Lies, Taxation and Pot, Oh My

A friend of mine suffers from nerve pain and has great difficulty sleeping.  When she sits in a chair, she hangs her head down, folds her arms in her lap and sits slumped over with her legs together as if trying to get in a fetal position.  The only time she can sleep is when she takes prescription muscle relaxants but they give her a hang over the next day.  The pain medication doesn't really work and presents some undesirable side effects on her.

She was complaining to me that she wished there was a natural, homeopathic or herbal medicine which would help her with her nerve pain and not have any side effects.  I immediately suggested marijuana.  Despite actually being a natural, homeopathic and herbal medicine, her voice rose with indignation saying that pot was an addictive drug with dangerous side effects.  It ills brain cells and she would never take that.  I told her that Steve Jobs was a pot smoker.  Look what it did to his brain.

It is amazing how Harry Anslinger's lies about this natural, homeopathic and herbal plant have endured over the decades despite medical research and thousands of my and your neighbors and friends "testing" it on a daily basis.  They themselves, in secret, have been proving the lies to be wrong.  It is easy to beleive a lie when so many people say it is so.

I looked up my friend's nerve pain medication and here are the possible side effects:
difficult or labored breathing, shortness of breath, tightness in the chest, , chills, cough, diarrhea, difficulty with swallowing, dizziness, fast heartbeat, hives, itching, joint or muscle pain, puffiness or swelling of the eyelids or around the eyes, skin lesions often with a purple center, skin rash, sore throat, unusual tiredness or weakness, accidental injury, bloating or swelling of the face, blurred vision, numbness or pain in the hands, change in walking and balance, clumsiness, confusion, delusions, dementia, difficulty having a bowel movement, difficulty with speaking, double vision, dry mouth, fever, headache, hoarseness, lack of coordination, loss of memory, lower back or side pain, painful or difficult urination, weight gain, seeing double, sensation of pins and needles, shakiness and unsteady walk, problems with muscle control or coordination, unusual weight gain, anxiety, bloated or full feeling, chest pain, cold sweats, coma, feeling of discomfort or illness, loss of appetite, loss of bladder control, loss of strength or energy, muscle aches and pains, muscle twitching or jerking, muscle weakness, nausea, nervousness, nightmares, noisy breathing, pain passing gas, rhythmic movement of the muscles, runny nose, seizures, shivering, slurred speech, sweating, trouble sleeping, twitching, uncontrolled eye movements, vomiting, thoughts of suicide, suicide.

Here are the side effects for marijuana:
munchies, mellow, sound sleep.

I shared with her my two experiences with marijuana.  Personally I would never smoke it.  I wouldn't do that to my lungs and beside that, I can't stand the smell of smoke and hate to be around people who do smoke.  So my first experience with marijuana was when I was in Washington State.  I went camping up to a glacier and since marijuana is legal in WA, at the suggestion of a friend, I purchased a few doses in pill form and took one before I went to sleep on the glacier.  I slept the whole night through while my hiking mates suffered the whole night freezing in the 20 degree temperature.  I took one final pill on my return flight back to NY.  As my plane took off I put my head down.  Six hours later I awoke to the sound of the pilot saying "We are making our final decent to Albany . . . "  This stuff is amazing.

It is too bad when my mother was suffering from nerve pain, her options were a concoction of three pain medications and one antidepressant or, as an alternative: morphine.  All that suffering she endured and at the expense to the insurance company could have been avoided if marijuana were legal.  You can bet that if she were alive today and still in that amount of pain, I would personally risk arrest and prison to find her relief from all the pain and suffering she endured in her final years.

For those who beleive in the fairy tales passed down by word of mouth, I am sorry you have been lied to and you beleive those lies; survival of the fittest.  Go ahead and take those lab created pills with all those aforementioned side effects.  For those of you wondering why marijuana was given a bad rap in the first place, our first drug czar, Harry Anslinger, who was in the pockets of the pharmaceutical companies, alcohol and tobacco distributors, and the lumber and print media industries, he made up stories about it.  Coming out of the prohibition, marijuana couldn't be taxed and was cutting into alcohol and tobacco sales.  Both the government and above mentioned industries were losing money.  His facts changed regularly and despite the scientific findings in LaGuardia report, issued the following quotes:

...the primary reason to outlaw marijuana is its effect on the degenerate races.​

Marihuana leads to pacifism and communist brainwashing.​

There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the US, and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos and entertainers. Their Satanic music, jazz and swing, result from marijuana usage. This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers and any others.​

Reefer makes darkies think they're as good as white men.​

Marijuana is an addictive drug which produces in its users insanity, criminality, and death.​

You smoke a joint and you're likely to kill your brother.​

Marijuana is the most violence-causing drug in the history of mankind.​

Marihuana influences Negroes to look at white people in the eye, step on white men’s shadows and look at a white woman twice.

Colored students at the Univ. of Minn. partying with white female students smoking marijuana and getting their sympathy with stories of racial persecution. Result pregnancy.

Two Negroes took a girl fourteen years old and kept her for two days in a hut under the influence of marihuana. Upon recovery she was found to be suffering from syphilis.

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Yup, your call.  Hopefully it will be to your elected representative demanding that marijuana be made legal AND, everyone languishing in our prisons today for past pot possession will be released and their records sealed or expunged. Hey, it is your tax dollars keeping them there at $30,000 per person per year.  It all started with Harry Anslinger.  Who will it end with?

How Dangerous is Marijuana?

Here is a compilation of annual causes of death according to the CDC:
Homicides: 16,121 (11,208 involved firearms (many were domestic abuse))
Alcohol-impaired driving crashes: 10,322 (1,168 were children 0-14 years old)
Heart disease: 611,105
Cancer: 584,881
Chronic lower respiratory diseases: 149,205
Accidents (unintentional injuries): 130,557
Stroke (cerebrovascular diseases): 128,978
Alzheimer's disease: 84,767
Diabetes: 75,578
Influenza and Pneumonia: 56,979
Nephritis, nephrotic syndrome, and nephrosis: 47,112
Intentional self-harm (suicide): 41,149
Marijuana: 0, no recorded cases of overdose deaths from cannabis have been found

Why is it illegal?  It can't be taxed other than by collecting money from arrests, tickets, court fees, fines and incarceration.  It is in the interest of the pharmaceutical industry, tobacco and alcohol industry, lumber industry and prison industry to keep it illegal.

For further reading, take a look at the LaGuardia Report on Marijuana:
http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/library/studies/lag/lagmenu.htm

Marijuana; Pros and Cons

Wow, a step in the right direction.  Voters in Oregon, Alaska and Washington, D.C. approved marijuana legalization.  Let's see where it goes from there.

First of all, all our laws against the smoking of pot are a waste of taxpayer resources because the law focuses on a drug that, at worst, only hurts its user.  It is a waste of resources to take people with this one habit, remove them from support systems, their family, and the possibility of rehab, and send them to jail or prison (aka, criminal conditioning and crime school).  By making this drug illegal makes society less safe as it drives the inevitable market underground outside of regulation where dealing it becomes dangerous and promotes criminal enterprises such as gangs, terrorism and people who will stop at nothing to protect their crop.

I support the legalization of marijuana because I know several responsible professionals who secretly smoke recreationally just fine. There are countless professionals and politicians who use it but stay in the closet due to the irrational stigma, and thus the stigma persists as it is associated only with criminals and people with severe and debilitating addiction issues not at all related to marijuana. 

Marijuana should absolutely be made available to people with medical conditions.  I know someone who is severely disabled with a back injury and all his doctor can do is prescribe copious amounts of addictive pain killers with horrible side effects for him.  Many, such as morphine, make him ill and knock him out for hours.  Marijuana, however, allows him to get up, walk around while functioning almost pain free for a couple of hours at a time.  Should he be arrested?

My sister, who died of brain cancer, she refused morphine during her final few months and instead opted for the illegal and criminal use of marijuana for both pain management and to facilitate healthy eating.  Although she never partook in drugs ever before in her life prior to developing cancer, she said "So what if I become addicted to it.  So what if it will give me cancer.  So what if it kills my brain cells.  So what if it decreases my sex drive.  So what if it makes me a sex offender.  At least I can fully and actively spend my last few months on this earth with my family and not vegetated in a morphine induced coma."

Marijuana was first made illegal in the thirties when a man named Harry Anslinger was put in charge of alcohol prohibition.  When the government realized that they were loosing millions in tax revenue and prohibition only created crime (like the marijuana laws do today), they repealed the prohibition.  What they didn't realize is that poor people who couldn't afford the illegal alcohol turned to marijuana as a substitute and discovered that not only was it inexpensive and they could grow their own, but it promoted appetite for the sick, worked much better than prescription drugs for pain relief, and it was a cure for addiction to prescription drugs and was a cure for alcohol addiction.  Not only that but when a person with alcoholism tendencies came home and partook in smoking weed instead of the bottle, he didn't beat his wife and kids, he didn't blow his paycheck, he didn't crash his car, he didn't throw up all over the place, and he didn't get a hang over the next day.  Marijuana was a God-send to those suffering from alcoholism. 

Anslinger teamed up with the generou$ Hearst Corporation, who owned hundreds of newspapers, which were printed on paper made from trees, whose pulp  suppliers were farming marijuana instead of lumber; and he teamed up with the pharmaceutical companies who were seeing a decrease in prescription sales, and the breweries who were seeing a decrease in alcohol sales.  Something had to be done.  So they made marijuana illegal.

Harry Anslinger made up so many lies and exaggerated so many stories about the herb that every time he retold his stories, they became more phantasmagorical.  Anywhere he could connect marijuana to a crime, he would cherry pick the data with rabid and foaming at the mouth discourse and exaggeration.

Since racism was rampant and acceptable back then, he would often use race as a scare tactic.  Harry once wrote:  "Most marijuana smokers are Negroes, Hispanics, jazz musicians, and entertainers. Their satanic music is driven by marijuana, and marijuana smoking by white women makes them want to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers, and others. It is a drug that causes insanity, criminality, and death — the most violence-causing drug in the history of mankind."  "Marijuana and sex, result: Syphilis and pregnancy."

If there was a crime and the smoking of marijuana could somehow be connected to that person in any capacity, he would blame the crime on the marijuana.  Even though music greats such as Billie Holiday and Charlie Parker both died after years of heroin and alcohol abuse, Anslinger blamed their deaths on marijuana.

This mentality still exists today.  In 1986 Reagan Drug Czar Carlton Turner ridiculously claimed that Marijuana leads to homosexuality and ultimately to AIDS.  Given his logic then, so does alcohol.  Why isn't that illegal?  Answer:  $$$$$$ on both fronts.

LaGuardia commissioned a report, called "The LaGuardia Report" which debunked most of the myths about marijuana but the government refused and still refuses to listen to facts.  Alcohol kills tens of thousands every year in car accidents and hundreds of thousands more due to other health complications related to alcoholism.  The Center for Disease Control doesn't even have a category for marijuana because, well, no one ever died from it. 

So, my predominate disgruntlement about this herb being illegal is because we were sold a bill of lies and deceit by the government which in turn destroyed hundreds of thousands of lives, many more collateral lives and cost us billions.  If alcohol was illegal and marijuana was legal, this country would be in a much better estate.

Now, for my cons.  I am a church organist and I know a lot of people who recreationally smoke pot, and that includes a smattering of Roman Catholic priests.  People who smoke pot are quick to say that it augments  and amplifies an experience.  I'm not a smoker so I can't confirm this.  However, I can talk about my experience with other smokers.

I once went on a hike with a few people who took a few hits while out on the trail.  As we walked down a path, one of them commented on the beautiful and glistening foliage on the trees.  It was winter and I told them that there were no leaves on the trees.  She said that the way the sunlight was glistening on the branches, it was as if there were leaves on the trees. 

Further down the trail we walked past a lake and I noticed my companions were "focused" on the trail straight ahead.  When I pointed out the lake to their left, they were amazed that it was there and commented how gorgeous it was and waxed exuberantly about the way the sun glistened off the water and how gorgeous it was.   On our return trip, I told them that we were going to pass by the beach on the lake and one of them asked "What beach?"  It was the one we walked across to get to the trail.  Somehow, their senses were so augmented and amplified, they missed was was in front of them.

My point is, maybe marijuana does augment and amplify the experience but, only in the users' head.  Not in reality.  Likewise, food apparently tastes better while high.  In reality, the flavor of the food doesn't change, only the the smoker's perception of it.  Are the senses heightened?  I don't know.

Here is a link to a Family Guy Episode from season four called "Deep Throats."  In this episode, Lois and Peter resurrect their hippie days as folk singers and they enter a talent contest because, well, they are really good.  Watch the end to see how good they really are.