I made my son cannabis cookies. They changed his life

A case could be made for exceptions here and there (like the child in this article) but I don't think it works so well in society.

This is a good book that shows some of the motivation for a War on Drugs is not in the name of health, safety, security... but the exact opposite. The War on Drugs sorta failed in these aims, so now "terrorists" are the new excuse for a 'soft' police state.

The war on drugs might subside because of the perfect enemy they have now: terrorists. A faceless, ever-present threat that can keep the war drums beating.

What I'd like to see is the military-industrial complex shift their battle to a War on Extinction: space exploration.

http://chasingthescream.com/

Spoken by someone who has never known an opioid or cocaine addict, and watched lives crumble, sometimes into death.

Most drugs are quite dangerous and have seriously adverse affects upon populations at large.

Cocaine, Meth, and Opioids create massive social health problems far beyond anything dope or alcohol ever could.

I have no doubt there are 'responsible' users out there, but in general, those things will lay waste to populations at large.

I had a friend who lived in his (wealthy) parents basement, smocking crack all day, every day. Visiting with him - there was gerbil feces everywhere, a divot in the sofa were he sat all day, and a pile of ashes next to him on the sofa. He had every opportunity in life, he now lives in a clinic.

Another 'responsible partier' friend in who died of suffocation 'laughing gas' mask to his face.

Another - a weed addict (yes, despite the fact that pot is not really chemically addictive, there is definitely such a thing as addiction) - who threw himself in front of a subway in despair. Not blaming the drugs, but it's specifically related in this case.

A family member who is point-blank prescription opioid addict - and it's complicated because she gets debilitating migraines that few drugs can help her with, but the 'solution' is poison.

And finally - close family members and friends who are 'chronic' pot smokers, who manage it quite well, but are basically always high. It has dramatically affected their lives, though they are functional - they are entirely different people. I'm not sure if I would call that addiction, but I would say it is problematic.

I live in a mixed neighbourhood of creatives/wealthy/working class, there's a health clinic across the street - and the effect of crack in my neighbourhood is quite visible.

Visit places where the 'war on drugs' is truly being lost, like West Virginia, and you get the picture pretty quickly.

Of course there is no reason to put pot smokers in jail - but this antagonism about the 'war on drugs' is very naive, unsympathetic, and dangerous.

Chewing on coca leaves? Maybe. The occasional LSD/Hyabithsca user? Doesn't matter.

But there is no way we will legalize opioids, coke, meth - it doesn't matter that some can 'handle it' - it just wreaks havoc overall. On the whole they destroy lives, families, social scenes, and this is before the legal framework.

I think that the 'perception' problem of the 'war on drugs' is largely led by people who are recreational users, living in the 'Burning Man' bubble of people who have their act together. Then they read up on 'jailing' because of this and that. Remember that if you're in that club, heck, if you're reading HN, you're probably in the top 5% of Americans, and probably the top 0.1% of global population.

Visit your local Salvation Army :)

As for people using drugs recreationally - if they're functioning adults then who cares? It's no different than drinking alcohol for a lot of people. If you do it in excess or irresponsibly you can die. Part of being an adult is taking a little personal responsibility.

   * I could obtain it from a trustworthy source
   * It's studies to understand it's effects on children (medical)
   * Understand any long-term effects it has on children's memory/behavior (psychological)

No and no.

Not only is it patentable, the United States Government famously holds one[1] for "Cannabinoids as antioxidants and neuroprotectant."

Additionally, there are already pharmaceutical companies producing, researching, breeding, and selling medical cannabis in other countries like Israel[2].

And if you're looking to see what's happening in the United States, GW Pharmaceuticals is seeing success in their Phase 3 trials for Dravet Syndrome and Lennox-Gastaut Syndrome[3].

[1] - https://www.google.com/patents/US6630507

[2] - http://www.tikun-olam.info

[3] - https://www.gwpharm.com/about-us/news/gw-announces-new-epidi...

The IP is certainly fuzzy but that's no argument. If it can be commoditized and involves some form of creative/innovative work, there's pretty much always some way to create legal protection for it. Besides, just because there's potential for competition doesn't mean that people won't try to enter the market.

> Large Pharma can't make enough money from something people could grow themselves?

As the article itself explains, growing weed is not simple. A sophisticated operation requires a lot of resources and dedicated man-hours.

The primary reason that no big, entrenched players are moving on it (or that anyone who does it hasn't gotten too big) is that the fact remains that marijuana is illegal. (This is true in a lot of countries, not just the U.S., but the rest of this comment is going to be U.S.-specific because I don't know the situation in other countries nearly as well.)

No matter what the states say, federal law overrides state law, which means that anyone that grows pot has huge legal exposure. There's also a secondary problem: pot growers have a lot of trouble using the kinds of services that are traditionally available to businesses, because B2B's (1) want clients that are not at risk of getting shut down by a DEA investigation and (2) do not want to expose their own businesses to legal risk, which they would be by working with a pot-growing op.

There's a lot of stories about dispensaries in Colorado who are denied, for example, banking services, because of the litigation it would expose banks to.

The argument that certain power interests wanted to keep it illegal, to fund secret wars, has never made much sense either (other than that such activities might occur as a monetary & political convenience while prohibition exists). Marijuana legalization is worth perhaps $30 billion per year nationally, at all levels, via taxation (sales taxes, income taxes, specialty taxes, etc); the industry would generate at least $150 billion in sales nationally were it legalized. There's a vast amount of money that should motivate legalization. Moralization of an issue often trumps monetary concerns (we see this frequently in biotech / pharma as well, the FDA prevents rapid progress in all sorts of ways).

[1] www.foxnews.com/health/2016/12/20/now-schedule-1-drug-cbd-hemp-oil.amp.html

Even if the constitution grant the right to discuss and modify the law... and the country claims being the country of the Human Rights.

Vive la France. The country where some animals are more equal than others.

Isn't moving the oil from Rhode Island to New York the same thing?

Correct. However this also applies to ADHD and anti-depressive medication that is commonly given to children, sometimes in doses higher than needed.

Seriously. I've smoked heavily for years, with sudden breaks, and at most I get a couple days of off appetite and bad sleep. No big deal.

I've met exactly one person that had withdrawals from pot: In his case, he was self-medicating with it. It wasn't that he got withdrawals from pot, but that mental illness simply reared its head more when he stopped.

So, at least the folks who wrote down those schedules disagree that Marijuana has legitimate uses.

Note that "accepted" here basically means whatever the person in power wants it to mean. There's absolutely no criteria that "accepted medical use" corresponds to doctors' opinions on the matter.

Conventional medicine has no treatment available. What would you do?

Read what you've said again; do you realize how completely ridiculous this sounds?

A "strong dose" of heroin, to a 9-year-old who is opiate naive, will obviously not cause them to "chill out." It will cause them to horribly itch, turn green in the face, violently vomit, alternate between pouring sweat and feeling freezing cold, moan and cry, and finally lose consciousness and quite plausibly their life.

Cannabis, even at a very "strong dose," will cause none of this.

As plant medicines go, cannabis is something like a wonder drug at least in the limited sense that it is therapeutically active for a wide array of conditions at very, very safe doses.

There may be no other drug which is a candidate for relief for the symptoms described in the article and for which a trial regiment has such a low cost in terms of risk.

Heroin most certainly isn't one.

Causation or correlation? Are people with psychiatric problems more likely to self-medicate with MJ? The conclusions drawn from the facts you mention are dubious at best.

Any reason to believe it will, other than it being a cliche?

It doesn't seem like tolerance is an issue here:

> And seven years later, it’s still working.

I still don't really get what your underlying point is.

-----------

I'm curious why you shared this piece of the article? Are you attempting to say his fits of rage were due to cannabis withdrawals? I thought it was pretty clear from the article that this was the issue that was being treated.

Some clarification would be nice.

> At the time he was consumed by violent rages. He would bang his head, scream for hours and literally eat his shirts. At dinnertime, he threw his plates so forcefully that there was food stuck on the ceiling. He would punch and scratch himself and others, such that people would look at the red streaks on our bodies and ask us, gingerly, if we had cats.

But when I got the cookies right, he calmed down. His aggressions became less ferocious and less frequent. Mealtimes became less fraught. He was able to maintain enough self-composure that he even learned to ride a bike — despite every expert telling us it would never happen.

> Since he was an infant, I’d watched my son struggle. At 18 months, he underwent two major spinal-cord tumor surgeries, only weeks apart, and was immobilized in a cast for a year. After that, the violent rages began — sometimes as many as 300 in a day.

TBF the parents did talk with a neurologist and medical experts at Brown, which is hardly a backwater.

I understand what you're saying, but I also think that this is a tough parenting decision that should be left to the parent and their family doctor.

Experimenting with dosage and type in a home pharma lab is pretty terrible. The people refusing to reschedule marijuana despite widespread medical support really are terribly evil for putting a parent in that situation...

Last december I spent a week in Amsterdam.

Smoking weed appears to be completely legalized there and it's a non issue.

He is a child, they are his parents. They have every right to choose his treatment

>quackery

If medical science had an alternative you may have a point. These parents ran out of options