Thursday

    I consider myself a responsible and caring parent who believes in discipline, respect, and good manners. So when I take a controversial stand, I do it with forethought and with seriousness. I'm not frivolous, whacked, spacey, or fried, and I'm nothing like Sean Penn's stoner character in Fast Times at Ridgemont High. If anything I am strict, orderly, abstemious, and very much in control. I like things to be in their right place. 
    I'm not a liberal Democrat; I have voted Republican or Independent all my life. I'm a Marine who graduated from the Naval Academy and worked in sensitive, classified jobs on everything from aircraft carriers to submarines. I'm a motivational speaker who has talked to well over three million school children about making the right choices when it comes to drugs. I've done public service anti-drug announcements for the White House. I'm a syndicated television talk show host who has managed to stay on the air for thirteen years. I'm a person who cares about crime, addiction, child abuse, medical care and the high cost of insurance. I'm also a person in constant pain and I don't want to become a prescription drug addict. 
    So I use cannabis. I inhale it through a vaporizer. I bake it into cookies. I condense it into jams. When I can't wait for it to digest as food, I smoke it.
    Even though I don't get high from what I put into my body, that still makes me, in the eyes of the law, a criminal.
    I think that's wrong.  There is something very archaic about the law that labels those of us who have chronic pain criminals for trying to subdue that pain and remain active and productive.
    Federal law classifies drugs according to schedules, from I to V. Schedule V drugs like the cough syrup Robitussin A-C and the diarrhea- stopping Lomotil are considered to have the lowest potential for abuse. Schedule IV drugs like Xanax, Valium, Ambien, and Halcion also have a low potential for abuse. Abuse of either schedule V or IV drugs "may lead to limited physical dependence or psychological dependence." Schedule III drugs, like the pure THC Marinol, anabolic steroids, barbiturates, and Phenobarbital have a "moderate" potential for abuse. Schedule II-amphetamines, cocaine, codeine, methadone, morphine, and opium-have a high potential for abuse which may lead to "severe psychological or physical dependence."  The U.S. allows some medicinal use of schedule II drugs, but with a heavy restrictions. Then there is Schedule I.  These drugs are banned, considered unsafe to use even under medical supervision, with a high potential for abuse. PCP, LSD, heroin and Quaaludes are classified Schedule I. And so is marijuana.
    This has got to change. Would I legalize heroin in America? No. Would I legalize Ecstasy? No. Would I encourage children under voting age to use any kind of drug? Absolutely not. Are there certain drugs I would legalize for medicinal purposes, which would then generate revenue for this country to deal with addiction?  Yes!  I think it's feasible and I think it would be smart.   
    This is something the leaders of this country don't want to hear.  They will talk about how they are against drugs and in favor of protecting our children, yet they will allow the highly addictive substance called alcohol to pervade every aspect of a child's life.  Every time our children turn on the television to watch a sporting event they see beer commercials. Picnics, celebrations, BBQ's, ballparks-we're teaching them that wherever there is "fun" and "good times" there's alcohol.  In magazines, on radio and television, we are inundated ten times an hour by ads for drugs: if you don't feel great take an antidepressant or an ibuprofen or an over-the-counter medicine that might damage your liver. It's shoved down our throats and then we wonder why this nation has an addiction problem. But we won't talk about that.
    We don't need any more studies to know the effects of too much alcohol in our systems. We don't need further tests showing that taking more than three aspirin at a time can cause serious damage to your stomach, and taking a handful is a suicide attempt. And by now we really don't need to test marijuana to know that it can get you high, or give you the munchies.
Well, we also know it relieves pain, and it isn't addictive.  Anyone who says otherwise is ignorant.  
    Way back in 1938, New York's Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia appointed a committee to study marijuana. The committee consisted of the commissioners of Corrections, Health, and Hospitals, the director of the Division of Psychiatry of the Department of Hospitals, two pharmacologists, two internists, and three psychiatrists. It took them six years to present their findings: marijuana didn't cause aggressive or antisocial behavior; it wasn't sexually overstimulating; it didn't change personalities; it didn't cause major crimes.  All those myths which had created the passage of the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937 were dispelled, but the Federal Bureau of Narcotics was not going to take these findings to heart. Even though LaGuardia remained New York's mayor until 1945, the study was largely ignored. 
    Forty-four  years later, in 1988, the Drug Enforcement Administration's administrative law judge, Francis L. Young, presided over public hearings that lasted two years to consider reclassifying marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule II. Judge Young concluded that marijuana's classification should be changed, saying, "Marijuana, in its natural form, is one of the safest therapeutically active substances known to man…One must reasonably conclude that there is accepted safety for use of marijuana under medical supervision. To conclude otherwise, on the record, would be unreasonable, arbitrary, and capricious." Yet the DEA ignored Young's conclusions and refused to reclassify marijuana. 
    In 1999, the Institute of Medicine, a branch of the National Academy of Sciences, released a two-year study of the marijuana plant identifying more than sixty kinds of cannabinoids and their specific actions on the brain and the body. They recommended that the government pay for research that would speed up the development of more cannabinoid drugs. This was the study that showed marijuana was effective in combating the muscle spasms associated with MS. 
    That same year, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the government has yet to identify any interest it may have in blocking the distribution of marijuana to those with medical need.  It found that legal alternatives to marijuana don't work or cause intolerable side effects. 
    And yet, in 2002, a DEA spokesman reacting to the passing of California's Proposition 215 to allow patients to use marijuana to alleviate pain, nausea, and lack of appetite, said: "There is no such thing as medical marijuana. We are Americans first, Californians second."
    Americans first? What does that mean? Am I un-American because I would rather use pot than OxyContin; natural weed rather than synthetic Marinol?  How hypocritical can these government officials get?
    I've been to congressional events and dinners where all the congressmen are sitting around with drinks in their hands pontificating about how smoking a joint is a crime and a sin.  It's ridiculous.  Like other controversial issues, there are people who will never back down on marijuana. Yet these same people think nothing of attending a rally to fight against it with a beer in their hands.  God knows we promote every other drug under the sun, making sure that no matter what your problem is you take something for it--as long as whatever you take is going to have the greatest profit margin for the pharmaceutical companies, who contribute heavily to both political parties.  It's no secret that these companies stand to lose billions of dollars annually if marijuana were legal in the U.S. and cultivated and sold by the government. Or simply grown in one's garden next to the rose bush and the cacti.
    To convince the federal government of the benefits of marijuana as medicine requires clinical trials; but the government insists that clinical trials are unwarranted because no solid evidence exists of pot's medical value. Hello? Has anybody ever heard of Catch-22?  The government controls the marijuana that they would accept for testing, but they won't grant approval for any tests. Scientists can obtain pot only from the National Institute of Drug Abuse, which gets it from a government-approved farm in Mississippi. NIDA insists that researchers who apply for the plant must have their studies approved by the National Institute of Health. The National Institutes of Health checks with the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) which insists that no American independent research or federal health program should be allowed to investigate natural cannabis derivatives for medicine. They just make you go around in circles until finally you stop trying. Scientists like Paul Consroe, a professor at the University of Arizona Health Sciences Center, feel frustrated by the Kafkaesque bureaucratic maze the government has created to keep acceptable studies of marijuana from being done or, if done, from being publicized. "Marijuana has been studied to death," Consroe says. "It's not a question of science; it's a political drug."

 

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