth! In all seriousness, though, marijuana provides millions of people around the world with pain relief — not to mention some great times that don’t involve dangerous, drunken punch-ups.

As it typically goes, the commonfolk end up being the big losers when weed is illegal, while Big Pharma gets to peddle its drugs, which are actually more harmful than all but the worst illegal narcotics. Moreover, when weed is illegal police unions get to line their pockets and ruin the lives of people caught with miniscule amounts of possession, criminals continue to get an extra source of income, and the alcohol industry continues to view cannabis as a wrongly-identified enemy.
 

roots69

Rising Star
BGOL Investor
50 Unexpected Benefits of Cannabis (you might not know)

Cannabis-Unexpected-Benefits-In-article_image_1-original.jpg

Has this plant enhanced your life? You're not alone.

It comes as no shock to anyone who knows cannabis that this is a valuable plant with a lot of benefits.

As we bring this plant out of the dark and into the light, it continues to blow our minds – just how great the benefits of cannabis actually are!

We are talking about benefits to public health, to the economy, and to each and every person who develops a positive relationship with this therapeutic plant.

Here are 50 emerging benefits of cannabis that will no doubt inspire further research:

The Health Benefits of Cannabis
1. It Could Help You Lose Weight
If you’re an avid Green Flower reader, then you’re already aware that cannabis users have been shown to be slimmer, on average, than non-users. That’s because cannabis helps the body regulate insulin production, and manage caloric intake more efficiently.

2. It Appears to Help Regulate and Prevent Diabetes
Because cannabis helps regulate body weight, it only makes sense that it would help prevent and regulate Diabetes. Again, you can thank the herb’s ability to regulate insulin production for this medical breakthrough.

3. It Fights Cancer
This is the big one that everybody’s been talking about. Both scientists and the federal government have released a good amount of evidence showing that cannabinoids fight certain types of cancer. It doesn’t get much more substantial than that.

4. It Can Help Depression
Cannabis-Unexpected-Benefits-In-article_image_2-original.jpg


Research is important, but so are the voices and smiles of those whom cannabis actually helps!
Depression is one of the more widespread, yet least talked about medical conditions in America. And research is showing that cannabis can help relieve people.

“Using compounds derived from cannabis — marijuana — to restore normal endocannabinoid function could potentially help stabilize moods and ease depression,” said Samir Haj-Dahmane, who is spearheading the research at Buffalo University – research that is only just now beginning to ramp up.

5. It’s Showing Promise in Treating Autism
Like many other high-profile disorders, autism may be a prime target for cannabis-based treatments. Science is digging into it, but in the meantime, some parents are using it to help manage violent mood swings in autistic children.

6. It Provides a Safer Alternative to Other Drugs and Alcohol
Cannabis can be harmful if you use it irresponsibly, but it’s nowhere near as destructive as alcohol for example. With wider availability, cannabis can and will become a substance of choice – and likely save a lot of lives (and livers) in the process.

7. It Helps Regulate Seizures for a lot of People
Using medical cannabis to regulate seizures is another one of the more high-profile findings coming out of medical science. For folks with disorders like Epilepsy, cannabis is showing immense promise.

8. CBD Can Apparently Help Broken Bones Heal Faster
Cannabis-Unexpected-Benefits-In-article_image_3-original.jpg

Science shows us how CBD can help broken bones grow back faster and stronger.
Can you believe that cannabis can actually mend broken bones? It’s true, as CBD evidently reacts chemically with collagen, spurring along the healing process. Another very exciting find.

9. It's Helping People with ADHD
For those with serious trouble concentrating, or who have children suffering from ADD or ADHD, cannabis might be the treatment you’ve been waiting for. It’s safer and more effective than medications like Ritalin or Adderall.

10. It Can Help Treat Serious Addictions
We already mentioned that cannabis can be a viable, safer alternative to substances like alcohol and tobacco, but did you know that it can also be used as a treatment for addictions to these substances, and more? Individuals addicted to serious drugs like heroin, opiates, and cocaine, are showing promise in ridding themselves of their addictions through cannabis therapy.

Of course, it’s entirely possible to develop a dependency to marijuana, also – so responsible and mindful use is key.

11. It Treats Glaucoma

One of the first big medical issue that cannabis was shown to effectively treat is glaucoma. Ingesting cannabis helps lower the pressure in the eyeball, giving patients at least temporary relief.

12. It Can Improve Lung Health
You probably never saw this one coming – especially since pot is commonly associated with smoking, and smoking with chronic lung problems. But some conditions, including lung cancer and Emphysema, have been shown to regress when cannabis is thrown into the mix.

13. It Helps Anxiety in Correct Doses
Cannabis-Unexpected-Benefits-In-article_image_4-original.jpg

Be careful. Too much cannabis can make your anxiety worse.
Fact: cannabis can actually cause anxiety but there are ways to potentially avoid that. And it’s also true that for many people, cannabis can help alleviate anxiety disorders.

14. It Appears to Slow the Development of Alzheimer’s Disease
Cognitive degeneration is pretty much unavoidable as we age, and Alzheimer’s disease falls under that umbrella. The good news is that studies are showing cannabis can stop the progression of Alzheimer’s, which may lead to longer, richer lives for millions.

15. It Helps M.S. Patients
Cannabis helps alleviate many of the symptoms associated with Multiple Sclerosis, most notably the tremors, spasms, and pain.

RECOMMENDED FOR CHRONIC PAIN:
Cannabis For Back Pain, Chronic Pain, & Nerve Damage

Watch Green Flower's online session with Mara Gordon today...



16. It Can Relieve Muscle Spasms
We’ve mentioned M.S. and seizures, but general muscle spasms are an ailment that affect millions. Cannabis can help calm those muscles, stop them from twitching, and deal with the pain associated with spasms.

17. It Could Help with Eating Disorders
A common use for medical cannabis is to help regulate eating patterns. Whether you eat too much, or too little, cannabis can help. This is especially helpful for people suffering from disorders like Bulimia and Anorexia.

18. It Relieves Arthritis
Cannabis-Unexpected-Benefits-In-article_image_5-original.jpg

Cannabis can offer serious relief for arthritis.
Another common ailment that cannabis is used to treat is arthritis. The THC and CBD – as well as other cannabinoids – help sufferers deal with the pain, especially when using quality cannabis creams and balms.

19. It’s Helpful for Those with PTSD
With so many veterans in need of effective treatments for PTSD after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the discovery that cannabis is a viable option is fantastic news. Now, the trick is to get the VA and doctors to actually prescribe it.

And of course not all PTSD is combat-related. All sorts of traumatic experiences can put that fight-or-flight response into overdrive, and cannabis is the only medication to address that.

20. It Could Help Regulate Your Metabolism
We touched on how cannabis helps your body process and deal with food, and obesity. This plays into how it also helps maintain and regulate your metabolism. That not only means sticking to an ideal weight level but generally being healthier and happier!

21. It Helps People with AIDS/HIV
Cannabis can’t directly cure the AIDS virus, but it can and does help those living with it cope. Specifically, cannabis helps those living with AIDS/HIV maintain their diets and handle associated pains and aches.

22. It’s Proved Effective for Treating Nausea
Next up on our list of marijuana facts: nausea. This is a relatively common feeling, and one that is brought on by any number of things. Some people live with constant bouts on a daily basis, and as you can imagine, it can be debilitating. How does cannabis come into the picture? Chemical compounds in cannabis react with brain receptors to regulate feelings of nausea. This is a particular boon for chemotherapy patients (see #27).

23. It’s an Alternative Treatment for Headaches
Cannabis-Unexpected-Benefits-In-article_image_6-original.jpg

You know you could potentially treat that headache with a non-psychoactive cannabis product?
Lots of people experience headaches every day, and taking the typical medicines – be it acetaminophen (Tylenol) or ibuprofen (Advil) – can take its toll on your body, leading to ulcers, liver damage, and other complications. Cannabis offers a natural alternative, and one that won’t chew threw your stomach lining.

24. It Looks the Herb Can Treat Certain STDs
It’s true – cannabis has been found to be at least somewhat effective in the treatment of a handful of sexually transmitted diseases, including herpes and chlamydia.

25. It Could Help with Speech Problems
If you, or someone you know, has an issue with stuttering, cannabis can help. Research is by and large still lacking, but in the same way that cannabis helps calm spasms and twitches, those with speech problems can potentially benefit from its effects.

26. It Can Improve Skin Conditions
Who would’ve thought that cannabis could be a viable treatment option for skin conditions like eczema? The only issue? Smoking won’t do much good, as smoking actually harms your skin. A quality cannabis topical, on the other hand, can do wonders.

27. It Can Help You Get Through Chemotherapy
This is another extremely popular use for medical cannabis. Those suffering from cancers and its treatments – like chemotherapy – have found comfort in cannabis’s soothing effects.

28. It Could Help with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder
Those living with OCD might also use cannabis as a therapeutic option. CBD, which effectively regulates anxiety to some extent, is the main active ingredient which helps those with OCD get a handle on the disorder – and live more functional lives.

29. Cannabis Can Calm Asthma Attacks
Cannabis-Unexpected-Benefits-In-article_image_7-original.jpg

Some forms of cannabis act as a bronchodilator.
You probably never saw this one coming. Cannabis and asthma? They’re apparently compatible, or so says science. Again, it has to do with cannabinoid receptors which help control coughing fits as well as the herb’s ability to act as a bronchodilator. Smoking is obviously not the best method of delivery here, as that will likely only make things worse.

30. It Can Replace Viagra for Some Men
How about a natural cure for erectile dysfunction? This is another one of the many benefits of marijuana. No more hiding that Viagra in the back of the medicine cabinet, merely stick to cannabis. The research is ongoing, but there is evidence that cannabis can help men overcome this frustrating issue.

RECOMMENDED FOR COUPLES:
Can Cannabis Solve Our Sex & Intimacy Problems?

Watch Green Flower's online talk with Jordan Tishler today, MD



31. It Can Lower Your Blood Pressure
Smoking and low blood pressure are rarely synonymous. Thankfully there are several other ways to ingest cannabis, which can help with hypertension and other blood pressure issues. Although if you have serious heart issues, caution is advised because we still have a lot to learn about cannabis and the heart.

32. It’ll Calm Your Panic Attacks in Proper Doses
As mentioned, calming anxiety is one of cannabis’s more sought-after effects. As a result, it can help people control panic attacks. Of course, it’ll depend on several physical factors, and what specific strains you use.

The Economic Benefits of Cannabis
33. It Can Be Used as a Food Source
Despite the fact that cannabis is hard to find at your local grocery store, throughout history, it’s been a dietary staplefor many civilizations. Hemp has often been cultivated as a source of protein, and even today is used to create protein powders, or seeds can be purchased for consumption. On a large production scale, hemp can feed a lot of hungry people if prohibitive laws are overturned.

34. It Makes for an Attractive Investment
Want to make green, from green? Lots of venture capitalists are starting to see the explosive potential in the cannabis industry, and as a result, are dumping money into cannabis-based startups and businesses. Cannabis capital summitsare even popping up, attracting investors and entrepreneurs.

35. It Can Help Fight Climate Change
If we are able to get large-scale cannabis farms into production, it could help curb emissions, and fight climate change. This would happen through a number of ways, from providing more carbon-absorbing plants across vast farmlands, to trading off emission-producing animal farms for greener, cleaner cannabis grows.

36. It Creates Jobs
The creation of literally tens of thousands of jobs in the wake of legalization in places like Colorado and Washington is hard to ignore. And in an economy that has been in slow-recovery mode since 2009, looking at any opportunity to add more jobs can’t be overlooked.

37. It Generates Revenue for Schools and Public Health Programs
Cannabis-Unexpected-Benefits-In-article_image_9-original.jpg

More money for schools is a great thing.
Instead of having money funnel into the hands of low-level street dealers, or even cartels on the other side of the border, legal marijuana markets are putting money to work in local communities through tax revenue. Marijuana is now supplying millions to schools and public health programs, among other things.

38. Legalizing Cannabis is Getting People Out of Jail
A big point of contention in the U.S. recently has been the large rate of incarceration, and the amount of money flowing to the prison industrial complex. Legalization is clearing out prisons, and freeing up time and resources for law enforcement.

39. It’s Creating New Industries
We mentioned that cannabis is creating a lot of jobs, and that’s because it’s creating new industries which house them. Cultivation, processing, sales outlets – there are numerous facets to the cannabis industry, and as legalization spreads, it’ll continue to grow.

40. It Lowers Crime Rates
Yes, making a previously illegal product legal lowers the crime rate – but it goes deeper than that. Numbers show that states in post-legalization status are seeing drops in crime, and perhaps most importantly, violent crime.

41. It Leads to Safer Roads
Traffic deaths have gone down in Colorado after legalization, which is fantastic news. This could be due to the substitution effect, people choosing pot over alcohol.

42. It Makes Law Enforcement Cheaper and Easier
Cannabis-Unexpected-Benefits-In-article_image_10-original.jpg

Law authorities shouldn't waste their time with cannabis. Why would they?
In legalized states, police no longer need to spend time chasing marijuana offenders, which also clears up the courtrooms for more serious cases. This makes things easier for everybody, and cheaper for the tax payers.

How Cannabis Can Improve Your Daily Life
43. It Can Keep Your Pets Healthy
Cannabis, in some forms, can make for a healthy supplement for your pets. And for animals that are sick, or living with chronic pain, cannabis-based treats can offer some relief.

44. It Can Stop Nightmares
Plagued by bad dreams? Try cannabis before you hit the sack, and see if it makes a difference. For some people, it’s doing the trick. For others, particularly those with PTSD, it can also eliminate dreams completely. The reason, it turns out, is that cannabis impacts REM sleep – the part of the cycle during which you dream.

45. It Can Bring Your Energy Levels up
A lot of people are tired. But a small subset of individuals suffer from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome – a disorder that is effectively treated with certain cannabis compounds and strains. Just make sure you’re picking the right ones if you want to avoid fatigue.

46. It’ll Help You Sleep
On the flip side, you can use cannabis to help you get to sleep. Again, though, it’ll depend on what specific strains you’re using, and your physical and psychological makeup. You may have to experiment a bit to get the desired effect.

47. It Can Help You Get Through the Work Day
Cannabis-Unexpected-Benefits-In-article_image_11-original.jpg

A lot of people use cannabis to enhance productivity. Too much though could have the opposite effect.
No matter what kind of job you have, cannabis can probably give you a boost in some way – be it mentally or physically. Even consuming after work can be a help. If you do decide to experiment with cannabis at work, be careful not to let things get out of hand. Be mindful of what works and what doesn’t.

And if you’re operating machinery, or driving? Abstain. Better to get high AFTER work.

48. It Can Make You More Productive
If you can get your cannabis regimen just right, productivity could increase significantly. For a lot of people that may be due to the medical benefits gained from cannabis, or the inspiration, or simply because they’re happier. On the other hand, productivity can also take a complete nosedive if you’re not careful.

What we do know is in medical cannabis states employee absenteeism is down.

49. It Could Make You More Creative
Surprise, surprise – cannabis can help you be more creative. There’s still some debate as to how or why this happens, but cannabis does inspire lateral and divergent thinking, an important mindset for innovation and progress.

50. It Can Protect Your Brain
Cannabis as a brain protector? It’s true. Scientists are finding that chemical compounds found in cannabis actually help protect our brains.

Let’s spread the word!
Wow, that’s a lot of benefits! If this list hasn’t provided you with enough marijuana facts to convert even the most strident prohibitionist, what will?

And of course we have to be realistic. Marijuana does have its own advantages AND disadvantages. Just like anything else it can be abused or misused. But if we’re going to educate, we’ve got to de-stigmatize and spark more conversations. The truth is that everybody, everywhere deserves access to all the benefits of marijuana.

Cannabis education is critical.

If you want to dive deeper, an entire universe of trusted cannabis knowledge awaits you...
 

roots69

Rising Star
BGOL Investor
20 Medical Benefits of Marijuana You Probably Never Knew
DISCLAIMER:

This article is solely based on the medical benefits of marijuana for those with a valid medical prescription. We are highlighting the positive aspects only, based on researches and scientific evidences. Please note, Lifehack does not promote consumption of marijuana for recreational purposes.

Before I begin, let me take you to 2737 BC. It has been described that during that period, the first direct reference was found in China in the writings of the Chinese Emperor Shen Nung. The first use of cannabis product was used for psychoactive agents.

In the writings, the focus was mainly on its power as a medication for rheumatism, gout, malaria, and funny enough, for absent-mindedness. The importance of medicinal value was focused mainly than the intoxication properties.

Gradually its use spread from China to India, and then to North Africa, and reached Europe as early as AD 500. Marijuana was listed in United States Pharmacopeia from 1850 till 1942. It was prescribed for different medical uses such as labor pain, nausea, and rheumatism.

Medical uses
From 1850s to 1930s cannabis started to grow famous for recreational purposes. As the intake of this drug increased over time, The Controlled Substances Act of 1970 classified it as a Scheduled 1 Drug. So naturally controversies aroused surrounding the medical use of marijuana.

To make it more medical-friendly, its active ingredient THC was synthesized in 1966, and finally approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 1985.

A 1999 a U.S. Government sponsored study by the Institute of Medicine uncovered the beneficial properties of marijuana in certain medical conditions such as nausea caused by chemotherapy, and wasting caused by AIDS. Since 1999, a number of studies have been done to show that smoked marijuana has pain reducing effects.

In 1996, California became the first state to legalize the use of marijuana for medical objectives, and about 24 of the states now have some sort of medical marijuana legislation.

Medical benefits of marijuana
You will be surprised to know why studies have been done on this herb, and for your favor, here is the list of 20 medical benefits of marijuana you probably never knew!

1. Slow and stop cancer cells from spreading
It was found in the study, published in the journal Molecular Cancer Therapeutics, that Cannabidiol has the ability to stop cancer by turning off a gene called Id-1. [1] In 2007, researchers at California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco, reported that CBDmay prevent cancer from spreading. The researchers experimented on breast cancer cells in the lab that had high level of Id-1, and treated them with cannabidiol.

The outcome was rather positive, the cells had decreased Id-1 expression, and were less aggressive spreaders. In fact, the American Association for Cancer Research has found that marijuana actually works to slow down tumor growth in brain, breast, and lungs considerately.

2. Prevent Alzheimer’s
THC, the active ingredient present in marijuana slows the progression of Alzheimer’s disease, a 2006 study led by Kim Janda of the Scripps Research Institute found out. THC slows the formation of amyloid plaques by blocking the enzyme in the brain that makes them. These plaques kill the brain cells, and potentially lead to Alzheimer’s disease.



3. Treat Glaucoma
Marijuana can be used to treat glaucoma, which increases the pressure in the eyeball, injuring the optic nerve and causing loss of vision. According to National Eye Institute, marijuana lowers the pressure inside the eye,[2]

“Studies in the early 1970s showed that marijuana, when smoked, lowered intraocular pressure (IOP) in people with normal pressure and those with glaucoma.”

These effects of the drug can prevent blindness.

4. Relieve Arthritis
In 2011, researchers reported that cannabis reduces pain and inflammation, and promotes sleep, which may help relieve pain and discomfort for people with rheumatoid arthritis.

Researchers of the rheumatology units at several hospitals gave their patients Sativex, a cannabinoid-based pain-relieving medicine. After two weeks, patients on Sativex had a significant reduction in pain, and improved better sleep quality compared to placebo users.

5. Control Epileptic seizure
A 2003 study showed that marijuana use can control epileptic seizure.[3]

Robert J. DeLorenzo, of Virginia Commonwealth University, gave marijuana extract and synthetic marijuana to epileptic rats. The drugs stopped the seizures in about 10 hours.

It is found out that the THC controlled the seizures by binding the brain cells responsible for controlling excitability and regulating relaxation. The results were published in the Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics.[4]

6. Ease the pain of multiple sclerosis
Marijuana works to stop the negative neurological effects and muscle spasms caused by multiple sclerosis. A study published in the Canadian Medical Association suggests that marijuana may ease painful symptoms of multiple sclerosis.

Jody Cory Bloom studied 30 multiple sclerosis patients with painful contractions in their muscles. These patients didn’t respond to other medications, but after smoking marijuana for few days, they reported that they were in less pain. The THC in the pot bonds the receptors in the nerves and and muscles to relieve pain.

7. Soothe tremors for people with Parkinson’s disease
Recent studies from Israel shows that smoking marijuana remarkably reduces pains and tremors and improves sleep for Parkinson’s disease patients. What was impressive about the research was the improvement of the fine motor skills among patients.

Israel has made medical marijuana legal, and a lot of research into the medical uses of weed is done there, supported by the Israeli Government.[5]

8. Help with Crohn’s disease
Cannabis may be helpful with curing Crohn’s disease. Crohn’s disease is an inflammatory bowel disorder that causes pain, vomiting, diarrhea, weight loss, and more.

Want to Change But Don't Know Where to Start?

Our Workbook Guides You to Design Your Dream Life & Kickstart Changing

But a recent study in Israel showed that smoking a joint considerably reduced Crohn’s diseasesymptomsin 10 out of 11 patients, and caused acompletecancellation of the disease in five of those patients.

Of course, this is a small study, but other researches have shown similar results. The cannabinoids from cannabis seem to help the gut control bacteria and intestinal function.

9. Decrease the symptoms of Dravet’s Syndrome
Dravet Syndrome causes seizures and severe developmental delays. Dr. Sanjay Gupta, renowned chief medical correspondent for CNN, is treating a five years old girl, Charlotte Figi, who has Dravet’s Syndrome, with medical marijuana strain high in cannabidiol and low in THC.

During the research for his documentary “WEED”, Gupta interviewed the Figi family, and according to the film, the drug decreased her seizures from 300 a week to just one every seven days. Forty other children are using the same medication, and it has helped them too.

The doctors who are recommending this medication say that the cannabidiol in the plant interacts with the brain cells to quiet the excessive activities in the brain that causes the seizures.

10. Lessen side effects from treating Hepatitis C, and increase treatment effectiveness
Treating Hepatitis C infection has severe side effects, so severe that many people are unable to continue their treatment. Side effects range from fatigue, nausea, muscle pains, loss of appetite, and depression- and they last for months.

But, pot to the rescue:

A 2006 study in the European Journal of Gastroenterology and Hepatology discovered that 86% of patients using marijuana successfully finished their therapies, while only 29% of the non-smokers completed their treatments, maybe because marijuana helps to lessen the treatments’ side effects.

Cannabis also helps to improve the treatment’s effectiveness. 54% of the Hep C patients smoking marijuana got their viral levels low, and kept them low, compared to the only 8% of the non-smokers.

11. Decrease anxiety
In 2010, researchers at Harvard University suggested that another of the drug’s benefits may actually be reduced anxiety, which would improve the smoker’s mood and act as a sedative in low doses.[6]

Beware, though, higher doses may increase anxiety and make you paranoid.

12. Help reverse the carcinogen effects of tobacco, and improve lung health
In January 2012, a study published in Journal of the American Medical Association showed that marijuana improved lung functions, and even increased lung capacity. Researchers looking for risks factors of heart disease, tested on 5,115 young adults, over the period of 20 years, and found out that only pot users showed an increase in lung capacity, compared to the tobacco smokers who lost lung function over time.

It is believed that the increased lung capacity is due to the deep breaths taken while inhaling the drug, and not from a therapeutic chemical in the drug.



13. Reduce severe pain, and nausea from chemo, and stimulates appetite
One of the most common uses of medical marijuana is for people going through chemotherapy. Cancer patients going through chemo suffer from severe pains, painful nausea, vomiting, and loss of appetite. This can lead to further health complications.

Marijuana can help reduce these side effects, reducing pain, decreasing nausea, and stirring up the appetite. Also, there are other FDA approved cannabinoid drugs that use THC, for the same purposes.[7]

14. Improve symptoms of Lupus, an autoimmune disorder.
Medical marijuana is used to treat the autoimmune disorder called Systemic Lupus Ertyhematosus, which is when the body starts attacking itself for unknown reasons.

It is believed that some chemicals present in cannabis is responsible to calm the immune system, which maybe the reason to help deal with symptoms of Lupus. The rest of the positive impact of the marijuana is probably from the effects of the pain and nausea.

15. Protect brain after a stroke.
Research (done on rats, mice, and monkeys) from University of Nottingham shows that cannabis may help protect the brain from damage caused by a stroke by reducing the size of the area affected by the stroke.

This isn’t the only research that has shown neuroprotective effects from cannabis. Some research shows that the plant may help protect the brain after other traumatic events like concussions.

16. Help veterans suffering from PTSD
Marijuana is approved to treat PTSD in some states in America.[8]In New Mexico, PTSD is the number one reason for people to get a license for medical marijuana, but this is the first time U.S. Government’s The Department of Health and Human Services has approved a proposal that incorporates smoked or vaporized marijuana.

Naturally occurring cannabinoids, similar to THC, help control the system that causes fear and anxiety in the body and brain.

17. Control other types of muscle spasms
Other types of muscle spasms respond to marijuana too.

Dr. Gupta’s patient, Chaz, has a condition called myoclonus diaphragmatic flutter (also known as Leeuwenhoek’s Disease).[9]This causes non stop spasming in the abdominal muscles which are not only painful, but interfere with breathing and speaking.

Chaz has been using medical marijuana to treat this disease because other very strong medications were unable to treat him properly.

Smoking marijuana is able to calm to calm the attacks almost immediately, relaxing the mucles of the diaphragm also.

18. Treat inflammatary bowel diseases
Just like Crohn’s disease, patients with other inflammatory bowel diseases like ulcerative colitis could benefit from marijuana use, studies suggest.



In 2010, University of Nottingham researchers have found that chemicals in marijuana, including THC, and cannabidiol, interact with cells in the body that play an important role in gut function, and immune system.[10]

THC like chemicals made by the body increase the permeability of the intestines, allowing bacteria in. The plant-derived cannabinoids in marijuana block these body-cannabinoids, stopping this permeability, and making the intestinal bond tighter together.

19. Help eliminate nightmares
This is a bit complicated because it involves both positive and negative effects. Marijuana may disturb the sleep cycle by interrupting the later stages ofREM sleep.

However, people who suffer from serious nightmares, especially patients with PTSD, this can be helpful. Nightmares and other dreams occur during those same stages of sleep.

By interrupting REM sleep, many of those dreams may not occur. Research using a synthetic cannabinoid, like THC, showed a decrease in the number of nightmares in patients with PTSD.[11]

Marijuana maybe a better sleep aid than some other medications or even alcohol because the latter two may potentially have worse effects on sleep, though more research is needed on the topic.

20. Protect the brain from concussion and trauma
A recent study in the journal Cerebral Cortex showed possibilities that marijuana can help heal the brain after a concussion, or other traumatic injury.

In the journal it was said that the experiments were done on mice, and that marijuana lessened the bruising of the brain, and helped with healing mechanisms after a traumatic injury.[12]

Harvard professor emeritus of psychiatry and marijuana advocate Lester Grinspoon recently wrote an open letter to NFL Commissioner Roger Goodall, saying that NFL should stop testing players for marijuana, and instead should fund for research on marijuana plant’s ability to protect the brain.

In the open letter, he writes,[13]

“Already many doctors and researchers believe that marijuana has incredibly powerful neuroprotective properties, an understanding based on both laboratory, and clinical data.”

In response, Goodall recently mentioned that he’d consider permitting athletes to use marijuana if medical research shows that it’s an effective neuroprotective agent.

These 20 medical benefits of marijuana are among the countless benefits this plant has. It is still puzzling how medical marijuana is still not legal in most of the country, and still retains such a negative reputation.

Hopefully in the near future, medical science continues to prove its benefits in more fields, and make this plant a famous cure for all major kinds of ailments.
 

roots69

Rising Star
BGOL Investor

Learn More!!!!





Why Is Marijuana Banned? The Real Reasons Are Worse Than You Think

5bb931af2400005100991008.jpeg

A Kentucky National Guardsmen throws a bushel of illegal marijuana plants seized by the Kentucky State Police Cannabis Suppression Branch onto a fire in Bronston, Kentucky, U.S., on Wednesday, Sept. 16, 2015. Funded by federal grant money, the Kentucky State Troopers and Kentucky Army National Guard work together to enforce marijuana laws including destroying illegal grow operations throughout the state. Photographer: Luke Sharrett/Bloomberg via

Across the world, more and more people are asking: Why is marijuana banned? Why are people still sent to prison for using or selling it?

Most of us assume it’s because someone, somewhere sat down with the scientific evidence, and figured out that cannabis is more harmful than other drugs we use all the time — like alcohol and cigarettes.

Somebody worked it all out, in our best interest.

But when I started to go through the official archives — researching my book Chasing The Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs — to find out why cannabis was banned back in the 1930s, I discovered that’s not what happened.

Not at all.

In 1929, a man called Harry Anslinger was put in charge of the Department of Prohibition in Washington, D.C. But alcohol prohibition had been a disaster. Gangsters had taken over whole neighborhoods. Alcohol — controlled by criminals — had become even more poisonous.

So alcohol prohibition finally ended — and Harry Anslinger was afraid. He found himself in charge of a huge government department, with nothing for it to do. Up until then, he had said that cannabis was not a problem. It doesn’t harm people, he explained, and “there is no more absurd fallacy” than the idea it makes people violent.

h-HARRY-ANSLINGER-628x314.jpg

Harry J. Anslinger, commissioner of the Treasury Department’s Federal Bureau of Narcotics, poses for a photo on September 24, 1930. (AP Photo)

But then — suddenly, when his department needed a new purpose — he announced he had changed his mind.

He explained to the public what would happen if you smoked cannabis.

First, you will fall into “a delirious rage.” Then you will be gripped by “dreams... of an erotic character.” Then you will “lose the power of connected thought.” Finally, you will reach the inevitable end-point: “Insanity.”

Marijuana turns man into a “wild beast.“ If marijuana bumped into Frankenstein’s monster on the stairs, Anslinger warned, the monster would drop dead of fright.

Harry Anslinger became obsessed with one case in particular. In Florida, a boy called Victor Licata hacked his family to death with an axe. Anslinger explained to America: This is what will happen when you smoke “the demon weed.” The case became notorious. The parents of the U.S. were terrified.

What evidence did Harry Anslinger have? It turns out at this time he wrote to the 30 leading scientists on this subject, asking if cannabis was dangerous, and if there should be a ban.

Twenty-nine wrote back and said no.

Anslinger picked out the one scientist who said yes, and presented him to the world. The press — obsessed with Victor Licata’s axe — cheered them on.

In a panic that gripped America, marijuana was banned. The U.S. told other countries they had to do the same. Many countries said it was a dumb idea, and refused to do it. For example, Mexico decided their drug policy should be run by doctors. Their medical advice was that cannabis didn’t cause these problems, and they refused to ban it. The U.S. was furious. Anslinger ordered them to fall into line. The Mexicans held out — until, in the end, the U.S. cut off the supply of all legal painkillers to Mexico. People started to die in agony in their hospitals. So with regret, Mexico sacked the doctor — and launched its own drug war.


“The scientific evidence suggests cannabis is safer than alcohol. Alcohol kills 40,000 people every year in the U.S. Cannabis kills nobody.”


But at home, questions were being asked. A leading American doctor called Michael Ball wrote to Harry Anslinger, puzzled. He explained he had used cannabis as a medical student, and it had only made him sleepy. Maybe cannabis does drive a small number of people crazy, he said — but we need to fund some scientific studies to find out.

Anslinger wrote back firmly. “The marihuana evil can no longer be temporized with,” he explained, and he would fund no independent science. Then, or ever.

For years, doctors kept approaching him with evidence he was wrong, and he began to snap, telling them they were “treading on dangerous ground” and should watch their mouths.

Today, most of the world is still living with the ban on cannabis that Harry Anslinger introduced, in the nation-wide panic that followed Victor Licata’s killing spree.

But here’s the catch. Years later, somebody went and looked at the psychiatric files for Victor Licata.

It turns out there’s no evidence he ever used cannabis.

He had a lot of mental illness in his family. They had been told a year before he needed to be institutionalized — but they refused. His psychiatrists never even mentioned marijuana in connection to him.

So, does cannabis make people mad?

The former chief advisor on drugs to the British government, David Nutt, explains — if cannabis causes psychosis in a straightforward way, then it would show in a straightforward way.

When cannabis use goes up, psychosis will go up. And when cannabis use goes down psychosis will go down.

So does that happen? We have a lot of data from a lot of countries. And it turns out it doesn’t. For example, in Britain, cannabis use has increased by a factor of about 40 since the 1960s. And rates of psychosis? They have remained steady.

In fact, the scientific evidence suggests cannabis is safer than alcohol. Alcohol kills 40,000 people every year in the U.S. Cannabis kills nobody — although Willie Nelson says a friend of his did once die when a bale of cannabis fell on his head.

h-MASON-TVERT-628x314.jpg

Mason Tvert on Thursday, May 6, 2010. (AP Photo/David Zalubowski)

This is why, in 2006, a young man in Colorado called Mason Tvert issued a challenge to the then-mayor of Denver and eventual governor, John Hickenlooper. Hickenlooper owned brew-pubs selling alcohol across the state, and it made him rich. But he said cannabis was harmful and had to be banned. So Mason issued him a challenge — to a duel. You bring a crate of booze. I’ll bring a pack of joints. For every hit of booze you take, I’ll take a hit of cannabis. We’ll see who dies first.

It was the ultimate High Noon.

Mason went on to lead the campaign to legalize cannabis in his state. His fellow citizens voted to do it — by 55 percent. Now adults can buy cannabis legally, in licensed stores, where they are taxed—and the money is used to build schools. After a year and a half of seeing this system in practice, support for legalization has risen to 69 percent. And even Governor Hickenlooper has started calling it “common sense.”

Oh — and Colorado hasn’t been filled with people hacking their families to death yet.

Isn’t it time we listened to the science — and finally put away Victor Licata’s axe?

Cross-posted from The Influence. Follow them on Facebook here.

Johann Hari is a British journalist and author. This article is adapted from his New York Times best-sellling book Chasing The Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs. To find out why Glenn Greenwald, Noam Chomsky, Bill Maher, Naomi Klein and Elton John have all praised it, click here.
 

roots69

Rising Star
BGOL Investor
In Debate Over Legalizing Marijuana, Disagreement Over Drug’s Dangers
In Their Own Words: Supporters and Opponents of Legalization

Public opinion about legalizing marijuana, while little changed in the past few years, has undergone a dramatic long-term shift. A new survey finds that 53% favor the legal use of marijuana, while 44% are opposed. As recently as 2006, just 32% supported marijuana legalization, while nearly twice as many (60%) were opposed.

Millennials (currently 18-34) have been in the forefront of this change: 68% favor legalizing marijuana use, by far the highest percentage of any age cohort. But across all generations –except for the Silent Generation (ages 70-87) – support for legalization has risen sharply over the past decade.

The latest national survey by the Pew Research Center, conducted March 25-29 among 1,500 adults, finds that supporters of legalizing the use of marijuana are far more likely than opponents to say they have changed their mind on this issue.

Among the public overall, 30% say they support legalizing marijuana use and have always felt that way, while 21% have changed their minds; they say there was a time when they thought it should be illegal. By contrast, 35% say they oppose legalization and have always felt that way; just 7% have changed their minds from supporting to opposing legalization.

When asked, in their own words, why they favor or oppose legalizing marijuana, people on opposite sides of the issue offer very different perspectives. But a common theme is the danger posed by marijuana: Supporters of legalization mention its perceived health benefits, or see it as no more dangerous than other drugs. To opponents, it is a dangerous drug, one that inflicts damage on people and society more generally.

The most frequently cited reasons for supporting the legalization of marijuana are its medicinal benefits (41%) and the belief that marijuana is no worse than other drugs (36%) –with many explicitly mentioning that they think it is no more dangerous than alcohol or cigarettes.

With four states and Washington, D.C. having passed measures to permit the use of marijuana for personal use, 27% of supporters say legalization would lead to improved regulation of marijuana and increased tax revenues. About one-in-ten (12%) cite the costs and problems of enforcing marijuana laws or say simply that people should be free to use marijuana (9%).


The most frequently mentioned reason why people oppose legalization is that marijuana generally hurts society and is bad for individuals (43% say this). And while many supporters of legalization say that marijuana is less dangerous than other drugs, 30% of opponents have the opposite view: They point to the dangers of marijuana, including the possibility of abuse and addiction.

About one-in-five opponents of legalization (19%) say marijuana is illegal and needs to be policed, 11% say it is a gateway to harder drugs and 8% say it is especially harmful to young people. A small share of opponents (7%) say that while the recreational use of marijuana should be illegal, they do not object to legalizing medical marijuana.1

health or brain.” Female, 33

“We have enough addictive things that are already legal. We don’t need another one.” Male, 42

The pattern of opinion about legalizing marijuana has changed little in recent years. Beyond the wide generation gap in support for legalization, there continue to be demographic and partisan differences.

Majorities of blacks (58%) and whites (55%) favor legalizing marijuana, compared with just 40% of Hispanics. Men (57% favor) continue to be more likely than women (49%) to support legalization.

Nearly six-in-ten Democrats (59%) favor legalizing the use of marijuana, as do 58% of independents. That compares with just 39% of Republicans.

Both parties are ideologically divided over legalizing marijuana. Conservative Republicans oppose legalizing marijuana by roughly two-to-one (65% to 32%); moderate and liberal Republicans are divided (49% favor legalization, 50% are opposed).

Among Democrats, 75% of liberals say the use of marijuana should be legal compared with half (50%) of conservative and moderate Democrats.


The new survey also finds that as some states have legalized marijuana – placing them at odds with the federal prohibition against marijuana – a majority of Americans (59%) say that the federal government should not enforce laws in states that allow marijuana use; 37% say that they should enforce these laws. Views on federal enforcement of marijuana laws are unchanged since the question was first asked two years ago.

In contrast to overall attitudes about the legal use of marijuana, there are only modest differences in views across partisan groups: 64% of independents, 58% of Democrats and 54% of Republicans say that the federal government should not enforce federal marijuana laws in states that allow its use.

A substantial majority of those who say marijuana should be legal (78%) do not think the federal government should enforce federal laws in states that allow its use. Among those who think marijuana should be illegal, 59% say there should be federal enforcement in states that allow marijuana use, while 38% say there should not be.

While most Americans support legalizing marijuana, there are concerns about public use of the drug, if it were to become legal. Overall, 62% say that if marijuana were legal it would bother them if people used it in public; just 33% say this would not bother them. Like overall views of legalizing marijuana, these views have changed little in recent years.

There is less concern about the possibility of a marijuana-related business opening legally in people’s own neighborhood: 57% say it would not bother them if a store or business selling marijuana opened legally in their neighborhood, while 41% say this would bother them.

And just 15% say they would be bothered if people used marijuana in their own homes; 82% say this would not bother them.

As might be expected, there are sharp differences in these concerns between people who favor and oppose legalizing marijuana. A large majority of opponents of marijuana legalization (85%) say they would be bothered by public use of the drug, if it were legal; about four-in-ten supporters (43%) also say they would be bothered by this. On the other hand, a majority of opponents of legalization (65%) say they would not be bothered if people used marijuana in their own homes; virtually all supporters of legalization (97%) would not be bothered by this.

And while 77% of those who oppose legalizing marijuana say, if it were legal, they would be bothered if a store or business selling marijuana opened in their neighborhood, just 12% of supporters of legalization say this would bother them.

Overall, 49% say they have ever tried marijuana, while 51% say they have never done this. Self-reported experience with marijuana has shown no change over the past two years, but is higher than it was early last decade: In 2003, 38% said they had tried marijuana before, while 61% said they had not.

About a quarter of those who have tried marijuana (12% of the public overall) say they have used marijuana in the past year. Similar percentages reported using marijuana in the prior 12 months in two previous surveys, conducted in February 2014 and March 2013.

Men (56%) are 15 points more likely than women (41%) to say they have ever tried marijuana.

About half of whites (52%) and blacks (50%) say they have tried marijuana before. Among Hispanics, 36% say they have tried marijuana, while 63% say they have not.

Across generations, 59% of Baby Boomers say they’ve tried marijuana before; this compares with 47% of Generation Xers and 52% of Millennials. Among those in the Silent generation, only 19% say they have ever tried marijuana. Nearly a quarter of Millennials (23%) say they have used the drug in the past year, the highest share of any age cohort.

There is little difference in the shares of Democrats (48%) and Republicans (45%) who say they’ve tried marijuana. However, there are differences within each party by ideology. By a 61%-39% margin, most conservative Republicans say they have never tried marijuana. Among moderate and liberal Republicans, about as many say they have (52%) as have not (48%) tried marijuana before.

Among Democrats, liberals (58%) are more likely than conservatives and moderates (42%) to say they’ve tried marijuana.

While a majority of those who say marijuana should be legal say they’ve tried the drug before (65%), 34% of those who support legalization say they’ve never tried marijuana. Among those who say marijuana should be illegal, 29% say they have tried it before, while 71% say they have not.
 

roots69

Rising Star
BGOL Investor
7 Reasons Why Eating Weed Is Actually Good for Your Health

marijuana-health-benefits-eating-01.jpg



Just 20 or 30 years ago, cooking with cannabis was still considered both completely taboo and reserved solely for Cheech & Chong-watching stoners. Far as anyone was concerned, the only health benefits of marijuana were that it got you stoned and made you laugh.

Of course, unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last few years, you’re probably now aware that there are a ton of benefits of cooking with cannabis that have absolutely nothing to do with getting stoney baloney’d.

But wait, it gets better. Where 30 years ago the only real products on the market were pot brownies, the world of edibles has expanded drastically over the last few years. I’m talking everything from cannabis-infused three-mushroom stews and macaroni and cheese, to things like cannabis caramel sauce and fucking weed-infused Thai iced tea. There are entire cookbooks dedicated solely to helping you become a red-eyed master chef.

If you aren’t cooking with cannabis yet, now’s definitely the time to start: here’s why.

It Doesn’t Have to Get You Stoned

marijuana-health-benefits-eating-002.jpg
CannaBeBetter / Youtube
First and foremost, cooking with cannabis doesn’t always mean you have to get stoned. The primary psychoactive chemical in cannabis is THC, a cannabinoid. However, when these leaves are left raw and are un-aged, the cannabinoid found in them is THCA, which isn’t psychoactive at all. THCA only becomes THC — the stuff that gets you high — after it’s aged or, most effectively, exposed to heat. It’s a process called decarboxylation.

Many people incorporate raw marijuana and hemp plants into their diet specifically for this reason. They want to take advantage of all the legitimate health benefits these plants have to offer without getting high. Ain’t nothin’ wrong with that!

Cannabis Leaves Are High in Vitamins, Minerals and Fiber

marijuana-health-benefits-eating-001.jpg
Desiree Marti / Getty Images
When looked at solely from the perspective of biochemical composition, raw cannabis leaves are excellent sources of certain vitamins, minerals and fiber. If that sounds surprising, keep in mind that even though they get you stoned, they are still green leafy plants. Raw cannabis is high in:

  • Vitamin K (Essential for blood clotting)
  • Vitamin C (Essential for immune systems)
  • Iron (Essential for blood oxygenation)
  • Calcium (Essential for bones)
  • Folate (Essential for DNA repair)
More specifically, cannabis is super high in fiber. So, if your diet is lacking, it could be the answer.

It’s High in Antioxidants
Antioxidants are essential to our bodies because they protect us from stress and other damage, as well as against things like blood vessel disease and cancer. They’re also our body’s only defense against “free radicals,” which are highly reactive molecules that can wreak havoc on our bodies over time.

Cannabis, whether raw or cooked, is chockfull of antioxidants that our bodies need. So, whether you’re infusing weed into brownies or juicing raw leaves — you’re going to get the stuff you need.

It’s a Healthy Alternative to Smoking

marijuana-health-benefits-eating-004.jpg
Frederic J Brown / Getty Images
People love smoking weed, but the truth is smoking anything isn’t good. Inhaling hot smoke causes inflammation of the respiratory system, and it has been proven that because people who smoke marijuana inhale more deeply into their lungs (and hold the smoke there longer), they wind up with four times as much tar than those who smoke cigarettes. And yes, before you ask, burning marijuana leaves will create tar.

Using marijuana in your cooking, however, has zero of the same drawbacks as smoking and introduces zero harmful carcinogens into the lungs. In fact, consuming cooked marijuana has a completely different psychoactive reaction in your body than smoking it. When you ingest marijuana orally, it is first metabolized by your liver, which turns it into a completely different kind of THC than you get if you simply smoke it. This THC, 11-OH-THC, is more potent than regular THC (Delta-9THC), and leads to a more intense and longer-lasting high.

The more you know, right?

It’s Great for Pain Relief

marijuana-health-benefits-eating-003.jpg
Martin Bernetti / Getty Images
As mentioned previously, people who ingest marijuana often experience a more intense and longer lasting full-body high than people who smoke it, who experience a high that typically lasts one to two hours.

So, if you’re smoking medical marijuana for pain relief, cooking with it won’t just help locate and neutralize the pain you’re suffering from, but it’ll also provide more relief and for a longer duration of time.

On average, a high from oral ingestion can last anywhere from four to six hours.

It Reduces Nausea


One of the key selling points to people curious about medical marijuana is that it is clinically proven to reduce nausea and help induce appetite. In fact, there are tons of studies on marijuana’s effectiveness in treating nausea and vomiting in humans and animals. One study, from researchers at the University of Guelph (Ontario, Canada), found that the manipulation of the endocannabinoid system is incredibly effective in regulating nausea and vomiting, regardless of whether they’re in response to natural stimuli or toxins like chemotherapy.

The only issue with edibles is that, because they can take 90 minutes before they start having an effect, they aren’t particularly useful for sudden and unpredictable bouts of it. However, if you know when to anticipate them — for things like menstrual cramps, after chemotherapy, etc. — consuming marijuana is an excellent way to curb nausea, stomach pains and more.

It Can Help to Fight Cancer


After years of misinformation, the National Cancer Institute finally updated its website a couple of years ago to reflect the fact that cannabis isn’t just effective in helping eliminate the symptoms that result from cancer treatment — nausea, loss of appetite, severe pain, discomfort — but that it can actually be used to fight cancer.

No, I’m not kidding. In clinical studies on living animals, researchers found that the cannabinoids in THC were able to isolate and actually eliminate cancer cells.

A little known fact, though, is that you can’t really get these benefits from smoking because it’s damn near impossible smoke a clinical level of the needed cannabinoids. However, when made into highly concentrated oils, you can get the recommended dosage in just a drop or two. Rather than ingest the oil on its own — which admittedly tastes pretty awful — people will frequently eat them with foods; for example cookies, brownies, veggies and toast.
 

roots69

Rising Star
BGOL Investor
I get a kick outta reading these false claims!! Boy reefer madness brainwashed more people than I thought!! Oh well,,





Top 10 Reasons Medical Marijuana Should Be Illegal

Top-10-Reasons-Medical-Marijuana-Should-Be-Illegal..jpg

Top 10 Reasons Medical Marijuana Should Be Illegal.
Top 10 Reasons Medical Marijuana Should Be Illegal

Marijuana is a funny drug. Classified alongside Narcotics as a Schedule I drug in the USA some other countries take a softer line on possession and use (although not, necessarily, on dealing). Despite a Supreme Court ruling stating that the federal government has the right to legislate on the legality or otherwise of cannabis use some US states do take a softer line with sale and possession being legal in Alaska, Colorado, Oregon and Washington.

From the 60s on it was seen, by some sectors of society, as a perfectly acceptable thing to do. American Presidents and British Prime Ministers, amongst others, have admitted either to smoking ‘weed’ or ‘pot’ or at least to being around people who did. There is a prevailing opinion amongst liberals that marijuana is not dangerous and that occasional use will do no harm. Still others, often further to the right in their political views (but not always) believe that it is a dangerous hallucinogenic that can cause short term issues and long term problems both personally and societally.

In recent years there have been a number of groups that claim that marijuana use is therapeutic for certain medical conditions. So convincing have they been that some US states permit the use of marijuana for medical purposes.

The majority of Americans believe that marijuana use should not be criminalized but a significant number still agree with the federal government that it should continue to be a controlled substance. We set out 10 of the most compelling reasons why it should be illegal.

10. Legalizing Marijuana For Medical Purposes Grants It A Quasi Legal Status That Will Encourage And Legitimize Recreational Use
Legalizing-marijuana-makes-ilicit-behavior-acceptable..jpg


Legalizing marijuana makes illicit behavior acceptable.
At the current point in time the federal government, basing their position against a significant background of scientific knowledge and in depth research has decided that there is no medical benefit to marijuana use (see below).

Marijuana is, however, a very popular illegal high, used by many Americans of all classes and sectors of society to relax, destress and enjoy the hallucinogenic side effects of the drug. Because many middle aged Americans used the drug in their younger years they see no harm in others enjoying it.

The result of this is that marijuana use, while illegal, is already tolerated and viewed as harmless by a large number of people. Against this background some people who would otherwise hesitate to get involved in drug use will feel the effects of peer pressureand end up experimenting. This pressure will be felt even more if the drug is no longer completely illegal but is given a quasi-legal status. Such a status will serve only to increase the levels of peer pressure that is placed on vulnerable youngsters to experiment with the drug because ‘it’s not really illegal’. In fact the argument that marijuana is ‘safe because it is used as a medicine for cancer and other diseases’ is often used by young people as an argument to justify their use of marijuana.

9. Legalizing Marijuana Use Would Lead To More People Using It Not Less
Legalizing-weed-with-make-it-uber-prevalent..jpg

Legalizing weed with make it uber-prevalent.
Laws and changes to legislation are often enacted with the very best of intentions but without regard to the principle of the law of unintended consequences. Ie changing one aspect of a system can alter the way people react and end up causing problems that were never anticipated.

Using marijuana results in costs to society; while many campaigners for legalization choose to state that these costs related to law enforcement the reality is that the majority of the costs are related to the effects of marijuana use itself (treatment, medical, societal etc).


Marijuana is the main non alcoholic cause of substance abusein the US with about 15.2 million users of which 4.2 million have a substance dependency. (This is equivalent to two thirds of all substance addicts in the US).


Many people like to draw parallels between alcohol and marijuana but for the purposes of this point the best comparison is gambling. When gambling became legal it was promoted by the authorities (it was, after all a revenue raising activity) which meant that less attention and support was given to those who engaged in illegal gambling. As a result the incidence of illegal gambling has increased with the legal channels acting as a gateway to the more lucrative, exciting illegal activities.

There is no evidence that legalizing marijuana in any way shape or form would act in a similar way, acting as a gateway to illegal use. Of course there would be a thriving legal market but more potent substances would be made available ‘under the table’. As a result it highly likely that legalizing marijuana for medical use would lead to an increase in users and a concomitant increase in the number of American addicts.
>

8. Users Of Medical Marijuana May Be Dishonestly ‘Gaming’ The System
Dont-game-the-system.-Wink-wink.jpg

Don’t game the system. Wink, wink!
Wherever a popular recreational drug is dispensed legally, for whatever reason, there will be people who try to twist the system for their own benefit. Studies on the use of methadone, an opiate provided on prescription to treat heroin addiction in the UK showed that of the 167 methadone related deaths over half of them related to prescription methadone that had been sold on the black market.

Concerns have been raised that a similar effect could be seen with the diversion of medical marijuana to the black market in the US. A 2011 study sampled over 1700 medical marijuana patients in


California. The report suggested that some medical users ‘gamed the system’ by exaggerating symptoms or needs to obtain medical marijuana for recreational purposes. Further work remains to be done in this area but it must surely be uncontentious that medical marijuana is likely to find its way onto the black market eventually.


Of course many proponents of medical marijuana use (or legalized recreational use) posit that legalization (at one or both levels) will help eliminate the black market all together. That simply is not true. Following legalization in Colorado analysts noticed some surprising things. Firstly the number of people registering as medical users claiming to be suffering from ‘pain’ (which is hard to verify objectively) rose as medical marijuana is exempt from taxes, testing regimes and other costs which apply to recreational weed. Secondly the black market has continued to thrive as it is able to by-pass taxes and tests and so undercut the price structures of the legal market

7. Modern Marijuana Is Dangerous And Very Different To That Smoked By The ‘Hippie Generation’
Todays-marijuana-is-not-your-grandpas-Mary-Jane..jpg

Today’s marijuana is not your grandpa’s Mary Jane.
It is very tempting for people who lived through the ‘hippie generation’ to dismiss cannabis as a relatively harmless substance. People who smoked it will point to the fact that it did them no harm, that they matured into successful adults while those who did not might think it something undesirable but not really in the same league as ‘hard’ drugs. That may have been true in the 60s and 70s but it is manifestly not true today. The marijuana sold on the streets and in medical dispensaries is a very different drug. Nevertheless societal attitudes to marijuana are still very much driven by the impact and effects of the older form of the drug.

The main ingredient the ‘magic’ so to speak is a substance known as THC.


The amount of THC in any one batch of marijuana depends, to a great extent on the type of plant used to create it and where and how it was grown with the buds of the ‘female’ plants providing the most potent cannabis of all. Analysis of the cannabis on sale today compared with that smoked many years ago shows that modern cannabis is up to 7 times stronger than the older forms. This is probably due to the fact that strains have been bred selectively to increase potency and because preparations are now more likely to be made using the more potent parts of the plant.


6. Pharmaceutical Extracts Are Available – There Is No Need To Smoke Weed
THC-can-be-put-in-pill-form.-No-need-for-bong-rips-anymore..jpg

THC can be put in pill form. No need for bong rips anymore.
When people started to claim that marijuana had medical benefits and helped alleviate symptoms of some diseases particularly pain and nausea which can be difficult to treat effectively, research was undertake to find out exactly what substances within the plant were responsible for the effect. This research has led to the developments of certain pharmaceutical extracts based on the plant. Several different drugs are available Cesamet (used to treat vomiting caused by chemotherapy) and Marinol (to treat AIDS related weight loss) in the US and Sativex (used to treat pain) in Canada, New Zealand and some European countries. Cesamet and Marinol are THC based while Sativex combines THC with another substance called cannabidiol.

These pharmaceutical extracts cause relatively few side effects and are not likely to prove of interest to an underground, black market. As these are available there is no need to legalize marijuana itself for medical use together with all the other problems that are likely to arise out of it. Any claims by the ‘patient’ community to require marijuana in ‘pure’ form are therefore exposed for what they are – a desire to see an unpleasant and dangerous habit made legal as opposed to a crusade for patients’ rights.

5. Marijuana Is Extremely Dangerous For AIDS Patients
Smoking-weed-is-super-dangerous-for-AIDS-patients..jpg

Smoking weed is super dangerous for AIDS patients.
Many AIDS sufferers believe that therapeutic marijuana use isbeneficial to the management of their condition. Cannabis, they claim, helps them manage not just nausea but the pain caused by AIDS and helps stimulate their appetite by bringing on the ‘munchies’ (hunger is a side effect of smoking marijuana). Some even claim that it helps halt the progression of the disease.

Sadly the relief these sufferers claim to experience (to the extent it is not a placebo effect for those who have not previously smoked or preventing withdrawal symptoms for those who did prior to AIDS diagnosis) is only short term in its effect. Studies into the impact of marijuana use have shown that smoking on a regular basis can helpweaken the immune system, preventing it from fighting attacks by bacteria, viruses, fungi and from inhibiting tumor growth. This is bad enough for healthy people but for those suffering from AIDS it can prove fatal. Studies also suggest that far from halting the progression of AIDS and AIDS related diseases smoking marijuana can actually accelerate it. Not only that but HIV positive smokers may find they develop AIDS before they otherwise would have. So yes it might alleviate nausea but at great cost.


4. Marijuana Use Has No Established Benefit For Glaucoma Sufferers
Weed-and-red-eyes-go-hand-in-hand..jpg

Weed and red eyes go hand in hand.
Glaucoma is a disease that causes vision loss as a result of high pressure within the eyeball. The proponents of the use of medical marijuana often point to the fact that its use helps to lower pressure within the eyeball which is of benefit to glaucoma patients.


This claim, however, only tells part of the story. If something can help to treat one of the leading causes of blindness amongst Americans it is worthy of study but the American Glaucoma Society disagrees with the use of marijuana as a treatment. While they acknowledge that smoking marijuana can have some beneficial effect on intraocular pressure they note that it is only effective for a short period of time after smoking and does not alter the long term course of the disease. They also note the potential for marijuana to cause long term health and mental problems. They do agree that there may be benefit to researching the effect of cannabis extracts but believe that the negative impacts of smoking weed outweigh the extremely short term benefits.

3. Marijuana Use Can Make Sick People Sicker
Smoking-weed-might-make-you-sick..jpg

Smoking weed might make you sick.
As already mentioned smoking marijuana can have a devastating impact on people who are suffering from AIDS, weakening their immune system to such an extent that they become vulnerable to infection from pneumonia, Kaposi’s Sarcoma and other opportunistic infections (see above).


It is not, however, just people who suffer from AIDS who will notice negative health impacts from using marijuana. Regular use (medical or recreational) is connected to the development of illnesses of the respiratory system including lung cancer.

One of the most common justifications for the use of medical marijuana is to control nausea and vomiting. For many users, however, it ceases to be effective with overuse. Smoking just one joint a day (a not atypical dosage) can lead to users developing a condition of persistent vomiting not dissimilar to morning sicknessin pregnant women.

These are yet more reasons to show that many of the people who anecdotally claim medical marijuana is of benefit to them are not, whether knowingly or unknowingly, being completely accurate.

2. There Is No Evidence That Medical Marijuana Is Safe Or Effective
Marijuana-could-be-a-real-pain-in-the-heart..jpg

Marijuana could be a real pain in the heart.
We have long acknowledged the dangers of tobacco smoke (like medical marijuana it was once touted as a healthy thing to use) but many people persist in believing that marijuana is safe. It is not, there is no evidence to prove that any level of use is either beneficial or even safe. Indeed smoking marijuana exposes the body to many of the toxins seen in cigarette smoke (including four times the amount of tar). Marijuana has even been shown to cause temporary sterility and birth defects when smoked during pregnancy.

People who smoke marijuana put themselves at increased risk of stroke or heart attack with the heart rate doubling or tripling in the hours after smoking. Marijuana can also interfere with blood sugar levels making it particularly dangerous for diabetics.


While proponents of the use of medical and recreational marijuana state that it can be beneficial for the treatment of some mental health disorders including panic attacks this could not be further from the truth. Marijuana use has been shown to be a factor in the development of a number of serious mental health disorders, not least paranoia, delusions and hallucinations. It can also trigger bipolar episodes and schizophrenia. While researchers are not quite certain what causes some people to develop these serious disorders after using marijuana they think there may be an element of genetic susceptibility. The strength of marijuana used and the age at which someone starts to smoke also play a part.

Even if users do not go on to develop these mental health problems they will notice a short term impact on their ability to make sound judgment, their memory (it can be compromised for up to six weeks after use), ability to learn and perception of risks. Use of marijuana can also cause people to become demotivated and withdrawn from normal life. The description ‘stoned’ was coined for a reason, smoking weed makes people appear stupid and encourages them to do stupid things. The impact of this on society is clear, not only in terms of the costs to health services but also because marijuana use is implicated in a frightening number of traffic accidents. In 2010 a study of 24,000 fatal incidents showed that marijuana use was a factor in 12% of them, three times more than in 2000. As more and more states legalize marijuana use (whether for medical or recreational purposes) this percentage is likely to increase.

1. Marijuana Is An Addictive Drug
Marijuana-is-addictive-for-some..jpg

Marijuana is addictive for some.

People who use marijuana like to point to the fact that it is not addictive and that it is, therefore, safe. This is not, however, the case, while most users are able to control what they smoke and when some people do go on to become addicted to marijuana. Classic symptoms of addiction include an inability to self regulate the rate at which they use, becoming irritable if they are unable to access their marijuana, base their life around marijuana use and use in spite of any negative social or health consequences. Addicted users will experience withdrawal symptoms including anxiety, loss of appetite, mood swings and aggressiveness. With marijuana strains today proving to be stronger than those in the past such addictions and withdrawal problems will only increase.

In some ways medical marijuana users are more at risk of developing an addiction because they convince themselves that they need to use the drug to manage symptoms of a disease even in spite of medical evidence that it will cause them long term harm (see above).

It is frightening to think that one in three Americans have tried marijuana in one form or another. Make no mistake marijuana is not an inoffensive substance that causes little or no problems in users. It is a dangerous substance that can cause long term emotional and physical effects in its users. It is a gateway drug that can lead users to try even more dangerous substances. It encourages otherwise law abiding individuals to engage in criminal activity. Even in states that have legalized its use marijuana is a thriving and popular product on the black market.

It is often claimed that legalizing the use of marijuana, even if just for medical uses, would close this black market and allow the authorities greater regulation of use and the opportunity to obtain revenue from taxes on marijuana. Sadly if we look at the example of the two ‘legal’ drugs, alcohol and tobacco, it is noteworthy that the tax revenues are insufficient to cover the costs the use of these drugs causes society. Alcohol costs the US approximately $185 billion every year but the revenue from taxes is only a fraction of that total – about $14.5 billion. Legalizing marijuana, even just for medical uses would increase the number of users and the cost of use for society.


Despite the claims of medical users that it helps to alleviate their symptoms of pain and nausea this benefit is not seen when tested in clinical trials. There is a danger, as with any controlled substance, that medical marijuana users will divert their tax payer funded weed to others for personal profit.

The medical evidence does not back up the claims made by those who use marijuana to treat symptoms. It is likely that at least some users will be claiming a medical benefit to normalize and enable their drug habit. Others may honestly believe that they obtain a medical benefit from marijuana but such benefits are likely to be either short term or evidence of a placebo effect.

Legalizing marijuana for medical purposes is an extremely bad idea and one that we oppose wholeheartedly.
 

roots69

Rising Star
BGOL Investor
ANNUAL AMERICAN DEATHS CAUSED BY DRUGS


400,000
Tobacco

100,000
Alcohol

20,000
All Legal Drugs

15,000
All Illegal Drugs

2,000
Caffeine

0
Marijuana
 

roots69

Rising Star
BGOL Investor
WHY???



Synthetic Marijuana: Everything You Should Know It and How It Is Made
synthetic-marijuana.jpg

A synthetic cannabinoid is a type of chemical which acts as cannabinoid receptors in your body. It is significant to know how the synthetic marijuana is different than natural marijuana which is originated from cannabis plants. When a blend of acetone or high-proof alcohol dissolved in a solvent and then sprayed or soaked into the plant like material, it becomes synthetic marijuana. There are numerous psychoactive synthetic cannabinoid families which are available and sold in the market like Spice, K2 and many others. You need not get confused with a legal synthetic product like Marinol because it is FDA approved.

John William Huffman, an organic chemistry professor at Clemson University started to synthesize plenty of novel cannabis in 1980 for the sake of medical research. It was manufactured with short turnaround time. Huffman insisted that synthetic cannabinoids are not created for human consumption. Synthetic marijuana is highly dangerous and it comes with profound psychological problems. When compared with real marijuana, synthetic marijuana costs lower but remains illegal.

Harmful Effects of Synthetic Marijuana
Synthetic cannabis is also called by other names such as synthetic cannabinoids, SCs or synncanns. New varieties of artificial marijuana are being introduced with mixed ingredients to maintain their legality in a tremendous manner. And these products are placed unnoticeably on the stores of smoke shops & gas stations. Even e-commerce site provides a wide range of synthetic marijuana. A Synthetic cannabinoid is not considered as the cannabis product rather it is a chemical analogue which combines the same receptions into it.

THC is the main psychoactive chemical employed in herbal cannabis, which latches to CB1 receptors in the brain to create high euphoric. However, synthetic cannabinoids seem to be 2-100 times more powerful compared to THC. As a result, it induces numerous side effects like psychosis, high blood pressure, agitation, vision blackouts, vomiting, headaches, chest pain, kidney damage, increased heart rate and many more.

How Is Synthetic Cannabinoid Blend Made?
A synthetic cannabinoid is usually a mixture of dried leaves with some chemical solvents mixed with them. This just consists of the chemicals that merely lets you get an effect of Marijuana but not naturally.

The uneven spraying or improperly mixed solution usually ends-up in chemical hot-spots or hazardously powerful areas around the consignment. The customer who tends to buy the product with concentrated hot-spot chemical seems to experience adverse side effects. You can also imagine plenty of production errors, particularly when it is given in the hands of careless and inexperienced manufacturers.

Synthetic marijuana is not a single drug rather it makes use of a combination of elements which interacts with the cell receptors of the brain similar to the THC in natural marijuana. Synthetic marijuana seems to be the bunch of chemicals which is sprayed on the dried leaves and lawn clippings.

Synthetic cannabinoids created as a crystalline powder or oil, which can be easily inserted into the plant material. Some manufacturers will never follow the manufacturing standards rather these chemicals are created in the cheapest labs in Russia and China.

Though DEA reduces the large-scale operations of synthetic cannabinoids however, small-scale operations seem to sell their products under various brand names at low cost. It is essential to know how the product is manufactured, what the ingredients are available in the product and what potency is maintained in every bath and so on. If you get a solution for these, then you will surely avoid taking synthetic cannabinoids.

Reason Why People Prefer Synthetic Cannabinoids
With these many dangerous side effects, why people opt to buy it? The reason is quite simple. People prefer synthetic cannabis over original cannabis because of the below reasons:

  • Cannabis is unlawful in their state
  • Synthetic cannabinoids will not upturn on urine analysis
  • It’s cheaper
Unluckily, these limited advantages are not worth the hazard of death or adverse side effects which can compromise with your health factor.

Synthetic marijuana seems to be more dangerous as compared to the natural marijuana. Sometimes these products will also create death factor so you must be very careful while choosing the marijuana products for your usage.
 

roots69

Rising Star
BGOL Investor
Everything that is man made and they produce, will always be considered safe and legal!! Now anything that is natural and can grow from the earth, with water and sun will always be considered illegal and unsafe for human consumption!!! Its not hard to figure out!!



Why Did the DEA Approve Synthetic Cannabis While the Real Thing Remains Illegal?


CANNABIS CULTURE – A recent development in pain management goes beyond nonsensical and into the realm of downright cruel.The DEA has approved a synthetic version of cannabis as safe for medical use, while millions of people of all ages languish behind bars for minor cannabis possession. Research indicates that altering the chemical structure of cannabis can produce dangerous reactions in users. Meanwhile, continuous medical evidence shows the benefits of medical cannabis, but it remains a Schedule I drug. This move clearly indicates that America truly has its priorities confused.

Cannabis has been used medicinally throughout history for good reason. It treats chronic pain while users can remain free from the danger of accidental overdose — something that is very much a risk with opioid-based medications. Better yet, cannabis grows relatively easily, meaning if it were legal, patients could grow their own medication. That’s something Big Pharma has an avaricious need to prevent. Keeping cannabis illegal while allowing pharmaceutical giants to release synthetic forms of the plant constitutes what some are calling a human rights crisis.

Potential Dangers of Synthetic Cannabis

Synthetic cannabis has existed for some time, as chemists have long tried to replicate cannabis’s unique chemical structure. While this sounds relatively easy on the surface, those attempting to clone all 480 ingredients, 65 of which are cannabinoids, meet little success. To date, no one truly knows how all the ingredients in natural cannabis combine, and making even minor changes in chemical structure can produce different, sometimes dangerous, physiological changes.
Before law enforcement agencies came together to ban it, spice — or synthetic cannabis — flew off store shelves, as it doesn’t trigger a positive result for cannabis on a basic urinary test for drugs. However, users soon began exhibiting unusual physical symptoms and side effects.

In March of 2018, 14-year-old Luke Pennington died after suffering a severe reaction to spice at a sleepover. He marks the youngest U.K. resident dying from this chemical substance. In April of 2018, two Chicago residents died from allergic reactions to spice, and 54 other individuals have required hospital treatment for heavy gastrointestinal bleeding.
Does this mean synthetic cannabis created by reputable pharmaceutical companies may cause similar side effects and even deaths? No one can predict the future, but history indicates that altering the chemical structure of cannabis creates unknown reactions. Researchers simply fail to understand yet how the ingredients in cannabis interact to prevent adverse outcomes.

Why Does Real Cannabis Stay on Schedule 1?

Cannabis currently remains classified as a Schedule 1 substance under federal law in the U.S. Substances falling into this category presumably have highly addictive properties and no recognized medical benefits. Advocates of medical cannabis quickly recognize the inherent hypocrisy of this classification.

Physicians licensed to prescribe medical cannabis in legalized states tout the benefits, especially regarding the opioid crisis. Dr. Syed Husain, an orthopedic specialist at New York-based medical facility, Regional Orthopedics, provided Cannabis Culture with his thoughts on cannabis and its use amid the opioid crisis:

“I have been prescribing medical cannabis to patients for the past three years and have seen great results for patients in need of substantial pain relief, oftentimes just with the use of medical marijuana alone. It can be used to treat patients who are opioid naive, patients hoping to avoid starting opioids or for patients who do not respond well to opioids. For patients who are already on opioids, it can also be used in conjunction with opioids to help reduce the total amount of opioids to safer levels. Oftentimes, it can eliminate the need to take other medications altogether.”

Despite continuous medical evidence of the benefits of cannabis, the DEA continues to demonstrate an amazing level of hypocrisy by approving synthetic cannabis but refusing to remove the plant itself from Schedule I. If cannabis truly had no recognized health benefits, then why would pharmaceutical companies attempt to make a synthetic version of the active ingredients found within? For that matter, why did so many prescription and over-the-counter pain remedies contain cannabis as one of the principal ingredients prior to it becoming illegal?

Cannabis lacks the negative withdrawal feelings experienced by those weaning themselves off of opioids. Users can safely quit cannabis cold turkey, even though they may become slightly irritable for a while. It remains unclear if Syndros would cause physical addiction, unlike natural cannabis. However, Insys doesn’t have exactly the best track record when it comes to maintaining just and fair practices.

Top executives at Insys stand accused of using unethical marketing practices, including bribing doctors to prescribe their products and defrauding insurance companies. In addition, John Kapoor, Insys’ founder, faces multiple lawsuits from those who have lost loved ones to the opioid epidemic, focusing in upon Subysys, a spray version of the potent and often deadly narcotic, Fentynal.

The U.S. government’s continued war on natural cannabis, while subsequently showing support for nefarious Big Pharma giants, only results in further discrimination against the most vulnerable: America’s poor.
The Economics of Natural Cannabis

Pharmaceutical companies know full well the healing benefits of natural cannabis. Even as they acknowledge the benefits, they nevertheless continue to pump hundreds of thousands of dollars to groups opposing the legalization of cannabis.
Pharmaceutical companies can’t profit off cannabis-based medications when the real thing costs far less and works significantly better. In addition, real cannabis, like any plant, provides the seeds needed to grow the next generation, meaning smart growers could invest in just one plant and, over time, end up with several. When comparing the cost of cannabis to that of other pharmaceuticals, it is significantly less expensive. If it were it legalized everywhere, prices could drop even further due to the need to stay competitive in the marketplace.

According to one estimate, should all 50 states legalize cannabis, the pharmaceutical industry would lose $4 billion annually. To counter this loss, pharmaceutical companies such as Insys Therapeutics have experimented with synthetic forms of the active ingredients in cannabis, which they can then sell at prices far greater than the price of even a full ounce of cannabis. An ounce of cannabis costs approximately $200 at most dispensaries, while Insys proposes charging $2,000 per month for Syndros, its synthetic THC medication.

How Can We Move Forward?

A solid majority of Americans — 62 percent — believe the government should legalize cannabis use. On a larger scale, refusing to legalize cannabis across the board while allowing pharmaceutical companies to make money off synthetic versions of this healing plant demonstrates that America cares for profit over patient health. This depressing reality is further reinforced by the fact that so many Americans have had their lives shattered over nonviolent cannabis possession.
The DEA should immediately remove cannabis from the list of Schedule I drugs. Police should cease enforcement action on simple cannabis possession. In addition, all inmates currently doing time for cannabis possession should be released and their records expunged so they may rejoin their families and society without a criminal record.

Cannabis can treat a multitude of conditions, from anxiety to migraines, and even cancer. Mother Nature created this plant as a gift to humankind to help them heal when injured or sick. The laws of man should never supersede this purpose, and no one should face punishment for treating themselves with nature’s medicine.
 

roots69

Rising Star
BGOL Investor
What is Patent No. 6630507?


V7N8uVCYoy8OpE-arL7JY0untuNdhKjbZ5E9HsO9m6qQ97sFcAT3GVtmLXeUTTejADHLsAQd_tsz3JHqJfK4PLBu9jspUivFSm5RqDT5x9cKiC_VXQjll2TgV3WpMVRWzKsOpWo7

The patent claims exclusive rights on the use of cannabinoids for treating neurological diseases, such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and stroke, and diseases caused by oxidative stress, such as heart attack, Crohn’s disease, diabetes and arthritis.
Cannabinoids are a diverse class of compounds that include many of the unique compounds found in cannabis. It is easy to think of the patent as a patent on cannabis itself. However, this would be inaccurate, since the patent actually covers non-psychoactive cannabinoids (both synthetic and natural), meaning those that don’t cause a high.
The patent also covers only a specific application of these cannabinoids and not the production or use of cannabis and cannabinoids overall. The patent claims to “provide a new class of antioxidant drugs, that have particular application as neuroprotectants.”
According to the description, the inventors recognized “a previously unanticipated antioxidant property of the cannabinoids in general (and cannabidiol in particular).” Importantly, the patent does not cover cannabinoids that act through cannabinoid pathways, also known as receptors.
“This new found property makes cannabinoids useful in the treatment and prophylaxis of wide variety of oxidation associated diseases, such as ischemic, age-related, inflammatory and autoimmune diseases. The cannabinoids are found to have particular application as neuroprotectants, for example in limiting neurological damage following ischemic insults, such as stroke and trauma, or in the treatment of neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease and HIV dementia.”
In addition to the fact that even the NIDA itself states on their website that cannabis can successfully kill cancer cells, they also state that it helps with nausea, sleep, appetite stimulation, and pain relief. Furthermore, there are now several drugs either containing synthetic forms of cannabinoids or direct extracts that are either FDA-approved as medicines or on their way to being approved. How much more “evidence” does Attorney General Jeff Sessions and the DEA need?
CBD and Non-Psychoactive Cannabinoids
6-5hGbYz2EVZNbjClcB96jP5uJGVu4AJKXo77n-ct5cTSo55uh0GzTapC8V1LvdpsnE4EcQoAfmMvY8dRTH1BomRuY6kL_p-ttFE8zKGYRgsXF_f7lsKE5dPkWeZhX7n1Kwi5V62

The government’s patent does not cover THC, the main ingredient in cannabis. On the other hand, cannabidiol (CBD) is specifically mentioned as an example of a cannabinoid that is covered. The patent describes CBD and other non-psychoactive cannabinoids as superior when taken in higher doses.
“Non-psychoactive cannabinoids, such as cannabidiol, are particularly advantageous to use because they avoid toxicity that is encountered with psychoactive cannabinoids at high doses.”
According to the description, CBD can be ingested in very large amounts without side effects.
“No signs of toxicity or serious side effects have been observed following chronic administration of cannabidiol to healthy volunteers, even in large acute doses of 700mg/day.”
The patent explains that cannabidiol previously had not been considered useful as a neuroprotectant. However, it cites various studies on cannabidiol as an antiepileptic and as a potential treatment for glaucoma.
Since one part of the government applied for the patent of medical cannabis, and another part of the government approved that patent, it only logical to conclude that the federal government knows that cannabis does indeed have valid medical properties. The U.S. government’s own National Institutes of Health researchers even concluded: “Based on evidence currently available the Schedule I classification is not tenable; it is not accurate that cannabis has no medical value, or that Information on safety is lacking.” Maybe there are some big pharma lobbyists and bigwig campaign finance contributors that would get a little upset.
How about the Patent?
The US patent office issued patent #6630507 to Aidan J. Hampson, Julius Axelrod (Julius Axelrod was an American biochemist. He won a share of the Nobel Prize in Physiology for Medicine in 1970) , and Maurizio Grimaldi ,who all held positions at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) in Bethesda, MD. The patent, which declares the definitive accepted medical use of cannabinoids as antioxidants and neuroprotectants:
“Cannabinoids have been found to have antioxidant properties, unrelated to NMDA receptor antagonism. This new found property makes cannabinoids useful in the treatment and prophylaxis of wide variety of oxidation associated diseases, such as ischemic, age-related, inflammatory and autoimmune diseases. The cannabinoids are found to have particular application as neuroprotectants, for example in limiting neurological damage following ischemic insults, such as stroke and trauma, or in the treatment of neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease and HIV dementia. Non-psychoactive cannabinoids, such as cannabidoil, are particularly advantageous to use because they avoid toxicity that is encountered with psychoactive cannabinoids at high doses useful in the method of the present invention. A particular disclosed class of cannabinoids useful as neuroprotective antioxidants is formula (I) wherein the R group is independently selected from the group consisting of H, CH3, and COCH3.”
Why would the US government obtain a patent on cannabidiol, a substance in cannabis, when it claims that cannabis has no therapeutic value? As a Schedule 1 drug, cannabis has been determined to have no therapeutic value, yet the patent claims substantial therapeutic value from one of its components.


What did the US government do with this patent?

“On November 17, 2011, the Federal Register published that the National Institutes of Health of the United States Department of Health and Human Services was “contemplating the grant of an exclusive patent license to practice the invention embodied in U.S. Patent 6,630,507” to the company KannaLife based in New York, for the development and sale of cannabinoid and cannabidiol based therapeutics for the treatment of hepatic encephalopathy in humans.”

“GW Pharmaceuticals plc (AIM:GWP) (Nasdaq:GWPH) (“GW”) announced today that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has granted orphan drug designation for Epidiolex®, GW’s product candidate that contains plant-derived Cannabidiol (CBD) as its active ingredient, for use in treating children with Lennox-Gastaut syndrome (LGS), a rare and severe form of childhood-onset epilepsy. Epidiolex is an oral liquid formulation of a highly purified extract of CBD, a non-psychoactive molecule from the cannabis plant.”

The FDA obtained the patent on cannabidiol and now it is licensing it for use by big pharma drug companies.
What stands in the way of a broad role for medical science in cannabis policy is the Controlled Substances Act. Under this law, cannabis is listed as a Schedule I substance, meaning the government claims it has a high potential for abuse and no current accepted medical use. Substances classified in Schedules II-V are still subject to varying degrees of control, but have a recognized medical use and may be dispensed with a prescription under certain circumstances.
They are also subject to robust research, testing, and manufacture. For cannabis to enjoy the same benefits, it would need to be rescheduled.
Critics of the DEA have pointed out that cannabis researchers are caught in a Catch-22. In order to have more research, scientists need to do more studies. But in order to do that, their studies must be approved by federal agencies, including the DEA, the FDA and occasionally the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the largest public funder of cannabis research.
The institute currently contracts with the University of Mississippi, which has held the sole license to grow research-grade cannabis in the entire country since 1968. Any US study that looks at cannabis needs to get its strains from the institute, whose mission isn't to prove efficacy of the drug but rather its harm and abuse potential.
"Science has been shackled by politics for decades. Controlled trials couldn't be done without begging NIDA," said Dr. Sue Sisley, a psychiatrist formerly with the University of Arizona. Sisley says she was let go from the university because of her research into cannabis. In April 2016, the DEA approved Sisley's proposal to study the effectiveness of cannabis to treat PTSD in veterans. It is the first such study in the country.

"The American Medical Association has no objection to any reasonable regulation of the medicinal use of cannabis and its preparations and derivatives. It does pretest, however, against being called upon to pay a special tax, to use special order forms in order to procure the drug, to keep special records concerning its professional use and to make special returns to the Treasury Department officials, as a condition precedent to the use of cannabis in the practice of medicine."
~Wm. C. Woodward, Legislative Counsel - 11:37 AM Monday, July 12, 1937
Please Tell Your Senators to cosponsor and Support the CARERS Act of 2017!

 

roots69

Rising Star
BGOL Investor
Why Do States Make Patients Renew Medical Cannabis Cards Yearly?

Registry Identification Cards And 3 Year Renewals
5aGqJqOZRWg3iTX-CugxfVKBVDkj2S74Y4v3WuQBd7k9bHm6kgFU-JOvEo9V5MifNqgYmP6P7R_wmGkA9uUWbeMmqBa7X-AqFSD-tTixMESMf6edOQf_Uux_2umBeJUyQgBzWS32

The New Mexico Medical Cannabis Program is available to any New Mexico resident with certain medical conditions. A Primary Caregiver may be designated by the Qualified Patient to take responsibility for managing the well-being of the qualified patient in the use of medical cannabis. A qualified patient may also obtain a Personal Production License (PPL) to grow medical cannabis for personal use.
If you believe your debilitating medical condition(s) qualify for the medical cannabis program, discuss your symptoms with your licensed physician. A doctor has to recommend you to receive medical cannabis as treatment, so the doctor is not prescribing medical cannabis. And this should allow for any licensed physician or nurse practitioner, in New Mexico, to sign for your enrollment. You must submit an application to New Mexico Department of Health’s Medical Cannabis Program administrator’s office along with all required forms.
Due to the qualifying conditions requirement into the medical cannabis program, the types of debilitating medical conditions that are part of the MCP, the nature of these debilitating medical conditions that qualify (and many others); it only makes sense from a medical standpoint to certify patients for a 3 year period in the medical cannabis program. The qualifying health conditions for the program are all ones that modern pharmaceutical pills failed to cure, provide relief and in many case made the conditions worse. That is why we are in the medical cannabis program as this form of medicine provides us the best option for for treatment in improving our health.
What is a chronic medical condition?
A chronic disease is one lasting 3 months or more, by the definition of the U.S. National Center for Health Statistics. Chronic diseases generally cannot be prevented by vaccines or cured by medication, nor do they just disappear.
What is the meaning of debilitating?
Something that's debilitating seriously affects someone or something's strength or ability to carry on with regular activities, like a debilitating illness. Debilitating comes from the Latin word debilis, meaning "weak." That's why you'll often see the adjective used to describe illness, despite the negative reference.
Facts About The Medical Conditions That Qualify For The Medical Cannabis Program.
Patients in New Mexico diagnosed with one or more of the following medical conditions qualify into the program and are allowed legal protection under the Lynn and Erin Compassionate Use Act:
Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) : Can't be cured, but treatment does help. Chronic: lifelong.
Cancer : Chronic disease, can be treated, & average treatment plan length 5 years or more.
Crohn’s Disease : Can't be cured, but treatment does help. Chronic: Lasting several years or lifelong.
Epilepsy : Is a chronic neurological disorder. Can't be cured, but treatment does help.
Glaucoma : Chronic, can't be cured, but treatment does help. ( Can braille cards be printed ? )
Hepatitis C : Chronic, but treatment does help.
HIV/AIDS : Can't be cured, but treatment does help. Chronic: lifelong.
Huntington’s Disease : Can't be cured, but treatment does help. Chronic: lifelong.
Hospice Care :palliation of a chronically ill, terminally ill or seriously ill patient's pain and symptoms.
Inclusion Body Myositis : Can't be cured, but treatment does help. Chronic: lifelong.
Inflammatory Autoimmune-mediated Arthritis Can't be cured, treatment does help. Chronic: lifelong.
Multiple Sclerosis Can't be cured, but treatment does help. Chronic: lifelong.
Damage to the nervous tissue of the spinal cord :No cure, treatment does help. Chronic: lifelong.
Painful peripheral neuropathy :Can't be cured, but treatment does help. Chronic: lifelong.
Parkinson’s disease :Can't be cured, but treatment does help. Chronic: lifelong.
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) :Can't be cured, but treatment does help. Chronic: lifelong.
Severe Chronic Pain :Can't be cured, but treatment does help. Chronic: lifelong.
Severe Anorexia/Cachexia :Often a sign of disease, such as cancer, AIDS, heart failure, or advanced chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). Chronic but treatment does help.
Spasmodic Torticollis (Cervical Dystonia) :Can't be cured, but treatment does help. Chronic: lifelong.
Ulcerative Colitis: Can't be cured, but treatment does help. Chronic: lifelong.
All of these types of debilitating medical conditions have some common medical facts; treatment plan for 5 years if not lifelong, most all have no cure, all of them are chronic health conditions, and sadly some take a person’s life. They all also require a medical treatment plan with several visits to more than one medical practitioner throughout the course of a year.
Patients, like myself, and all patients are currently required to renew their cards every year despite all of patients in the program having serious debilitating medical conditions that are chronic and will never go away. Nor do we need a yearly reminder of our health problems...once a patient is accepted into the program the registry and identification cards should be set at a 3 yr renewal basis and expire 3 years from entry into the program.
The Department can then do yearly address verification with a simple form, by mail, all while maintaining safe access to medical cannabis for patients in the program. The current “change of address” form used by the Department of Health could also be used here. Setting the registry for the program at 3 years will save the Department of Health money by reducing employee hours spent on this process yearly, reduced cost in printing, and office supplies cost. This will also strengthen the medical cannabis program by knowing patient registration numbers and additional statistics for 3 year periods.
For the patients with a personal production license, they could submit annually to the department a statement or form for address verification and to provide that nothing has changed from the initial PPL application that was approved.
The physician or practitioner that you receive your recommendation from should be a practiced, and licensed with medical and research experience (preferably cannabis related). While these doctors cannot “prescribe” cannabis, they can “certify” or “recommend” patients use medical cannabis that meets the criteria to be a qualifying patient.
Although it is easy to walk into a green, 4:20 themed “clinic” and pay a cheap price for a evaluation, there are some factors you should consider before doing so. If you are a patient looking to get the maximum benefit from cannabis as a medicine, the relationship between yourself and your medical cannabis doctor should be respected as much as in any other medical circumstance. For this reason, Americans For Safe Access advise staying away from these types of places many call, “bargain clinics.” Make sure there are no extra fees associated with obtaining ID cards, or extra copies of the letter of recommendation. Patients should protect themselves from clinics that treat them “strictly as a business.”

The Santa Fe New Mexican reported on February 13th (2017) that the New Mexico Medical Cannabis program has grown dramatically from 9,000 patients in 2013 to more than 33,000 today. The Department of Health estimates approximately 500 to 800 new patients join the program weekly. The tremendous growth of the Medical Cannabis Program with new program participants, an increase of 75% during 2016, so that currently means we have almost 45,000 patients benefiting from medical cannabis. The medical cannabis program office is currently processing applications in a 12-14 day range and recommends submitting renewal and new patient applications a minimum of 60 days prior to expiration to allow ample time for processing.

The Department of Health should certify patients under presumptive eligibility and set the registry for the program at 3 years for every patient. This will benefit both the patients, whom the program was created for, and benefit the Department of Health in a state that is looking for ways to save money.
Senate Bill 177, “Medical Marijuana Changes”, proposed making it so if the patient’s debilitating condition is considered chronic, then reapplication would be required no sooner than three years from the date of issuance. However, if the condition is not chronic, reapplication would be no sooner than three years but the patient would be required to submit a statement from a practitioner annually. The 3 year card renewal was also amended out late as a floor amendment.

It was changed to be a written attestation, thus "written attestation" means a written statement from a qualified patient that: (1) states that the qualified patient has been diagnosed by a practitioner as having a debilitating medical condition; (2) states that the qualified patient continues to receive care from a practitioner for the debilitating medical condition in accordance with a schedule determined by that Practitioner; (3) states that the qualified patient's practitioner has indicated that the practitioner believes that the potential health benefits of the medical use of cannabis would likely outweigh the health risks for the patient; and (4) provides the name, telephone number and address for the qualified patient's practitioner; and
"SECTION 5. A new section of the Lynn and Erin CompassionateUse Act is enacted to read:[NEW MATERIAL] REGISTRY IDENTIFICATION CARD--RENEWAL.--A qualified patient shall renew the qualified patient's and that qualified patient's primary caregiver's registry identification cards on an annual basis by submitting to the department a written attestation."
Senate Bill 177 has been sent to the House Health & Human Services Committee -Waiting to be scheduled. Call and email your House of Representative member in your district and call the Roundhouse for your voice to be heard. House of Representatives main phone number 505-986-4751 and general email: house@nmlegis.gov. Ask for presumptive eligibility and setting the registry for the program at 3 years for every patient to be added back into SB-177.

If your debilitating medical condition is not on the list of qualifying conditions, you are strongly encouraged to petition the Medical Advisory Board with a request to add a new condition not currently on the list of qualifying conditions. The Medical Cannabis Advisory Board convenes at least twice each calendar year to conduct public meetings and is made up of eight board certified practitioners. The board is responsible for reviewing and recommending to the department additional conditions that would benefit from the medical use of cannabis, accepting and reviewing petitions to add medical conditions, medical treatments or diseases to the list of debilitating medical conditions that qualify for the use of medical cannabis; recommending quantities of cannabis necessary to constitute an adequate supply, and issuing recommendations concerning rules to be promulgated for the issuance of registry identification cards.
 

roots69

Rising Star
BGOL Investor
Cannabinoids and Therapeutic Effects: CBD


bR2T7eJWkHxAUaW0bc0ic9nVH-aDeEbIC8mOwoadyGl5jS1CEorCO5ta0LYxE-DBnvGTpUkWYIenfwhNP6wNYYydRjMU96KQCYlPP8CDNvQsESZRrwaWAIP5Vtq2TEpzniKgL7UL

On Dec. 14 2016, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency made it clear that “any marijuana-based extract is considered a Schedule I drug under federal law, including CBD oils and other types of CBD-rich extracts.” Even though CBD shows much promise as a medicine, it remains illegal in many parts of the world. CBD is classified as a Schedule I drug in the United States and a Schedule II drug in Canada.
Cannabidiol, CBD, is a cannabis compound that has significant medical benefits, but does not make people have the euphoric feeling of being “stoned” and can actually counteract that psychoactivity aspect of THC. The fact that CBD-rich cannabis is non-psychoactive or less psychoactive than THC-dominant strains makes it a great option for patients looking for relief without disconcerting feelings of lethargy or dysphoria.
pS-5kuZKVymj2HixnBZ3eub1-CcW-R_NYwmwV8VYLSeZDQ_t1rXRT3XkzNNyRghwhJnR1Bf4zatESg-5Hq7IEf6aQzznDpJT2nmaWmuYo5oOUGDPVCDynmoeztATbJnhk2jJjMsi

CBD is a key ingredient in cannabis and is one of more than 80 active cannabinoid compounds found in the cannabis plant that belong to a class of molecules called cannabinoids. Of these compounds, CBD and THC are usually present in the highest concentrations, and are therefore the most recognized and studied. CBD and THC levels tend to vary among different plants. Cannabis grown for recreational purposes often contains more THC than CBD.
However, by using selective breeding techniques, cannabis breeders have managed to create varieties with high levels of CBD and next to zero levels of THC. These strains are rare but have become more popular in recent years.
LPvHmSnP4edchvkeuxGX2bvwS6Aa8GbvaMx81TM9hyb8rGQXs3svJ_gw3h2-ek69KRW5HkMhyqU2yl4r6CXg6Dn2TdTOYRDruGsP9UDATlR3ZHn7dUSkH9VKOd22LrGKILryCuKi

The beneficial health effects of CBD for the human body are coming more and more prevalent into social awareness, here are five facts that you should know about this unique compound:
1. CBD is Non-Psychoactive:
Unlike THC, CBD does not cause a “high”. While this makes CBD a poor choice for recreational users, it gives the chemical a significant advantage as a medicine, since health professionals prefer treatments with minimal side effects. CBD is non-psychoactive because it does not act on the same pathways as THC. These pathways, called CB1 receptors, are highly concentrated in the brain and are responsible for the mind-altering effects of THC. A 2011 review published in Current Drug Safety concludes that CBD “does not interfere with several psychomotor and psychological functions.” The authors add that several studies suggest that CBD is “well tolerated and safe” even at high doses.

2. CBD can Treat Addiction:
Drug addiction is a disorder characterized by the compulsive and uncontrollable desire to use drugs. A 2013 animal study published in Addictive Biology found CBD inhibits the rewarding effect of morphine. CBD was able to block morphine’s addictive effect on the rats by reducing the pleasure the drug offered. CBD is an exogenous cannabinoid that acts on several neurotransmission
systems involved in addiction. Scientific studies have shown the beneficial effects of CBD on opioid and other psychostimulant addictions.

3. CBD helps Regulate Blood Sugar Levels in the Body
Studies as recent as 2013 have found that one of the ways that cannabis helps people regulate their weight is through regulating blood sugar levels. Studies found that cannabis users were less likely to develop diabetes in their life. As to whether or not CBD is useful for diabetes patients is still somewhat controversial but more studies are being done to show these benefits. But CBD regulates blood sugar levels and decreases the likelihood of developing diabetes.

4. CBD Treats and Reduces Seizures In Children
CBD has anti-seizure activity, reducing the severity of seizures in animal studies. Several case studies and reports suggest CBD is effective in treating children with drug-resistant epilepsy. Charlotte's Web is one strain of cannabis create just for this purpose.

5. CBD Inhibits Cancer Cell Growth
The cannabinoids in marijuana excite certain receptors that allow the body to produce pharmacological effects in the immune system and the central nervous system. Cannabinoids have been found to act in this way to inhibit cancer cell growth. In fact, they are being used to decrease the size of tumors also, and for cancer-related side effects. CBD has been shown to reduce pain and nausea, and increase appetite during patients' cancer treatments. There are also reports that show CBD's anti-tumor effects. There has been a reduced cell viability, increased cancer cell death, decreased tumor growth, and inhibition of metastasis. Researchers attribute these effects to to the antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties of CBD. Combined with the THC cancer killing effect, this is really a big deal underscored by the US Government and Big Pharma!

CBD has demonstrated neuroprotective and neurogenic effects, and its anti-cancer properties are currently being investigated at several academic research centers in the United States and elsewhere. Although CBD and THC act on different pathways of the body, they seem to have many of the same medical benefits. According to a 2013 review published in the British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology, studies have found CBD to possess the following medical properties:

Medical Properties of CBD
Effects
Antiemetic
Reduces nausea and vomiting
Anticonvulsant
Suppresses seizure activity
Antipsychotic
Combats psychosis disorders
Anti-inflammatory
Combats inflammatory disorders
Anti-oxidant
Combats neurodegenerative disorders
Anti-tumoral/Anti-cancer
Combats tumor and cancer cells
Anxiolytic/Anti-depressant
Combats anxiety and depression disorders

While some doctors can’t seem to look past certain effects of THC due to a lack of general understanding of cannabis, CBD doesn’t appear to present that much of problem. More and more evidence of CBD’s medical benefits continues to grow with CBD’s potential as a treatment for a wide range of conditions, including anxiety, arthritis, diabetes, addiction, alcoholism, MS, chronic pain, schizophrenia, PTSD, depression, antibiotic-resistant infections, epilepsy, and many other neurological disorders.
A patent awarded to the U.S. Health and Human Services in 2003 (US6630507) also covers the use of CBD as a treatment for various neurodegenerative and inflammatory disorders.
 

roots69

Rising Star
BGOL Investor
There's a WAR going on outside no man is safe from, either you "Stand up or Sit down!!"



Cannabis Use And “Impairment”


During the regular legislative session for 2017 in New Mexico, we saw the attempt by retired police officer, William “Bill” Rehm file HB-22, “DUI For Certain Drugs & Interlocks”. HB-22, DUI For Certain Drugs & Interlock, was an arbitrary proposal with the use of metabolite concentration to determine DUI for cannabis (THC, dissolves in fat, whereas alcohol dissolves in water). The proposed law stated a person would get a DUI, “for the active compound in marijuana, delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol, five nanograms per milliliter of blood” ( 5ng/ml THC).

For patients in the state’s medical cannabis program, they would potentially be in jeopardy of DUI even without medicating prior to driving due to residual levels of cannabis in a person’s system. When you drink, alcohol spreads through your saliva and breath. It evenly saturates your lungs and blood. Measuring the volume of alcohol in one part of your body can predictably tell you how much is in any other part of your body. Because THC is fat soluble, it moves readily from water environments, like blood, to Fatty environments. Fatty tissues, like the brain, act like sponges for the THC.

Marilyn Huestis, who headed the chemistry and drug metabolism section at the National Institute on Drug Abuse, conducted a study finding that when a smoker’s blood THC level peaks at 15-18 nanograms per milliliter, that could be just as a dangerous as driving drunk.



Medical Cannabis and Impaired Driving

On, June 27, 2017 – Canadians for Fair Access to Medical Marijuana (CFAMM), a national non-profit organization, released a first-of-its-kind preliminary research review on medical cannabis impaired driving – one of the major public safety concerns stemming from the legalization of non-medical cannabis.

Although the federal illegality of both medical and recreational cannabis in the United States makes it a difficult comparison to Canada, it is still worthwhile to explore examples of how individual states have approached impaired driving. Overall, approximately one-third of US states have laws related to THC- impaired driving with policy ranging state-to-state. Sixteen states have zero-tolerance approaches, meaning any detectable level of THC presence results in a charge, and six others have per se laws according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, 2017.

States with per se limits, such as Washington and Colorado, have been using blood tests to determine THC levels as a measure of impairment. Both states use a legal threshold of five ng/ml THC of a driver’s blood. However, in Colorado, five ng/ml only triggers a "presumption" of impairment and drivers can challenge this presumption at trial. In other states without per se limits, such as Oregon, Alaska and Washington, D.C., trained observations by police are used to determine impairment.
However, medical uses of cannabis have not been reviewed in these contexts.

Defining “Impairment”

While CNJ is fully against impaired driving and supports responsible driving legislation, the term “impairment” is widely used but is not always clearly defined. When speaking of impairment, crucial to this dialogue is speaking to actual impairment of cognitive, psychomotor, and other functions necessary to safely drive – not simply a measure of previous use such as the presence of THC in blood. Unlike blood alcohol concentration, which is scientifically linked to levels of impairment, matching levels of impairment to levels of THC in one’s system is still widely debated and has not been studied related to medical cannabis use.

Although many studies have explored the risk of recreational or occasional use of cannabis related to driving impairment, few have studied the risk related to responsible medical use of cannabis. For most patients, the goal of medical cannabis use is not to experience its psychoactive effects, but rather to treat or manage symptoms of an illness using the smallest effective dose. Although it's a limited example, a past study on the medical use of cannabis (Sativex) for multiple sclerosis identified better driving safety measures after the introduction of cannabis in patients' treatment regimens, suggesting a need for further research on medical users.



It is also important to note that U.S. states have recorded an 8-11% drop in overall traffic fatalities one year following the introduction of medical cannabis legislation.

Many medically authorized people in both the US and Canada use cannabis daily or near daily to manage symptoms associated with their illness and are expected to follow advice from health care providers. This includes safe-use guidelines, such as waiting 4+ hours after consumption before driving, to help eliminate risk of potential impairment. The metabolism and effects of THC are highly variable from person-to-person and THC can remain detectable within a regular user's blood for days after last consumption.

The current laws and proposed laws in many states, which would set a per se cut-off of 5 ng/ml THC at the lower end, means even when patients are not impaired, they would have to stop using their medicine for 3 to 7 days before driving.

"Although driving is not a right but a privilege, patients who use cannabis responsibly and are not impaired should still be able to drive without risk or fear of being charged. It is necessary for the government to incentivize further research and include considerations for patients using cannabis. While a strict precautionary approach may be appropriate in light of limited evidence, policymakers have a responsibility to both safeguard road safety and balance the rights of medical cannabis patients to ensure they are not unfairly criminalized by drugged driving laws that do not target impairment."- Jonathan Zaid, Lead Author and Executive Director, CFAMM
 

roots69

Rising Star
BGOL Investor
Daily cannabis use is on the rise in American adults

Study finds adults ages 50 to 64 increased non-daily cannabis use both before and after 2007; uptick among daily and non-daily users in all age categories 18 and older since 2007

NEW YORK--Cannabis use may be decreasing among teens, but a new study by researchers at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health showed that American adults have increasingly used cannabis daily since 2007. The findings are published online in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs.
The legal status of cannabis for medicinal and recreational use rapidly evolved between 2007 and 2014, with the number of states with medical cannabis laws doubling from 12 to 24. As of September 2017, 29 states and the District of Columbia had medical cannabis laws, and 8 states and the District of Columbia had recreational cannabis laws.
The study found that nondaily cannabis use decreased among those aged 12 to 2J and 35 to 49 before 2007, increased among all adults after 2007, particularly among adults 26 to 34--the latter by 4.5 percent. Daily cannabis use decreased among those 12 to 17 years of age before 2007 and increased among adults in general after 2007. Daily cannabis use was highest among 18 to 34-year-olds but overall, the rate of daily cannabis use increase did not differ significantly and ranged between one and two percentage points among adults 18 to 54.
"Increases in daily and nondaily cannabis use among adults after 2007 could be due to increasingly permissive cannabis legislation, attitudes, and lower risk perception," said Pia M. Mauro, PhD, assistant professor of Epidemiology at the Mailman School of Public Health and first author.
Using the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, a survey of individuals ages 12 and older, the researchers examined trends in cannabis use among six age categories between 2002 and 2014. They compared change over time to identify ages that may have disproportionately increased use of cannabis. Daily use was defined as 300 days or more in the past year.
"We saw a steady increase in more frequent use among people who reported cannabis use, including young people," Mauro noted. "We found significant increases in daily cannabis use across adult age categories after 2007 that contrasted with stable prevalence before 2007 and decreases among adolescents."
"Not all adults use cannabis at the same rate," said Silvia Martins, MD, PhD, Mailman School associate professor of Epidemiology and senior author. "Understanding the ages at which young people and adults use cannabis can help target appropriate reduction or prevention interventions."
Middle-age adults ages 50 to 64 were the only group with increases in nondaily cannabis use both before and after 2007. If trends continue, prevalence estimates of cannabis use among ages 50 to 64 could surpass those of adults ages 35 to 49.
"Research about the patterns and consequences of cannabis use in baby boomers in particular is needed, since use is high in this birth cohort and is expected to continue to increase," said Martins. "Moreover, significant increases in nondaily cannabis use among adults 65 and older defy perceptions that older adults do not use cannabis, although daily use in this age group remains rare."
###
The study was funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (grants T32DA031099, R01DA037866, and R01DA034244); and the New York State Psychiatric Institute. The authors report no competing interests.
Co-authors are Hannah Carliner, Qiana Brown, and Melanie Wall, Mailman School of Public Health; Deborah Hasin, Mailman School of Public Health and New York State Psychiatric Institute; Dvora Shmulewitz, Reanne Rahim-Juwel, and Aaron Sarvet, New York State Psychiatric Institute and Department of Psychiatry, Columbia University Irving Medical Center.
Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health

Founded in 1922, Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health pursues an agenda of research, education, and service to address the critical and complex public health issues affecting New Yorkers, the nation and the world. The Mailman School is the third largest recipient of NIH grants among schools of public health. Its over 450 multi-disciplinary faculty members work in more than 100 countries around the world, addressing such issues as preventing infectious and chronic diseases, environmental health, maternal and child health, health policy, climate change & health, and public health preparedness. It is a leader in public health education with over 1,300 graduate students from more than 40 nations pursuing a variety of master's and doctoral degree programs.
 

roots69

Rising Star
BGOL Investor
Cannabis: A Different Kind Of Treatment


Thanks to the results from recently-permitted scientific studies and the untiring work of cannabis activist groups, more and more people are beginning to accept that cannabis is a successful form of treatment for certain medical conditions. Despite this, many patients out there are still hesitant to try it. Their reasoning may stem from religious beliefs, or perhaps because they’re fearful of losing their job. Oftentimes, however, patients are wary of things that seem to be outside of the current medical system and choose not to explore the benefits of medical cannabis.
“If my doctor doesn’t support weed, why should I?”
“I’m already taking something for my anxiety and it helps me.”
It’s good to have doubts and ask questions, but these can be a bit lopsided. Patients should remember to question their current system, too. Medical culture has conditioned us to accept remarkably negative side-effects as a “normal” part of medication, and many of us become resigned to this. Unfortunately, this can lead to a lifelong dependency on prescription meds. As side-effects from previous medications arise, patients are prescribed additional medications to treat them. Oftentimes this results in patients being treated for an increasing number of conditions that actually stem from the medications themselves.
To illustrate this, let’s use the example of a female patient who consults a psychiatrist because she’s having trouble focusing at work.
After giving responses to a standardized questionnaire, she’s diagnosed with ADHD. Her doctor hands her a prescription for Adderall and says, “This will help.” She fills the prescription. Sure enough, things improve immediately at work. The patient can accomplish tasks and participate actively during meetings. It’s a miracle! The only problem is, she’s too wired to fall asleep at night.She complains about this to her psychiatrist, who is all too familiar with this amphetamine-based side-effect and writes her a prescription for Ambien. All the patient needs to do is pop an Ambien at bedtime and she’s guaranteed to get some rest. Success!But along with Ambien comes another debilitating side-effect: daytime drowsiness. The psychiatrist ups her Adderall prescription to combat this, and all is well…until the patient starts having panic attacks due to the increase of amphetamines in her system. The fear of panic attacks disrupts her social life and leads to her feeling depressed.Next come prescriptions for Clonazepam, a benzo (aka tranquilizer) commonly used to treat anxiety, and Wellbutrin, an antidepressant. Now, we have a patient who initially complained about loss of focus at work but is now being medically treated for ADHD, insomnia, anxiety, and depression. Not only does she now have a handful of additional conditions to treat indefinitely, (unfortunately including conditions that arose in the form of side-effects from her prescription medications), but she has become fully dependent on her medication regimen to feel “normal” when she initially only wanted to become more focused at work.
This practice of medication stacking that leads to total loss of patient responsibility is frighteningly common. What’s the solution? Well, we’d love to say that it’s as simple as “cannabis,” but it’s not quote that simple. Cannabis is not a cure-all. However it CAN indeed successfully treat many conditions, but only if the patient is willing to take responsibility for their own treatment. Only if they’re willing to work for and participate in their wellness.

Cannabis works much differently than the prescription medications we are used to taking, from a physiological standpoint as well as a mental one. And the latter is what ends up turning many people off from it. They don’t want to put the effort in; they’re misinformed of the benefits of cannabis; they want an easy fix; they don’t want to try.

If you want to successfully treat your conditions with this marvelous plant, you’re going to have to step up and take charge of your own treatment. You’re going to have to do the research and pay attention to all the interactions. You’re going to have to conduct your own trials and determine what works best for you. In many cases, the most effective regimen is a combination of cannabis and a reduced dosage of certain medications*. But you won’t know unless you’re unwilling to experiment. This may sound scary, intimidating, or just plain hard, but it’s what it takes to build a good relationship with your treatment.

Not only can cannabis successfully treat a plethora of medical conditions without the risk of major side effects, but it can put you more in touch with yourself, your body, and your mental health. By mindfully integrating it into your life, you’ll begin to realize you have more control over your treatment than you thought.

We urge patients to empower themselves by taking responsibility for their own health and wellness. That’s what being healthy truly is.


*Do not make any changes to your medication without doctor approval. We strongly encourage you to be open with your doctor about your cannabis usage.
 

roots69

Rising Star
BGOL Investor
The coffee cannabis connection

Coffee affects cannabis and steroid systems




It’s well known that a morning cup of joe jolts you awake. But scientists have discovered coffee affects your metabolism in dozens of other ways, including your metabolism of steroids and the neurotransmitters typically linked to cannabis, reports a new study from Northwestern Medicine.

In a study of coffee consumption, Northwestern scientists were surprised to discover coffee changed many more metabolites in the blood than previously known. Metabolites are chemicals in the blood that change after we eat and drink or for a variety of other reasons.

The neurotransmitters related to the endocannabinoid system — the same ones affected by cannabis — decreased after drinking four to eight cups of coffee in a day. That’s the opposite of what occurs after someone uses cannabis. Neurotransmitters are the chemicals that deliver messages between nerve cells.

Cannabinoids are the chemicals that give the cannabis plant its medical and recreational properties. The body also naturally produces endocannabinoids, which mimic cannabinoid activity.

In addition, certain metabolites related to the androsteroid system increased after drinking four to eight cups of coffee in a day, which suggests coffee might facilitate the excretion or elimination of steroids. Because the steroid pathway is a focus for certain diseases including cancers, coffee may have an effect on these diseases as well.

“These are entirely new pathways by which coffee might affect health,” said lead author Marilyn Cornelis, assistant professor of preventive medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. “Now we want to delve deeper and study how these changes affect the body.”

Little is known about how coffee directly impacts health. In the new study, Northwestern scientists applied advanced technology that enabled them to measure hundreds of metabolites in human blood samples from a coffee trial for the first time. The study generates new hypotheses about coffee’s link to health and new directions for coffee research.

The paper was published January 15 in the Journal of Internal Medicine.

Drinking lots of coffee for science
In the three-month trial based in Finland, 47 people abstained from coffee for one month, consumed four cups a day for the second month and eight cups a day for the third month. Cornelis and colleagues used advanced profiling techniques to examine more than 800 metabolites in the blood collected after each stage of the study.

Blood metabolites of the endocannabinoid system decreased with coffee consumption, particularly with eight cups per day, the study found.

The endocannabinoid metabolic pathway is an important regulator of our stress response, Cornelis said, and some endocannabinoids decrease in the presence of chronic stress.

“The increased coffee consumption over the two-month span of the trial may have created enough stress to trigger a decrease in metabolites in this system,” she said. “It could be our bodies’ adaptation to try to get stress levels back to equilibrium.”

The endocannabinoid system also regulates a wide range of functions: cognition, blood pressure, immunity, addiction, sleep, appetite, energy and glucose metabolism.

"The endocannabinoid pathways might impact eating behaviors," suggested Cornelis, “the classic case being the link between cannabis use and the munchies.”

Coffee also has been linked to aiding weight management and reducing risk of type 2 diabetes.

“This is often thought to be due to caffeine's ability to boost fat metabolism or the glucose-regulating effects of polyphenols (plant-derived chemicals),” Cornelis said. “Our new findings linking coffee to endocannabinoids offer alternative explanations worthy of further study.”

It’s not known if caffeine or other substances in coffee trigger the change in metabolites.

Although Cornelis studies the effects of coffee, she didn’t drink it growing up in Toronto or later living in Boston.

“I didn’t like the taste of it,” Cornelis said. But when she moved to join Northwestern in 2014, she began to enjoy several cups a day. “Maybe it’s the Chicago water,” she mused, “but I do have to add cream and sweetener.”

The study was supported by the American Diabetes Association, the German Federal Ministry of Health and other sources.
 

roots69

Rising Star
BGOL Investor
How to Become a Cannabis Advocate


Most people thought the fight was over when Colorado voters legalized commercial cannabis in 2012, but that victory led to a series of smaller battles over such issues as social consumption, home-grow limitations and industry expansion. Proposals continue to pop up on both the local and state level that could advance or limit your rights as a cannabis consumer, patient, grower or business owner. Want to make sure things go in the right direction? Here's how to become a cannabis advocate:

Attend Local Government Meetings

Most of the decisions that affect your daily life are made at a local level by neighborhood organizations, city councils, county boards, mayoral administrations and so on — so don't let these groups off the hook. Amendment 64 allows municipalities and counties to choose whether to ban or allow cannabis businesses, and the majority of Colorado communities still prohibit them. A number of towns and counties have also discussed stricter limits for home-growing, even for medical patients, while a few have tried to address issues such as social consumption and cultivation health standards.

Have an opinion? Share it at a public meeting. Sternly worded emails might get some attention from elected officials, but if you really want them to know who you are, force them to stay at a boring meeting past 10 p.m. to hear your testimony.

Keep an Eye on Your Legislators
Just as you should watch local officials, it's important to keep an eye on what your state lawmakers are up to. Colorado's legislators have become more educated on the science behind cannabis in recent years, and a lot of that is thanks to advocacy efforts. If you're like most people and can't attend legislative sessions and hearings to voice your opinion, you can always study the Colorado House and Senate meeting recordings that are posted online, then reach out to your state rep or senator.

The Colorado Legislature ended its session on May 9, but not before considering some pretty crazy pot bills. Measures that would have proposed a tracking agent for commercial marijuana plants or a tracking system for legal pot buyers were defeated after extensive public input in 2018, while bills that added autism and post-traumatic stress disorder to the list of conditions approved for medical marijuana passed in 2017 and 2018, respectively, both buoyed by heavy public support.
In New Mexico, there is the New Mexico Legislature Website Video Tutorials, that shows you how to track all New Mexico Legislation through the My Roundhouse tool, how to find your Legislators and how to find specific legislation.

See What Groups Are Right for You

There's no shortage of groups advocating for cannabis, but it can be hard to pick one specific cause that deserves your time. While you can always join broader national groups focusing on cannabis rights as a whole, such as the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws(NORML), Drug Policy Alliance, Americans for Safe Access, Students for Sensible Drug Policy or Marijuana Policy Project, there are also groups that fight for more focused causes. Organizations that represent medical marijuana patients, minorities in cannabis, health-care professionals, women, veterinarians, autistic children, veterans, recreational consumers and many other demographics are out there and eager for new members. All you have to do is ask.


The Medical Cannabis Advocate's Training Center

ASA believes that good policy is created when those who are most affected are at the table. Just because you are medical cannabis patient, it doesn't mean that you automatically have a degree in public policy. ASA has always been committed to demystifying political systems and providing advocates the tools they need to participate in the processes in a meaningful way. Learn all about grassroots organizing, citizen lobbying, media spokesperson training, and much more. https://www.safeaccessnow.org/advocate_training_center
In This Section

A. The Informed Advocate


The best advocate is an informed advocate. The history of medical cannabis advocacy is a rich one, filled with brave individuals like you. The key to being an effective advocate is a firm understanding of our history, the political landscape in which you are operating, the rules of engagement and the ability to articulate your needs.

B. Finding Your Voice


In order to be an effective advocate, you will need to find your voice. The training in this section will help you merge your personal experiences with strategic messages that will help you meet your political goals.

C. Using Your Voice


Every political campaign will include a variety of strategies and tactics. This section will expose you to several strategies you can utilize in your advocacy and give you step by step instructions on how to master them.

D. Building a Movement


While it is true that a few individuals can accomplish a lot, it will take a strong, vibrant movement for us to achieve our ultimate goal - safe and legal access for all Americans. This section will give you the tools you need to build a strong movement that will help you reach your political goals.

E. Joining a Movement


When joining a movement, you are making not only a commitment to an issue, but a commitment to other individuals in our struggle. In our movement, our brothers and sisters are vulnerable to criminal sanctions. This section will go over programs and projects you can incorporate into your advocacy that support our movement.

Resources for Organizers


Everything you need to be an effective activist: handbooks, outreach materials, graphics and more!

Purchase the Advocate's Handbook


Purchase The Medical Cannabis Advocate's Handbook on Amazon Kindle!


Or Start Your Own
Just because there's a lot of something doesn't mean you can't have more. The thought of legal cannabis is still very new, even in Colorado, and there's a good chance that you're not wholly represented — or maybe the group that's currently representing your category isn't pushing the interests you'd prefer. Either way, the opportunity is there to motivate like-minded cannabis consumers to come out of the closet. If you're scared of starting a nonprofit to support a federally illegal substance, then start small with a Facebook group or weekly get-togethers through Eventbrite or Meetup.com.

Attend Events — All Kinds

Our weekly Cannabis Calendar lists pot-infused yoga sessions and art classes, but it's also stocked with industry shindigs and advocacy events in the metro area — and even we can't keep up with all of them. Support groups and networking parties are hosted weekly for everything from the hemp-derived-CBD industry to parents with children who use medical marijuana. They're often attended by some of the Denver cannabis scene's movers and shakers, many of whom are happy to give advice or lend their support to the right cause. Recreational classes, parties and events are frequented by many of the same faces, and they often get into policy discussions, too. Figure out potential allies and ask them for advice — but also learn who to avoid.




Don't Settle

Obtaining the right to consume cannabis seems like a huge victory, and rightly so. It took years of lobbying by groups like Safer Alternative for Enjoyable Recreation, Students for Sensible Drug Policy and the Campaign to Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol to even get Amendment 64 on the ballot, but there are plenty of people who don't think it went far enough. Whether you agree with their stances or not, activists like Miguel Lopez or Larisa Bolivar continue to piss off authority as they try to protect minorities from industry consolidation and consumers and caregivers from law enforcement persecution. Recent retail legalization efforts in Arizona and Ohio were both opposed by large factions of cannabis advocates, largely because both catered to a small network of pot-business licenses that limited market access. Don't let the rush for legalization result in an unwelcome compromise.

But Don't Be Afraid to Talk to the Other Side

As with any political issue, you have to be prepared for the reality that not everyone will agree with you. In fact, some will oppose you to the point of boiling anger — but you'll have to get over that. Even if you completely disagree with everything they say, it's still beneficial to engage your opposition in dialogue. On top of learning about their biggest disputes with what you're pushing, you might even reach a compromise. Both Denver and Colorado officials routinely force all sides of cannabis stakeholder issues to sit in the same room until something close to a consensus is reached. Even if you can't get on that exclusive list of stakeholders, the meetings are public and allow comment from the audience. Attend those meetings to make sure you're heard, but remember to listen to other voices, too.

May 15, 2018 | Geoffrey Marshall for ASA News

By Herbert Fuego for Westword

 
Top