Leading Anti-Marijuana Academics Are Paid by Painkiller Drug Companies | Hacker News Reader

Leading Anti-Marijuana Academics Are Paid by Painkiller Drug Companies

vice.com

293 pointsMultics90 comments

Drug companies are not trying to stop the legalization of marijuana. Painkiller manufacturers has gotten into a lot of shit for the abuse of their products (some execs almost went to prison and paid $34M in fines personally; see Purdue Pharma [1]. How do they remedy that? By funding anti-drug groups. Unfortunately there are no "bud is ok, but Oxycotin is bad" groups, so they fund the ones that are anti-all-drugs. The main goal of funding these groups is to stop abuse of their own drugs, while looking good doing it.

I work in the drug industry. Trust me, none of them consider marijuana a threat. There may be one or two exceptions, but they certainly aren't the companies making narcotic painkillers.

[1]http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/21/business/21pharma.html?_r=...

I find this a bit hard to believe.....how might we know the truth though?

"I work in the drug industry. Trust me," Sorry.

I accidentally upvoted you with a fat finger.

Come on this is a crap argument. I work in academic science. The irrational paranoia that the many people have about scientists is unbelievable. Many seem to think that researchers are in it for the money.

Feel free to downvote, or better yet comment as you did in the proper spirit. The drug industry has earned its reputation. Skepticism is the proper response. "I work in xx. Trust me" is pretty weak at the best of times but as ever, falsifiable evidence trumps argument from authority.

Nobody thinks researchers are in it for the money. The people that pay the researchers on the other hand...

I think the irrational paranoia about scientists is that they are too often wrong, long before they should have stepped back from the ledge. By 'wrong', I mean, scientists manage to produce things in the world which get entirely mis-used by the masses, too often. So there is a direct responsibility for the massive amount of mis-control/mis-use of the sciences - in any field, not just drugs/pharmacology - and this responsibility needs to be taken seriously.

Oxy addiction paid for a lot of peoples paychecks. Blaming it all on the 'masses inability to control themselves' is an argument which most scientists must make, properly, before they unleash their products on the world markets. If it is made after the fact of catastrophy, instead of before, then we - who distrust scientists - inherit the problem.

It's not like there are huge numbers of researchers involved. There are climate scientists who argue against global warming. Coincidentally their research is underwritten by fossil fuel companies. It's not researchers in general, it's the weird outliers who coincidentally are being underwritten by vested interests.

Who said the poster was a researcher, and if s/he is then what makes you think that researchers have anything to do with high-level corporate strategy.

It's worth pointing out that the drug industry has already brought both THC (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrahydrocannabinol#Marinol and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nabilone) and CBD (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannabidiol) and both (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nabiximols) to market as official, legal drugs.

(UPDATED and corrected to four drugs, including the new to me one with both.)

Another update: here's a nice table of all the drugs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_cannabis#Pharmacologic...

In formulations they can patent and charge arbitrary prices for.

And you see no value in knowing exactly what you're getting or prescribing? E.g. per Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannabidiol#CBD-enhanced_canna...):

"Decades ago, selective breeding by growers in US dramatically lowered the CBD content of cannabis; their customers preferred varietals that were more mind-altering due to a higher THC, lower CBD content. To meet the demands of medical cannabis patients, growers are currently developing more CBD-rich strains."

This is a major reason to prefer pharmaceuticals over the original raw herb, who's concentrations and additional and potentially unwanted active ingredients varies from plant to plant.

It's more important if you need to be prescribed something. I need to eat fruit and vegetables to live, and the value of their being exactly formulated is negligible.

Marijuana is hard to OD on and doesn't cause long term liver damage when used at reasonable levels for extended periods (which opiates do). Prescriptions aren't necessary.

Please reread what I posted, and perhaps follow the links.

E.g., if you want the medicinal properties of CBD, how can you know you're actually getting a significant dose?

It's like the old use of curare in surgical anesthesia (prior to inserting a tube down the airway), the anesthesiologist or nurse anesthetist (my mother was one of the latter, along with Bill Clinton's mother) didn't grind up some plant material with a mortar and pestle and hope she was administering just the right amount. No, they used properly titrated extract prepared by those eeeeevil drug companies.

Or what if you're concerned about THC exposure? As I understand it, it's at least associated, perhaps correlated, with some very unpleasant things, like an increased incidence of schizophrenia.

All drugs, whatever the source, are dangerous, and will harm and kill small fractions of the people who might take them.

Comparing the mass quantities of stuff you get from normal eating to the low doses of these drugs, whatever the source, is not, I think relevant. You can reasonably expect different concentrations of essential foodstuffs to balance out, and for vitamins and some minerals take a generic one a day pill to make sure you don't inadvertently get any deficiency diseases.

Right now any clinical data we have on marijuana's active ingredients is massively tainted by the fact that NIH will only fund research into harmful effects, so essentially you're suggesting that we're better off getting "prescribed" a quantity of something based on faulty/biased research.

(Incidentally, CBD products are now technically legal in the US -- you can order them on Amazon!)

The point with curare is that a small amount will kill you. All drugs are to some extent dangerous, but some are safe enough that people are allowed to buy them on their own and figure out the dosage they need -- e.g. aspirin, most antihistamines. The same arguments would apply to them.

Really, please, follow the links and read. Some of these drugs were or are being developed in other countries, so it's obviously not axiomatic the NIH's research had anything to do with their development.

And at least 3 of them are being done in conjunction with the FDA, 2 approved, the CBD drug in Phase 2/3 FDA level trials. This massive tainting somehow hasn't convinced the FDA that THC and CBD are bad.

Errr, I hope it's obvious that drug trials produce clinical data....

As for your final point, I would hope bmelton's comment would underline the folly of trying to use raw herbs of uncertain potency for reliably getting what is needed. Does Charlotte Figi need serious, hard to obtain quantities of CBD to stop her seizures, or will any old weed suffice???

I'm aware of the clinical trials of marijuana derived drugs, but that produces clinical data on those drugs. (Indeed there's been a synthetic THC drug for AIDS patients available for years, but it appears not to work very well, and not as well for many patients as "the real thing".)

My point is pretty simple -- marijuana is pretty damn safe, safer than tylenol for example, and it may or may not help with various medical conditions, so let people use it. If drug companies want to formulate highly specialized or refined derivative and market them against stuff you can grow yourself or buy from a dispensary, let them. But don't criminalize the basic product.

Let me recommend to you the documentary "WEED" to watch.

The difference between pot and pot specifically grown to have high CBD content is like the difference between corn and corn syrup. Most marijuana, even medical marijuana, is not going to contain enough CBD content to be effective at treating certain ailments.

In the case of kids with Dravet Syndrome, the difference is drastic. Smoking medical marijuana all day long is not helpful at all, but smoking marijuana bred for CBD potency is downright curative, at least at preventing seizures.

Charlotte Figi has dozens of grand mal seizures a day if left to her own devices. The average medical marijuana does not help her, but CBD-potent marijuana effectively quells her seizures. A little bit of oil extracted from CBD halted the grand mal seizures.

The downside is that practically nobody is growing this type of marijuana, and specifically, we're breeding most medical marijuana to have higher THC content at the expense of CBDs.

In this case, yes, pharmaceutical-grade products are possibly superior, especially as they can begin regulating it and testing its actual effectiveness towards treating chronic issues like Dravet that "smoking pot" doesn't necessarily impact at all.

And the eeeeevil drug company that's developing CBD as a drug is finding hard evidence that it just might work: http://www.gwpharm.com/GW%20Pharmaceuticals%20Announces%20Ph...

That's an early trial, probably more to prove safety than efficacy. The Phase 2/3 trial they said they're doing now will at least start to nail down both---or not, or to what degree and for whom, as clinical trials do.

Side note: I've not studied it (know only one person, who's stable with existing drugs), but just from what I'm reading about CBD and Dravet Syndrome it's clear, and not surprising that epilepsy is a symptom with multiple causes. In this subset: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generalized_epilepsy_with_febr... researchers researchers have found no less than 4 genes who's mutations can result in different diseases.

Caffeine is probably a good example of how weed should be handled. Caffeine is actually way more dangerous (OD'ing on it is something that is actually reasonably possible). If you want precision doses of caffeine, you can certainly buy it in pill form produced by reliable laboratories. On the other hand, buying it in 'natural' products such as coffee beans is perfectly legal. Don't want to mess around with the inconsistent results from raw product but don't want it in pill form either? The Coca Cola Company has got you covered there.

>How do they remedy that? By funding anti-drug groups.

Could you specify which groups you mean? Because the article addresses what you mention in exactly the opposite way:

Pharmaceutical-funded anti-drug groups like the Partnership for Drug-Free Kids and CADCA use their budget to obsess over weed while paying lip-service to the much bigger drug problem in America of over-prescribed opioids.

Your comment strikes me as a distraction. "some execs almost went to prison"? Your NYTimes article mentions more than once the judge felt frustration he could not award prison time. God forbid they serve probation:

Defense lawyers for the three executives involved ... all urged Judge Jones not to put their clients on probation.

You may work in the industry, but who says you're privy to internal policy decisions which, if made public, would be deeply embarrassing and possibly lead to criminal charges?

Even if I trust your intent, why should I trust your knowledge?

Incidentally, I have worked in the industry, and corporate ethics are widely variable, ranging from Eli Lilly, which i found to be painfully homest, to Roche, who were quite open about having no ethics at all.

Let me put it this way. Of all the problems the pharma industry faces, the legalizationof marijuana isn't in the top 50.

This kind of indirect monetary "investment" to maintain the moats to your market reminds me a lot of how ridiculously cost effective lobbying can be to companies like Intuit. $10mm/year in lobbying can virtually guarantee that legislation remains in their favor, which blows any kind of product R&D in terms of ROI out of the water.

It's frustrating and disheartening to read things like this, and yet the evil business side of me can't help but think, "damn that's evil but so smart of them..." :(

> damn that's evil but so smart of them...

But this kind of thing can often backfire if there's a public outcry and then it won't have been so smart.

It might back-fire for a few individuals at the company (e.g they might senf off a CEO or some department head with his golden parachute), but the company will continue doing it after the outcry stops...

All bark and no bite.

Citizens of the US haven't stood up to any immoral corporate practice and had a significant impact in decades. For example, the makers of OxyContin could (completely hypothetically) manufacture an opiate so powerful it rivals heroin, encourage doctors to prescribe it at many times the necessary rate for true medical pain-relief, watch millions of lives get ruined by addiction to their supposedly safe drug, and no group of people will ever get together in protest to put more than a couple percent dent in their profits.

Economic term is regulatory capture:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture

relevant Onion from this week:

http://www.theonion.com/articles/elderly-lobbyist-always-dro...

Regulatory capture is one of the results. The primary economic mechanic that causes this is special interests vs. dispersed interests: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_choice#Special_interest...

What do intuit lobby for? Do they have some sort of monopoly?

Note: (I'm Outside US)

> "In the most technologically advanced countries, filing a tax return is free, easy and fast: Instead of taxpayers painstakingly calculating figures themselves, the government provides estimates of what they owe based on the very bank records and wages it already collects. Intuit, maker of the popular tax preparation software, TurboTax, has funnelled millions to oppose every effort to make tax day less painful."

http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/27/turbotax-maker-funnels-mill...

That makes no sense. Reporting income is is easy. The IRS will mail you a correction of you make an error.

Deductions are the hard part, which is not govt tracked.

It's easy, but it is not as easy as it should be. They should be able to send me forms pre-filled for all of my sources of income (In my case, and in most cases, they already know all of that information. Some may still need to do some data entry.) What takes me a few hours could take me a few short minutes.

Government doesn't move at Silicon Valley's pace. The ability to cheaply track your income from all sources and bill you directly for your taxes is barely a few decades old.

Plenty of governments in other parts of the world already do this. In Spain (and I assume in most parts of Europe), the govt provides a draft of your return, which most people just accept through their internet bank.

The US is a tad larger and more politically/legally disparate than Spain; those factors alone make it much more challenging.

In New Zealand you don't even have to file a return unless you owe money or have some special stuff going on. When I started working here there was a very simple flow chart ending in one of 2(or 3?) big circles with a letter in it. You find the right letter and write it on the line;done. That's the last I've dealt with Inland Revenue(IRS equivalent).

Intuit successfully got laws passed that prevent the government from communicating to tax payers the information it already has about taxes owed. User name is apt.

PDF forms can do basic math (of the sort that you do when filling out the tax return) but that functionality isn't available on the IRS forms. So every year that means several hours of double and triple-checking things that should be rights only take a few minutes. It's really aggravating to consider that there are people who want the process to be as tedious and difficult as possible.

They want taxes to remain difficult so that people continue to pay them to handle the difficulty

> $10mm/year in lobbying can virtually guarantee that legislation remains in their favor, which blows any kind of product R&D in terms of ROI out of the water.

This is oft-repeated, but doesn't stand up to any sort of logical scrutiny. You think there aren't dozens of parties with interests adverse to Intuit who could pony up $10 million to lobby for the opposite position? I think of this every time someone mentions lobbying by telecom or media companies: for what Facebook paid for WhatsApp, it could purchase all of the lobbying efforts of the top 10 D.C. lobbying firms for the next half-century. You think the Facebooks and Googles of the world are above buying legislation in business-critical areas like telecom policy or copyright if it were that cheap?

What lobbying does is help you tap into a base of support that already exists. In the case of Intuit, their lobbying dollars go to supporting Republicans and Libertarians who don't want to make filing taxes easy. The cost and burden of filing taxes is a major hammer people use to chip away at the whole concept of progressive taxation. It's a major selling point of proposals like the flat tax or consumption taxes. In a system with employer withholding, it's the only major reminder of how much the government is taking out of your paycheck each year.

That $10 million doesn't guarantee Intuit favorable legislation--it leverages a deep divide in the polity that happens to advance Intuit's specific interests. And at the end of the day, almost all effective lobbying, at least at the federal level, takes that shape.

The $10mm/year is the meager carrot. There is an implied stick, which comes in the form of much stronger support for opposing candidates come the next election cycle.

$10 million is nothing; any lobbying group worth a shit can cough up that. You could probably fucking crowdfund it if you found a cause that 'the internet' cared enough about. But to make a difference you also need to convince your congressperson that you also have a stick and are able/willing to use it. Good luck crowdfunding that. A company like facebook has the money to have a stick, but these sort of tech companies are typically politically inactive enough to raise doubt that they would have the motivation ever use their stick.

I don't know why you're being downvoted - that's a pretty astute summary of the public choice theory problem. It's very hard to build an effective coalition for pragmatic pedestrian issues like making it easier to file taxes. Several presidential candidates have made it a plank in their platform but it's hard to get much traction for something people only think about once a year unless you also have a comfortable legislative majority.

> "The cost and burden of filing taxes is a major hammer people use to chip away at the whole concept of progressive taxation. That $10 million doesn't guarantee Intuit favorable legislation--it leverages a deep divide in the polity that happens to advance Intuit's specific interests."

How are these not the same exact thing? I don't think anyone is claiming that lobbying is akin to submitting a payment for immediate legislation approval. We are all well aware that there are politicians and voter bases that may side with a company like Intuit. But in either case, the money is being used to influence legislation, whether that's a sure shot or to tip the scales. Rather than legislate based on the merit of both opinions (eg. paid vs free tax filing), companies are introducing often personal financial incentives for politicians to dig their heels into the ground by claiming that a particular opinion is Right and True. Deepening the divide does nothing more than cause people to bury their heads further into their ideologies and works against progress.

First, there no "personal financial incentives." Lobbying isn't the same as campaign donations, and corporations like Intuit are prohibited from making direct campaign donations.

Second, legislation isn't based on "the merit of both opinions" but how both opinions fit into the preferences and ideologies of the polity. And in a democracy, that's probably precisely what legislation should be based on.

Third, keeping the above two points in mind, I think it's fundamentally different to say that lobbying "guarantees favorable legislation" and to say that lobbying exploits an ideological divide in the polity that "results in favorable legislation."

The former seems wrongful. The second, in my mind, seems entirely appropriate. I think it's fine to spend money to remind elected officials that a particular, minor, policy decision (making taxes easier to file) will undermine their efforts to make a different, major policy decision consistent with the preferences of their voter base (lowering tax rates, reducing the progressiveness of the tax code).

>First, there no "personal financial incentives." Lobbying isn't the same as campaign donations, and corporations like Intuit are prohibited from making direct campaign donations.

You say the most fantastical things sometimes. I know you're aware of what "Quid pro quo" means, but you apparently must believe it to be some abstract conceptual thing without any practical use.

> You say the most fantastical things sometimes.

I just know more about lobbying than most people who harp about it.

> I know you're aware of what "Quid pro quo" means

What quid pro quo is involved in lobbying? To me, a "quid pro quo" is "here's a $5 million donation and if you happen to support our legislation, that would be great." That's not lobbying, and that's illegal. Lobbying is hiring someone to tell an elected official: "if you support these environmental laws, it will affect the coal industry and 1,000 people in your district might find themselves out of work." That's not a quid pro quo to me.

>I just know more about lobbying than most people who harp about it.

Well then, enlighten us all as to why it is such a lucrative business despite your assertion that lobbyists primarily write persuasive letters extolling the virtues of employment in the coal mines.

If you're not just being obtuse, and really cannot see the connection between campaign finance and political influence, then it's time to question the source of your lobbying knowledge. Have you merely collected a large number of facts pertaining to lobbying?

Sounds like they knew what would happen:

States with Medical Marijuana Have Fewer Painkiller Deaths https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8245373

The drug companies fight against any effective remedy that isn't covered by a patent. Besides marijuana, another example is the substance DMSO (dimethyl sulfoxide).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimethyl_sulfoxide#Medicine

If the remedy has any slightest shred of controversy attached to it, opponents can latch on to it and blow it out of proportion.

DMSO isn't controversial in normal use. It's only controversial in the alternative medicine context, where it does nothing. Despite the fact that it does nothing for any disease by itself, it's claimed to cure everything from lymphoma to emphysema.

DMSO is still used commonly in medicine. There's no stigma attached to actual uses.

Edit: Spelling errors.

Pairs well with this book review of Bad Pharma:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8012263.

With no single known cure available for a given condition, one of the most useful parameters in case treatment is chosen might just be simple toxicity itself, depending on how the outcomes are judged by the treated, and treator if involved.

In corporations which historically benefit enormously from regulatory and media influence, it should not be unexpected for them to obfuscate or propagandize to influencers and the public on topics such as harm vs benefit to consumers, especially when the public is becoming threateningly powerful politically on that exact subject.

If you are in the toxic materials business, nature may be against you and depending on ethics, a very profitable approach has been shown to be not only playing unfairly but underhandedly tilting the playing field in your favor at the same time.

Not like there's any question.

So, the big news here is that pharmaceutical researchers (researching small molecule drugs like THC) are largely funded by companies who earn their money from a large number of small molecule drugs. Vice doesn't actually compare pro-legalizing and anti-legalizing scientists.

I'll also get on the record that I would not recommend using THC containing products for pain relief without medical supervision or advice.

Don't get me wrong: funding bias is a problem, but it gets overstated. The scientific process has to deal with much worse problems, like personal egos, evil publishing, malstructured career mechanics and outright fraud. Still, "paying for the right results" is a lot harder than it is often taken to be.

What you say may be true, but I would much rather have public outcry against this practice than the opposite of overlooking the issue because there are bigger fish to fry.

There is no medical supervision for using THC. There are no guidelines that doctors follow or recommendations beyond recommending vaporizing or using edibles.

Not entirely true for non-pain relief uses. Dronabinol, synthetic THC, is sometimes given to treat nausea and vomiting in patients receiving chemotherapy.

Marijuana is proven to be more safe than alcohol. Say what you will about the risks, but what about personal freedom? Why do we need the government involved in this decision at all?

"Medical supervision", in my case, has been "let's see what these pills do for you" -- really just gatekeeper making educated guesses.

The worst THC is likely to do is give somebody a bad trip, like Maureen Dowd's recent venture: http://www.forbes.com/sites/daviddisalvo/2014/06/09/why-eati...

Actual physiological harm shouldn't be a concern.

There is direct physical harm from THC. Not for everyone, not always, but it would be naive to assume there isn't.

Indirectly it's a bad idea to manage pain by just one way, be it pills or THC or whatever. The danger is that the conditions change or that the pain is telling you that you need additional medical attention.

> Don't get me wrong: funding bias is a problem, but it gets overstated.

Hardly. It is in fact far worse than you are attempting to imply, and is covered in detail in Bad Pharma[1] which is well worth reading.

A snippet: "Drugs are tested by the people who manufacture them, in poorly designed trials, on hopelessly small numbers of weird, unrepresentative patients, and analysed using techniques which are flawed by design, in such a way that they exaggerate the benefits of treatments."

[1] http://www.badscience.net/2012/09/heres-the-intro-to-my-new-...

This is mostly true for drugs where there is almost zero public interest. And even then I don't want to overinterpret "evil intentions" when it just might be a case of honest researchers not doing a perfect job in an imperfect world.

When there is public interest, independent studies are conducted.

Your comment is terribly misinformed about the reality of drug research. I'd urge you to at least read that opening paragraph I linked to up-thread from the 'Bad Pharma' book.

If you have an interest in this area I would imagine you'd want to read the book to fully understand how broken the current system is.

It's not all doom-and-gloom though; a movement to try to get back to a scientific approach in drug research is continuing with http://www.alltrials.net/.

Even knowing the book, I think it is terribly "misinformed" to describe the current drug research/development as something other than a "scientific approach". There is no clear picture of what good scientific research looks like, at least not in the real world, and not if you take the financial picture into account, and the benefit of developing new therapies.

The ready assumption of evil intentions can hardly be described as "scientific" either. Pharma companies are taking on development risks which no public health system is willing to stomach.

I don't know anything about these researchers and the article did nothing to change that. It threw out some heavy allegations with no evidence and no indication that they'd done any real investigation of anything.

I'm filing this under clickbait. I don't know if it happens to be true or not, but the article did not give any real evidence.

Da passt mal wieder alles wie den Arsch auf den Eimer.

Not sure what's that in English.

Follow the money.

The article loses some credibility by saying Zohydro is a new opioid. It's just hydrocodone, without the harmful acetaminophen additive. Nothing special.

Is pot an effective painkiller if you need to really think while getting relief? Opiates don't have psychedelic effects or even the general mental impairment of pot.

I have been prescribed opiates like hydrocodone before, and I can guarantee that they significantly affect your thinking. I'm not sure how anyone could argue otherwise. They are worse than being drunk. Is that really something that people debate? Opiates don't impair your thinking? Am I responding to a robot astroturfer?

Just one anecdote, but I felt surprisingly clear-headed when I took oxycodone. Aside from feeling more relaxed and optimistic than normal, I didn't feel any of the fuzziness I feel when drunk. Maybe an external observer would have disagreed; I wasn't really interacting with people or attempting any mentally-taxing exercises.

There are lots of other downside to opioids, of course, such as dizziness during physical activity and addiction.

All I've ever felt on opiates is pleasantly tired.

Of course, marijuana doesn't really impair me much either. Or alcohol for that matter. My ability to handle intoxication is sometimes distressing.

Well I'm suprised to see these responses. Even studies show opiate treated patients have better cognitive performance (due to pain reduction, presumably). The head of Germany's air force was a morphine addict. Plenty of addicts are outed and go on to admit their "problem", yet they were functioning fine.

Apart from people getting nauseous or passing out from opiates, I've never heard people complaining about not being able to think. (Sample size ~30). In fact, I've heard the opposite, that opiate treatment improves their ability to think. Whereas with pot, it seems most people are seeking a mental state that doesn't encourage detailed concentration.

Try looking at people's pupils as you go about your day. Doctors, lawyers, executives... I've seen plenty of people with pinned pupils but no obvious signs of cognitive impairment.

You definitely don't seem like a robot, but your initial comment was similarly surprising to me. From personal experience, I would say that it's entirely possible to act normally under the influence of opiates while being completely affected by them. I think it's more a flaw in the way we judge people. At high doses of opiates, a person will be incapacitated, but at low doses, I still had my motor skills but felt like an entirely different person, like half my brain was blocked. I compensated, of course, but I was painfully aware that I was compensating, and I was often acting out of memory of how I would have responded rather than naturally reacting to things. For me, it was more like destruction of feelings and higher thinking while maintaining basic memories and reactions to things. I could be completely logical while emotionless and lacking any larger perspective or analysis. Maybe that kind of attitude is just considered normal now.

I think weed makes people think more abstractly but opiates destroy feeling and complex thoughts.

Opiates surely affect judgment by adding a positive spin. Similar to how one's judgment is affected when things are going well (say, a fantastic start to a relationship). But I was referring to analytical thinking, not more subjective feeling.

I can and have written a search engine/database while on opiates. I doubt I could implement cat on pot.

I believe you, but I think we are talking about two different kinds of impairment. I'm sure there are also effects of tolerance to be able to program on opiates, and different people will react differently. The positive spin is something I never experienced. I got the opposite negative perspective on everything.

So will agree that it is probably easier for most people to think analytically on low doses of opiates rather than cannabinoids, but I think there are other aspects of mental blocks that manifest strongly on opiates, at least for myself.

I'm an ex heroin addict who was considered a functional addict. I kept it hidden for 6 years. It's not like alcohol at all, in terms of impairment, in my experience. Hell, I'm working an amazing job doing innovative things while on suboxone, as I have been for the past two years.

First off let me state this, I believe Marijuana should be legal. But I also believe that all drugs should be legalized and distributed by a doctor and not available at a pharmacy for anyone under 21. Having said that opiate users/addicts are surprisingly functional unlike those under the influence of Marijuana imo. I got shoulder surgery two days before my final exams in my senior year of college and then proceeded to get A's on every exam without any problems concentration or other side effects. I never could have done that on Marijuana. But the real problem with the recent efforts to legalize Marijuana is that it is promoting the fallacy that it is a panacea and has no side effects and can just magically cure all diseases when in reality the recent research is showing quite the opposite.

http://jn.sfn.org/press/April-16-2014-Issue/zns01614005529.p...

http://schizophreniabulletin.oxfordjournals.org/content/earl...

http://www.nature.com/npp/journal/v38/n12/full/npp2013164a.h...

I can argue otherwise. I didn't have that effect, and still don't despite being on suboxone. Depends on the person.

Opiates themselves aren't an effective pain killer if you need to think while getting relief. Initial euphoria, followed by dizziness, headache and constipation. And I've heard they're addictive.

> Opiates don't have psychedelic effects or even the general mental impairment of pot.

Spoken like someone who's never been prescribed opiates. I had to take oxycodene for a while, and before that tramadol (a milder opiate) and "attend" university at the same time. I might as well have been in Antarctica for all the mental capability I had while either.They're also massively addictive, with pretty harsh physical withdrawal symptoms occurring after short dosages, requiring a slow weaning process to stop taking them.

I guess it all depends in your genetic makeup. I just feel generally happier and find that my coding and math abilities are slightly enhanced.

Lots of people will feel like they perform all sorts of things better while intoxicated under various substances when in reality they are performing suboptimal. You need an outside party to verify these types of claims.

I have pain currently requiring over 100mg/day morphine equivalent and have been on opiate treatment for nearly a decade. Apart from when changing doses or the occasional side effect, I have no problem thinking, coding, etc. I do much better in general on medication than not. I don't seem to be dumb (going off relative cognitive ability to other people, feedback, etc.)

I'm surprised at these responses, which contradict so much of the evidence I'm aware of. But I suppose there is survivorship bias as people like you are unlikely to continue on to long-term treatment. But thank you for the counter evidence.

I only really noticed the difference when I stopped taking Oxycodene. My evidence is purely anecdotal, of course. I was on it for about 2 months, with about 3 months either side w/ Tramadol, so not quite long term, but long enough.

I wouldn't classify it as a dumb feeling - more of a passive state, but when I stopped with the heavy opiates I noticed an increase in productivity - I spent much less time working and achieved a much higher output. Of course, that's not an option for some people.

I've taken Demerol after a rock climbing incident resulting in a fairly serious (but thankfully transient) soft-tissue lower back injury. I can assure you that I was far more mentally impaired on Demerol than I ever have been on pot (which I have used recreationally a few times over the years, but am not a regular user of).

When on pot my mind has felt a little "slow", on Demerol my mind was essentially out to lunch for a couple of days.

Funnily, pot completely destroys me. Different genetics I suppose.

Yeah I'm sure there is a ton of "YMMV" in there depending upon the exact strain of pot, the exact type of opiate (and the dosage), and just differences in how people react to each.

I was given opiates after having my wisdom teeth pulled. After two days I decided I'd rather have a clear head and deal with the (by then subsiding) pain than continue wading through fog. The impairment was that unsettling.

>Is pot an effective painkiller if you need to really think while getting relief?

Speaking as a chronic pain sufferer of over a decade, I would hazard that you are high on anti-cannabis propaganda.

"Is pot an effective painkiller if you need to really think while getting relief?"

A low-THC strong indica strain leaves you rather clear-headed (I do not personally find them to be effective for pain relief, but others claim good results).

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