"Healing" with Marijuana

A friend of mine is suffering from cancer and, the treatment thereof.  She is in great pain and the medications she is taking are accompanied by debilitating side effects.  Surgery is out of the question because her platelets are low from the cancer and she has to watch her sodium intake.  She continues receiving chemo treatments but then immediately she gets a skin infection (cellulitis). Then her doctor gives her antibiotics which work against the chemo. Everything is working against each other.  Now she can't walk and she's gotten even weaker from lying in bed.  Since she is taking so many different drugs, they cancel out the good effects of each other and she can't eat.  It is too bad she won't consider cannabis (pot or marijuana) as a treatment but she has been brainwashed into thinking that marijuana is a "drug" and that the pills she is popping are treatments.  If only she would consider pot as a treatment she could not only re-gain her appetite which would be beneficial to her health and well being but she would also be relatively pain free and conscious.  The drugs she takes now renders her into a zombie estate and do not give her the benefit of sleep.  One of her drugs inhibits getting a good night's sleep which she desperately needs and marijuana could provide that.  But, she is a good girl and doesn't do drugs. 

NY recently passed medical marijuana laws and our next door neighbor, Massachusetts, is looking into legalizing it across the board which will of course destroy NY's medical marijuana industry and, bwahahahaha . . . all the wasted time and tax payer dollars that went into the planning for the medical marijuana industry.  Hah! 

Not only can marijuana be used for physical, mental, and emotional well being, it can be used for "healing."  First, consider the meaning of the word "healing."  There is a difference between healing and curing.  To cure means to make the disease go away.  Healing has to do with an expression of greater wholeness and acceptance rather than curing.  Healing is about discovering what is hurting us in the first place and helping us to come to terms with it. 

A long time ago a friend was dying of cancer.  She sought every treatment and nostrum available, draining her bank account and only getting physically and emotionally worse at the same time.  She was in denial.  I don't know what precipitated her change in attitude but when she accepted the fact that she was going to die, she "healed."  She was able to talk about it, make amends with friends and family whom she transgressed in the past.  She was able to live life a little more fully and finally be happy.  I beleive it was the edible pot that she illegally obtained from her son who traveled to Colorado and risked arrest and decades in prison for its procurement, but gave his mom a new outlook on life and death.  Healing is about discovering what is holding us back in the first place.  Pot helped my friend look at life differently and die with dignity and comfort rather than denial, failure and shame - and she had a healthy appetite, too. 

Diabetes, obesity, autism, anxiety, cancer, autoimmune conditions, thoughts of suicide and other expressions of imbalance are increasing in society as are prescription drug treatments for all of those ailments and the downward spiral which comes with them and their treatments.  A pharmacist friend told me that she believes all the cholesterol medication people take causes diabetes and the medication for diabetes causes weight gain and kidney complications leading to heart issues. 

Cannabis could play a much larger role in most people's lives by helping them maintain a balanced, healthy outlook and diet.  Dying with dignity, comfort and acceptance should be the primary focus of "healing."  It is time for doctors to incorporate medicinal marijuana into their regular treatment practices in addition to traditional medical treatment in order to spare people the harsh side effects of pharmaceutical drugs. 

I recently watched the History Channel's movie "Marijuana Revolution" and I discovered that cultivators of this plant are able create strains to achieve goals and outcomes far more advanced than the dangerous prescription drugs mired with side effects that profit hungry pharmaceuticals are creating and pushing onto doctors to prescribe.  I have no doubt that in the future, cannabis combined with other treatments will actually lead to a cure for many maladies which afflict us.  It is definitely a cure for alcohol and drug addiction because pot itself is not addictive but is an alternative to those other addictions.  Working on the suicide hot-line I had many callers who were in mental and physical pain because of their addiction to pain killers.  I'm sure pot would ameliorate their conditions on the first day of use.

Thank you to states like Colorado and Washington who of course are making billions in tax revenue each year but, are also providing people with the option to heal, even to their death.  It is very exciting that marijuana cultivators are exploring uses of various strains in an effort to find cures and treatments and these people are not even medical practitioners.  They are simply lovers of the plant.  Too bad medical science and pharmaceutical companies are overlooking what has been in front of us for centuries.  Ultimately, there is no profit in curing cancer and other diseases, there is profit however in treating  symptoms.  

If you are on the fence about this natural God given herb, watch the History channel's movie "Marijuana Revolution."  If you can't watch it on the history channel (http://www.history.com/shows/the-marijuana-revolution/about) or find it in the tv guides, you can probably find it on the torrent sites.  Write to your law makers and ask them to re-legalize this herbal drug and support the hundreds of companies already cultivating, infusing, testing, marketing and selling cannabis-related products.

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. 

Marijuana; And How Politicians Hurt Society

Throughout history, politicians, together with big business and lobby's have been steering the country in calumnious directions in an effort to make money, control people, decimate competition and win elections. 

Consider the Puritan Witch Hunts.  We didn't hunt witches, run them out of town and burn them at the stake because they were actually turning people into frogs and conjuring demons.  Some of them were actually political troublemakers, they may have owned land that someone else wanted or someone just didn't like them.  Many of them were falsely accused because their accusers were tortured into giving names.

So how do you get people rallied into an irrational blood thirsty mob willing to take up pitchforks and torches?   You use children.  Everyone knows that witches eat children and lock them up in dungeons and towers.  That is where we get stories such as "Hansel and Gretel" and "Little Red Riding hood."  Think of the children. 

Our current boondoggle sex offender registry is no different.  You need only take a few high profile crimes, scare the public into thinking that this could happen in their back yard, you publish a hundred million dollar photo album online with no delineating information about the case, the remorse, acceptance of responsibility or rehabilitation, and then you disenfranchise an entire class of citizen - to protect the children.   An 18 year old HS senior who has sex with his 15 year old HS sweetheart is not so much a child rapist (although by law he is) than a teen with raging hormones and quite possibly, they are two kids in love. 

Bionically, Mary was thirteen and Joseph was in his forties when they got married.  That was a different culture and a different time, though.  In those days  life expectancy was about forty so girls had to start pumping out babies ASAP in an effort to propagate the population. 

Today, the registry is a giant blind net ranging from violent murderers to people who urinate in public.  This registry program wins elections, sells papers, supports our struggling prison system and creates businesses designed to protect you from the monster next door. 

There was another man who used children for job security, to become famous, to triple his budget, to hobnob with the rich and powerful, to spread mis-truth and to win favor and support from big business.  His name was Harry Jacob Anslinger.

The war on drugs is a billion dollar boondoggle.  Much like Prohibition in the ‘20s which made tons of money for suppliers and made gangsters very wealthy. 

Politicians love to cherry pick data and skewed statistics in an effort to get what they want, to win elections, to scare people into seeing things their way, to obtain and distribute grant money and to bribe or win supporters.  It is easy for them to make something up, spin, fold, mutilate the facts and statistics or rely on unconfirmed data and hearsay.  Politicians are adroit at not dealing in realty but in the false narrative.  That's the nature of the politician.  They often seek out and only listen to the "expert" who shares their same opinion.  Show me an expert witness with one opinion and I'll show you another with an equal and opposite one. 

We know that alcohol is the root cause of many car accidents and deaths.  Alcohol also amplifies bad behavior in people and some of these people may beat their wives and kids, drink their paychecks and many drunks die in alcohol fueled car accidents.  People die every day from liver and heart damage caused by alcohol and millions of people suffer from addiction and other medical maladies caused by alcohol. 

In 1951, the United Nations reported that an estimated 200 million people used marijuana.  It has been used for over 5,000 years and the earliest reference was from China where it was used to relieve pain during surgery.  For decades it was pedaled by vendors as a nostrum for swelled breasts, sore nipples, shingles, piles, bronchitis, eczema, migraine, menstrual discomfort, sore throat, colic, arthritis, rheumatism, depression, epileptic fits, gout, it was sold as an aphrodisiac, and ironically, it was used successfully as a treatment for alcoholism. 

Marijuana was a source of rope and cloth fibers, birdseed, essential oils and many medicinal products.  It has long been a cash crop for many farmers including President George Washington.  Unlike Bill Clinton and certainly like Barack Obama, George probably inhaled.  So how did this weed become illegal?

During prohibition, many of the poor and minorities were unable to acquire illegal alcohol from gangsters so they turned to the cheaper and less harmful medicinal herb, marijuana.  They found it stimulating, relaxing, non toxic and non addictive.

In the 1930s the Treasury Department began their warfare on marijuana.  Prohibition was repealed and liquor began to flow freely but the people who took to smoking pot when liquor was scarce, illegal and expensive, continued smoking it because it was still cheaper, easier to get, faster acting, didn't render the user to an intoxicated and vomiting stupor, you could grow your own, it wasn't addictive and it didn't give you a hangover like alcohol did.

The Federal Bureau of Narcotics, like the Bureau of Prohibition, was under the auspices of the U.S. Treasury Department. At that time, the sale of marijuana was considered a loss of revenue because it could not be taxed and people could grow it themselves. There was no way to control it and it was dipping into alcohol and tobacco sales.

The Newly created Federal Bureau of Narcotics then began a 7 year campaign to fight marijuana and labeled it a killer drug.  Harry Jacob Anslinger led this new office and his scare campaign was in all the papers and on all radio stations.  It became a political campaign tool and parents were frightened into thinking that marijuana was everywhere and it would kill their children or destroy their lives - think of the children.    

Harry Anslinger claimed that he had witnessed a scene that affected his life. When he was 12, he heard the screams of a morphine addict.  I'm not sure what this has to do with marijuana but it became his political football and excuse for his rabid and foaming at the mouth lust to criminalize pot, and it was job security.  It was easy for him to get political support because he had budgets, business backers, the media and he could make up facts.

Thousands of people were surgically arrested for the possession of pot.  They were mostly black and poor.  Marijuana was a great tool to ethnically cleanse certain neighborhoods and was an easy means to get people you didn't like off the street, especially if you couldn't get them on some other charge.   I once knew a cop who admitted to me that they had no evidence on an arsonist so they planted pot on him just to get him in the system.  The same thing happened to Freeway Rick Ross.  He rarely carried drugs of any kind.  He did however walk around with about $80,000 in his pocket which every day, he freely gave it all out to the people in his community who needed it for food, rent, medicine or school.  The police finally got him off the street but he also had evidence against the cops so they brokered a deal.

New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia was not convinced of Anslinger's arguments and requested the first in depth study into the effects of smoking marijuana.  He remembered a report he read by the Army Board of Inquiry that the drug was used by many soldiers and was deemed harmless to them.  La Guardia requested that the New York Academy of Medicine to do a thorough study of the herb. 

This report systematically contradicted claims made by Anslinger and the U.S. Treasury Department that smoking marijuana results in insanity, deteriorates physical health, assists in criminal behavior and juvenile delinquency, is physically addictive, is a gateway drug to more dangerous drugs and the report determined that the practice of smoking marijuana did not lead to addiction in the medical sense of the word.  Ultimately, the worse effect smoking pot will have on someone is 2 - 40 years in prison, a criminal record and no hope of getting a job when they got out. 

Released in 1944, the La Guardia report  (http://medicalmarijuana.procon.org/sourcefiles/laguardia.pdf) infuriated Harry Anslinger who was campaigning against marijuana and he condemned it as unscientific.  Anslinger then went on an offensive against what he saw as a "degenerate Hollywood" that was promoting marijuana use. After high profile arrests of actors like Robert Mitchum, Anslinger gained full control over future scripts.   Cotton farmers and farming lobbies who didn't want hemp competing with their crop stood behind and supported Anslinger, in many way$.

Much like the way Congress works today, the early laws against marijuana were often passed with little public attention. Many people allege that Anslinger and the campaign against marijuana had a hidden agenda.  DuPont petrochemical interests and William Randolph Hearst together created the highly sensational anti-marijuana campaign to eliminate hemp as an industrial competitor.  Hemp took less time and was significantly less expensive to harvest an acre of than it did for cotton.  Today, the lies and half truths Anslinger bandied about still exist simply because of ignorance and indoctrinated lies.  

Anslinger's primary focus was to alarm the public of the threat in their community. He used the mass media as his forum to start this national movement to scare people about a problem that didn't exist.  This required a larger staff and bigger budgets.  He used isolated and even unrelated stories to get his point across.  Here are a few of his press releases:

"An entire family was murdered by a youthful addict in Florida. When officers arrived at the home, they found the youth staggering about in a human slaughterhouse. With an axe he had killed his father, mother, two brothers, and a sister. He seemed to be in a daze… He had no recollection of having committed the multiple crime. The officers knew him ordinarily as a sane, rather quiet young man; now he was pitifully crazed. They sought the reason. The boy said that he had been in the habit of smoking something which youthful friends called “muggles,” a childish name for marijuana."

“By the tons it is coming into this country — the deadly, dreadful poison that racks and tears not only the body, but the very heart and soul of every human being who once becomes a slave to it in any of its cruel and devastating forms…. Marihuana is a short cut to the insane asylum. Smoke marihuana cigarettes for a month and what was once your brain will be nothing but a storehouse of horrid specters. Hasheesh makes a murderer who kills for the love of killing out of the mildest mannered man who ever laughed at the idea that any habit could ever get him….”

People still beleive these lies today.  Anslinger was not afraid to use race to scare people, either:

"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 Negros took a girl fourteen years old and kept her for two days under the influence of hemp. Upon recovery she was found to be suffering from syphilis."

Anslinger also noted that Billie Holiday and Charlie Parker both died after years of heroin and alcohol abuse so he orchestrated a nationwide dragnet of jazz musicians and kept a file called "Marijuana and Musicians."  Keep in mind that Billie and Charlie died of heroin and alcohol abuse, not marijuana.

It's time we stopped wasting our tax dollars enforcing outdated laws based upon lies and incarcerating non-violent "offenders" for possession of an herb. Recreational drugs are not anything I am interested in but who am I to tell someone what they can or cannot put in their bodies when the stuff really doesn't harm anyone? I've yet to meet a mean, nasty stoner, but I've dealt with more than my fair share of mean, nasty drunks and mean nasty "good" people who go to church on Sunday yet harbor hate and prejudice and are eager to run people out of town whom they don't like.  (Hands in the air) Praise Jesus.

We can use our tax dollars to address much bigger problems such as education, crime and rebuilding our failing roads and bridges.  Legalizing marijuana will take the cash flow away from major crime gangs and we can then cut our police and prison budgets.  When the prohibition on alcohol was lifted, the next day, Al Capone was out of a job. 

Iowa Republican Rep. Steve King who is pushing his new law The KIDS Act, said that Mexicans are crossing the border and desert each carrying 75 pounds of marijuana.  Uhm, like, you know, do you know how big a 75 pound bag of pot would be?  More false narrative.  Steve King, you're funny.  Who voted for you?

Not only should pot be legal, maybe it should be part of the daily regimen of our New York politicians. It already is for some of them (Steve Katz).  Greed and job security is to blame for their stupidity, corruption and many of their asinine decisions. They push lies in order to pass their own bills which are usually laden with hidden pork.  Maybe if our politicians were stoned, they'd make less destructive legislation and focus on what is good and needed rather than how they can justify a pay raise and pretend to look busy. 

When my sister was dying from brain cancer which metastasized from breast cancer, a morphine induced coma was unacceptable and not how she wanted to live out her final days.  Marijuana made it so that she could consciously enjoy her family for a few more precious weeks with minimal pain.  So many people are suffering today from medicine and their side effects.  It's time to recognize that marijuana has a place in the treatment of certain diseases and treatment side effects.

And Congress, quit passing stupid laws in an effort to make it look like your are doing something.  Fix the laws already broken.  Astrologically we are leaving the Piscean age and entering into Aquarius, the age of enlightenment.   Let's facilitate that.

For more reading:

More and more police officers are realizing the War on Drugs is a mistake
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/five-reasons-cops-want-to-legalize-marijuana-20130627

Marijuana Legalization Gains Support, Confounding Policymakers
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/29/marijuana-legalization_n_3521547.html