Federal chokehold on marijuana stymies studies on epilepsy, autism
spectrumnews.org
spectrumnews.org
Why does a drug have to be legalized to be studied? If it can be purchased down the road, why are you involving the DEA at all?
Is it solely in the pursuit of funding? Or will some journals not publish research if the DEA is not involved?
(Legitimate question.)
A doctor or pharmacist will likely lose their license - even if they don't, most places won't employ them. Slews of places won't employ them after that drug charge. Some places withhold benefits and some will turn them down for housing. Yes, some of this happens with other crimes as well, but there are special restrictions for folks convicted of drug crimes in many places.
Most folks caught for piracy wind up with a lawsuit instead of a felony from the government. I couldn't find numbers with a quick google search of how many folks actually got a criminal charge instead of a lawsuit, honestly - most of the articles talk about getting sued and being "guilty" in that respect.
Getting sued has completely different consequences. You might not pass a background check (so you might not have your research position), but it might not affect you much. You do not have to check the "have you ever been convicted of a felony" box that is popular in many states. And so on.
Yep, in my state, a simple Dept of Health Provider Credential Search (whether by public or prospective employer) will give you Enforcement Action: YES in nice big bold red type as soon as any such thing happens.
Its possible to perform studies with illegal drugs that are not schedule one however. For example, cocaine is schedule 2, and I helped work on a study where we purchased cocaine legally from Sigma and administered it to animals to study something which actually had nothing to do with the stimulant effects of the drug.
The idea that academia is somehow prevented from engaging in this field because it's federally illegal is not credible and it tarnishes the integrity of the field.
Source?
In order to perform a clinical trial with marijuana, by law investigators would need to get an IND (investigational new drug) application approved by the FDA as FDA does not recognize marijuana as a safe and effective drug for any indication. Part of this involves DEA review, and DEA will almost certainly say no. Let's assume for the sake of argument that you do not care about getting approval to run your study. If you do not get an IND approval and you run a clinical trial anyway, your physicians will almost certainly lose their medical licenses, all participants will be subject to multiple criminal offenses, the group will lose all their funding, they be slapped with enormous amounts of fees, and participants will likely lose their university and / or hospital appointments.
https://www.fda.gov/NewsEvents/PublicHealthFocus/ucm421163.h....
https://www.fda.gov/AnimalVeterinary/ResourcesforYou/ucm2681....
I don't have a concrete example for as to what will happen because to my knowledge no one has been stupid enough to give the FDA the middle finger and run an unlicensed clinical trial. FDA would never let this go unanswered because it would completely undermine their regulatory authority and set a horrible precedent. In effect, this is a perma-ban level offense, and people that do it should expect to get massively punished.
It only took you 3 coarse and unhelpful posts to answer my legitimate question. Thanks for your cooperation. (5 Whys? Only 3 Whys were needed here.)
I imagine that in some locales, the political climate is such that what Thriptic is saying is quite the reality -- it is much too risky.
That being said, with acceptance of cannabis legality growing, there does seem to be a shift where more formal organizations are involved in research, like the CMCR (https://www.cmcr.ucsd.edu/) mentioned in the Factcheck article. CMCR is located in the University of California in San Diego -- it is not surprising to find out that a formal research base is in a state more politically and legally friendly to cannabis.
There are over 170 active clinical trials in the US for THC.[1]
[1]https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/results?cond=&term=thc&cntry=...
Marijuana has been studied overseas.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_switch_in_time_that_saved_...
FDR's pressure on the supreme court brought about the abuses of the commerce clause. Before this, things like Prohibition required a constitutional amendment rather than a law like The Controlled Substances Act of 1970.
It is about locking up poor people in order to keep them from voting.
It is about filling our prisons with non-violent offenders so we can force them to work for slave wages, and line the owners of the prisons and the politicians they fund's pockets.
It's about political suppression, not about some moralistic crusade to protect people from drugs.
"The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did." - John Ehrlichman
https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/
His children dispute the claim, if that helps you, according the the CNN article. The man died in 1999 and it was reported years later.
CNN: https://www.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-rich...
The Independent: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/richard-ni...
Channel4: https://www.channel4.com/news/factcheck/factcheck-war-drugs-...
These were all in the first page of Google results with the query 'John Ehrlichman quote drug law'.
I dont trust any of these sources.
Otherwise, you're just rudely wasting people's time.
Poor people already don't vote in high numbers.
> It is about filling our prisons with non-violent offenders so we can force them to work for slave wages, and line the owners of the prisons and the politicians they fund's pockets.
That's part of it, but private prisons hold a small minority of the prison population.
> It's about political suppression, not about some moralistic crusade to protect people from drugs.
It's about political suppression, but also about perceptions that "only bad people smoke" etc etc. Maybe the leaders are fully malevolent in their intentions, but they get their support from the populace who they misled about the drug problem in the first place.
I think some people had hidden racist or imperialist intentions and so found what they could hate about blacks and hippies and spread the lies. (Edit: obviously overt racist intentions have affected minorities forever.) I assume much of it was malicious and conscious and much was genuine belief that came from horrible racism. Then those people made television shows and news stories about how marijuana makes you dumb (conveniently diffusing any intellectual currency hippies had). People like my dad saw the propaganda and believed it wholeheartedly, and then I did too. So far removed from the 1950’s shows like Dragnet that laid it on thick, and having grown up in a different place full of friendly pot smoking hippies, I had a different experience and saw the lies for what they were.
But propaganda is started by those who want influence and believed by those who are unable to see through the lies.
Not the whole truth, as there are known rare side effects that are significantly detrimental. In my experience it also seems harder/rarer to be a high functioning regular user. But yeah.
If I do accept that position though - I'm not sold the argument is in favour of anything but prohibition
I'm broadly in favour of selling every single drug to the public without need of a prescription, let people do whatever the fuck they want and live with the consequences (but there will be societal consequences too). Mostly I just long for consistency
Similarly, private for profit prisons, while they existed earlier, weren’t really a thing (as we know them today) until the 1980’s.
So the idea drug laws were created as a weapon against hippies and blacks (30 years in advance) or to line pockets of prison owners (50 years before the true for profit prison system) seems off. Even political suppression, women just got the right to vote, blacks were already actively being suppressed from voting by Law when marijuana prohibition laws were created (and continued to be until the civil rights movement and the voting rights act of 1965).
Looking back on the propaganda people do come to the more in your face conclusion it was about anti-Mexican immigration, but that was just a catalyst for the for winning the PR war and muddying the waters, as the American public already had medicine cabinets full of cannabis tinctures and a positive history with hemp.
Nixon did very much like that he was screwing over black people and hippies with the war on drugs but the main reason he pursued this was that rising crime rates were freaking out voters. They wanted to vote for people with a plan to fix this but crime was mostly a state and local issue. By claiming that cracking down on drugs would solve crime Nixon was able to claim that he had a solution to crime.
But the reason we have such weird laws about marijuana in particular is that "marijuana induced insanity" was a popular criminal defense in some places prior to criminalization and that led most people at the time to think of marijuana primarily in terms of inducing violent crime.
There's only one good reason; Psychedelics make people question their existence and therefore, their social situation as well. The dictators don't like that.
Non-psychedelic drugs like opiates are banned to keep people in the mountains from defending their lands using opium money. I know, iv seen it done.
Being Massachusetts though, although technically it should be legal since july, they haven't issued any permits to allow it to be sold. Those issues should be resolved with luck in another 2-3 years...
Essentially, to the bank the debit card transactions look like they're coming from an ATM. That 'ATM' is owned by a wholly owned subsidiary of the dispensary that, IDK, ostensibly sells t shirts or something. Then the 'cash' out of the 'ATM' is immediately used in your transaction.
There's no way the banks involved don't know what's going on, but there's just enough plausible deniability that they're going with it for the moment. But all it takes is one dropping the hammer on one instance of this and everyone will be back to pure cash.
Being Massachusetts the licensing issues will be cleared up once the appropriate pockets are lined or once a relative of a state legislator starts trying to get a license, not a minute sooner or later.
As for forcing them? Such unfunded mandates overriding official discretion cannot be forced upon a state's police force. Stop this civil rights abuse or acting outside your mandate are valid ones without funding. Start actively looking for spies is not one unless both deputized and funded. They could respond to any if they run across them without but it is within the leadership's discretion to say we have our hands full with the obvious criminals, not going on wild goose chases after guys who leave and take notebooks in public trashcans. The funding available for said purpose? Has to be used for spy chasing if taken. As always they can use federal jurisdiction to establish their own. Generally they stick to interstate matters instead of setting up shop 50 times for something redundant.
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
This has been an issue since the 1780s, so it will take more than a couple of sentences to give the whole rundown but it's like this. A few states are saying "we have explicitly made marijuana legal for adult consumption, and since the Federal Constitution doesn't forbid this, it's legal," and the federal government is saying, "um, I don't think so. Cannabis is a schedule 1 drug that is regulated by the DEA, and it can't be made legal. And we intend to enforce this with the DEA."
So every once in a while, the DEA come in and shake up a cannabis operation (they raid the grow house or the dispensary or sometimes [rarely now] raid patients' homes) that is legal at the state level but federally illegal and there's a whole jurisdictional issue. The local police used to cooperate with the DEA in decades past, but have since told them to get bent. Now there aren't enough federal agents to deal with this, and a lot of local police forces have realized that cannabis is really not a big deal, so sometimes these things get enforced and sometimes they don't.
So we're in a gray area right now, where you can purchase cannabis legally or medically in quite a few states, but it's still illegal at the federal level. Apart from selective enforcement of this being scary, this opens up weird issues for seemingly law-abiding citizens: Since cannabis is a schedule 1 drug, using it precludes you from purchasing a gun legally at the federal level. So a law abiding citizen can easily unknowingly put themselves into a situation where they're breaking federal law even though they're abiding state laws.
If you want to see how ridiculous DEA drug scheduling is, check out this page: https://www.dea.gov/drug-scheduling
[0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/42/1996a
Edit: wrong subject
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2010/11/02/scoring-...
As far as I understand it you can be arrested by federal law enforcement and charged with a federal crime but you cannot be arrested by local or state law enforcement and charged with a local or state crime.
This is why the marijuana industry is "cash only" - banks won't give them a bank account because it violates federal law for them to do so. This is very undesirable for the marijuana companies because having large stacks of cash laying around is a liability and also an accounting mess. Though last I heard some companies might be trying to band together to create a "maybe semi legal bank like entity" to fix this problem.
So far the DEA has largely chosen not to go after marijuana dispensaries and growers that are operating within the parameters of state law, but that can change, and it might lead to some interesting court cases.
This also can lead to problems for ordinary citizens, if they can go into a store and buy a product it is reasonable to think the product is totally and completely legal. However, they do risk being charged with a federal crime, but that's not totally obvious.
"In March, Insys launched a multinational study of 190 children to evaluate cannabidiol as a first-line therapy for infantile spasms"
That does seem to be the solution being pursued it seems
As for the article: MAPS is also doing work related to expanding marijuana research, but I haven't been following that as much. However, based on the above, I recommend donating if this is something you care about!
How people maintain cannabis as schedule I is Vogon levels of incompetence.
Yay bribery and corruption.
"Work with us and your problems will go away."
Such a shame because cocaine is a blissful, perfect drug and smoking crack is an especially excellent way to consume cocaine.
Its ok to sell: "a drug that causes irreversible vision loss in as many as one-third of the children who take it"
Its against the law: canabidiol from a plant, or even grow the plant yourself
Why is this? Why this derangement on the subject of cannabis? I've read a fair amount, and every time I've brought it up, I get downvoted to hell. So, I'll ask:
Anyone have a hypothesis on why a large number of our leaders, who happen to be older white men, are insanely against this plant?
"We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did." (John Ehrlichman, Nixon's domestic policy chief)
In the interim, it became a wedge issue and via "tough on crime", an extension of certain party platforms, (also in that it has effectively become the status quo for some population segments) and I think persists largely as some combination of the above.
[0] https://www.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-rich...
>Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Did I maybe miss a supreme Court case where that bit of it was neutered?
You can't really have it both ways. Forced labour in prison creates a colossal conflict of interest for the state, even in a world where the law is just, and is applied fairly. (We don't really live in that world.)
What I stated was a fact. Too bad, that you don't like facts, or that you try to dismiss the fact that it is slavery by comparing it to chattel slavery.
This isnt some bigoted law in some Southern state legislature. This is enshrined as federal constitutional law, and is also why the USA is not a signatory to numerous anti-slave treaties.
> If we're going to call any instance of the government forcing you to do a job you don't want "slavery", then here's a list of countries where the majority of the population has been forced into "slavery" without even being found guilty of a crime.
No, "I" didn't call it slavery. The 13th amendment did. Too bad the constitution isnt enough of a authoritative source. And then, you dismiss it with whataboutism. I live in the USA, and am dscussing USA constitutional law; Im not discussing your whataboutism of countries I dont live in.
We can discuss controversial subjects. Happens quite often. But you're wanting me to respect the fact that people are OK with slavery. Put it this way: I have ethics, and this is beyond the pale.
This "argument" is nothing more than a decorum complaint. Slavery, in all its forms, is Wrong. Anybody who supports slavery is Wrong. No ifs, ands, or buts.
And we fought a war over this very issue, and the 'compromise' was that criminals could be enslaved. Who'da thought that the majority of those who were chattel slaves would end up as "criminals", and back where they started? Its high time we excise that criminals part from the 13th.
Combine it with these observations:
1) Trials are increasingly rare, most criminals in prison never had one, they made a plea deal
2) The difference between a maximum sentence and a plea deal can be an order of magnitude (2 years instead of 20)
3) Dark skinned people can rationally expect that they won’t receive a fair trial, given bias in police investigations, DA practices, and juries.
... That adds up to a lot of innocent dark skinned people in prison, who quite rationally traded their civic rights for a smaller variability in their risk profile.
I guess what’s “better” about that than chattel slavery is that person had a possibility of release. So instead of 100% chance of incarceration and loss of civil rights, they had only an 80% chance of incarceration. Is that your position?
Personally, that doesn’t feel like a qualitative difference. Seems like the same situation just moved to a different psychic plane. But, interested in your thoughts.
These systems aren't as bad as chattel slavery because there is a strict legal requirement of when they must end (usually within a year), the citizen remains a citizen (albeit a military one as well) and thus still gets due process (outside of military punishments for, say, defecting or pointing a gun at a superior officer), the citizen can own property while doing their service, they get to do whatever they want with their own money, etc etc etc.
I still think they're wrong, for many reasons, but also because I don't believe there should be militaries designed for human-human conflict.
The Supreme Court does not have the authority to "neuter" parts of the Constitution.
edit: I should clarify that medicinal herbs one can grow oneself scare the profit-hungry pharmaceutical industry, and they will (and do) spend money to keep such plants illegal. There is also money from private prison companies who earn profit on the incarceration of citizens who stand to lose money if marijuana is fully decriminalized (I’m not going to pull a number out of thin air, but I believe it is a majority of inmates who are locked up for victimless drug crimes). State and local police departments love to receive federal grants to keep on fighting the war on drugs. There is so much money and effort against the legalization of a f’ing plant, and from so many sides, that even a well-meaning politician can look at the “evidence” and believe the public, as a whole, wants to keep Mother Nature illegal.
I'm astounded that psilocybin mushrooms, mescaline, and LSD are all scheduled so harshly.
Cocaine is a schedule 3 stuff. Cannabis and crack cocaine are schedule 1.
The only reason to support the current drug laws is literally because you want more crime and drug use.
You can even evaluate this without malice: Some say MJ is dangerous, and some say it's great. The status quo is that it is banned. Changing that creates the risk that it is bad and the change will be blamed on you, but legalizing will not bring you much glory, so you support the status quo until you have sufficient incentive (most likely $$$, but a strong push from the public instead of "meh" would also count).
That said, I find a mix of opportunism and greed to be the most likely explanation.
If I'm totally honest with myself I have to appreciate where they are coming from to a degree. I in no way think that marijuana is bad and I think it's actually extremely beneficial in many ways, but it is, for lack of a better word: strong.
Getting drunk can make you act like an idiot and be life threatening but it doesn't really change how you think, it just sort of shuts down pieces of your brain. Weed in some sense changes who you are. I think this effect is what a lot of people are afraid of.
So in the end I don't think "older white men" are actually being racist (intentionally) but they are just conservatives who are really uncomfortable altering their state of consciousness. I don't agree with it, but I think it's often a good faith argument on their part.
No one should be forced to do drugs of any kind but what is it with this 'baseline hostility' towards altered states?
Without getting into the moral argument of whether or not people should be able to choose to alter their mental state through drugs (are we cool with coffee as well?), it seems clear to me that the best policy is one of education and harm reduction, not FUD and prohibition.
Have you ever asked yourself if prohibition was the best way to combat drug problems?
I would suggest reading the book "Rise of the warrior cop" and then ask yourself if you still support prohibition.
However I don’t think this has any bearing on legalization. Whether something should be illegal is a different question than whether it is harmful.
If prohibition, in practice, will cause intolerable side effects, then it’s not a just policy. Even if we agree that the prohibited behavior is destructive.
It’s also not universally true that prohibition even decreases the prohibited behavior. Especially with teenagers it can sometimes have the opposite effect.
I am against abortion bans, not because I think abortion is harmless, but because I think prohibition has terrible effects.
Lastly, there are positive effects of a general culture of freedom. Freedom to make mistakes, not just freedom within a set of formally approved activities. We are able as a group to more effectively explore the space of safe activities if we allow personal exploration of unsafe activities to a degree.
This is why some people advocate not for prohibition of all harmful activities, but prohibition only of those that harm non-consensual participants. It’s illegal to hit your domestic partner. It’s legal to hit your sparring partner at the gym. That’s not because hitting is harmless (it’s not). It’s because many of us think the law is best suited to dampen harmful non-consensual activities, while other means (ministry, fellowship, etc) are more effective means to dampen consensual harmful activity.
It's not just cannabis though. This whole ideology can be applied to many topics. Where older people grew up being taught to hate it, while younger generations seem to be more rational and open to understanding that these taboo subjects may not be as bad as society wants you think. Some other topics that fall into this category include abortion, female workers/pay, war.
If I were constantly told by a number of authority figures that Argentina was a war-torn shithole with rampant poverty and violence, I'd likely believe it. I've never been there, I don't know anyone from there, and I have no reason to suspect those who I trust are liars.
As someone who has found some actual relief from previously crippling anxiety using cannabidiol, I'm really hoping to see progress on this front. It's all upwards from here for me.
When the basis of objection is largely emotional facts aren't all that helpful.
That said, the "counter culture" gave us the war on drugs, gun control, probably a couple other curtailments of personal freedom that I'm forgetting, they reduced public support for the civil rights movements of the time and provided an excuse for the three letter agencies to greatly increase their amount of domestic surveillance. In return we got out of 'nam a year, maybe two, earlier. I don't see why people romanticize the culture shifts of the 1960s. Their intentions were good but their methods flawed and their results worse.
Hemp threatened the cotton industry.
Cannabis was more usual among Mexican immigrant workers, which is why they renamed it to something more Mexican sounding.
It was a convenient way of breaking up the hippie movement and avoiding Vietnam war protests.
It has many medicinal uses and less side effects than the artificial crap we call medicine these days.
It scrambles the programming, people start asking themselves the wrong questions when using it.
It allows the government to conduct a war against its own people, and discriminate freely; while claiming to protect.
And on it goes...
States have managed to foment different levels of social stigma.
In Sweden, where I was born; you might as well do crack cocaine in most peoples eyes.
[1]https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/16/nyregion/fentanyl-subsys-...
$$$.
There's a lot of money in that.
They couldn’t raid black panther meetings for legally possessing guns, but they could for smoking joints and selling drugs.
"The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people," former Nixon domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman told Harper's writer Dan Baum for the April cover story published Tuesday.”
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2016/03/23/poli...
And when you are an black us citizen, have fun in prison.
It is stupid...
Not only that, the same psychiatrist might be getting kickbacks from the maker of ambien to peddle it to their clients.
>it is randomly decided by a few individuals
It isn't randomly decided. It's systematically decided by drug companies.
And I can not say I can trust my pharmacist to raise a flag on a dangerous prescription or interference between medication, as I would back home. Perhaps this is a subjective feeling.
P.S. On second thought: I am concerned about a friend who is getting over prescribed addictive medication for chronic back pain (see Vicodin/ Hydrocodone w. paracetamol). I have discussed this with a few family doctors overseas who all agree it is a terrible idea. Yet it is kind of standard in the U.S. Anyone with medical training in the U.S. has experience, thoughts or care to pitch in?
I was prescribed Ambien by going to a doctor for insomnia. No tests, no nothing. Sure I legit had insomnia, a pretty bad one at that, but they just asked me my problem I told them I can't sleep, next thing I know I'm prescribed Ambien. This the university hospital one of the best universities in US, not some random rural hospital.
You should never ever use any drug without doing your own research about it. Doesn't matter if #1 MD in the Western World prescribed it. Drug industry is nothing but a game to make 1% of 1% richer.
Been using Epocrates (the free parts) to check interactions and side effects. Beats digging through the FDA website for it.
One suggestion, NEVER look up common drugs like Advil.
So say someone took Advil then had, as a minor example, violent giggling fits completely unrelated. Now violent giggling fits is going to be listed as an adverse effect for Advil because, maybe it caused it?
Now replace violent giggling with fun things like: stroke, Stevens-Johnson syndrome, or whatever other fun things are listed on Advil...
Basically, likely to scare yourself for no reason. But for more serious drugs? Maybe worth some digging.