|
From part one
Scientific evidence overwhelmingly indicates that cannabis
is substantially less harmful than alcohol and should be treated not as a criminal issue but as a social and public health issue. Senator Pierre Claude Nolin Chairman Committee on Illegal Drugs Recently a government report about the negative effects of antidepressants in children"suppressed by the US Food and Drug Administration"has surfaced indicating that children taking antidepressants were twice as likely to become suicidal as children taking placebo. An expert with the FDA's Office of Drug Safety, Dr Andrew Mosholder, reportedly urged the FDA to follow the lead of British health authorities by warning doctors that the risks of the newer antidepressants might outweigh the benefits when used in children. [xix] A whole case can be made for substituting a relatively safe drug like marijuana for the more toxic drugs offered by doctors and pharmaceutical giants when it comes to many mental and emotional problems in adults and children. There is only one great problem in this. There is no money to be made from a common weed that anybody with two thumbs can grow themselves. In June 2001, a jury ordered GlaxoSmithKline, the maker of Paxil, to pay $6.5 million to the relatives of Donald Schell, who, two days after starting on the drug, murdered his wife, his daughter and his granddaughter before killing himself. Christopher Pittman, who at 12 years of age killed both his grandparents, is said to have done so for a reason beyond the boy's control - a reaction to the antidepressant Zoloft, a drug he had started taking for depression not long before the slayings. [xx] Christopher committed the murders while in a psychotic state induced by Zoloft. Dr. Lanette Atkins Forensic Psychiatrist "It seems to me if one is going to need to use drugs, one ought to consider a relatively safe drug, like marijuana," said Bernard Rimland, Ph.D. of the Autism Research Institute. [xxi] Marijuana, the forbidden medicine, seems to be useful for some people with adult attention deficit disorder, impulse disorders and bipolar disorder. Some families have found marijuana to be nothing short of miraculous. Some of the symptoms marijuana has ameliorated include anxiety--even severe anxiety--aggression, panic disorder, generalized rage, tantrums, property destruction and self-injurious behavior. [xxii] One mother commenting on using marijuana for her autistic child said, "I know it's not the end all answer but it's been the best answer for the longest time for us in regards to ALL the other medications. I cannot tell you how many months we would go on a medication wondering if it was doing anything, anything at all. Here we can see the difference in 30-60 minutes guaranteed." It boggles my mind to think that our government officials are spending so much time and money to obstruct the use of a medication that might actually help cancer patients tolerate their chemotherapy, AIDS patients gain a little weight, glaucoma patients suffer less. Dr. Kate Scannell According to Dr. Rimland, "Clearly, medical marijuana is not a drug to be administered lightly. But compare its side effects to the known effects of Risperdal, [xxiii] which include massive weight gain, a dramatically increased risk of diabetes, and an elevated risk of deadly heart problems, as well as a host of other major and minor problems. Other psychotropic drugs are no safer, causing symptoms ranging from debilitating tardive dyskinesia to life-threatening malignant hyperthermia or sudden cardiac arrest. Of all drugs, the psychotropic drugs are among the least useful and most dangerous, and the benefit/risk profile of medical marijuana seems fairly benign in comparison." He continues, "The reports we are seeing from parents indicate that medical marijuana often works when no other treatments, drug or non-drug, have helped". According to Dr. Lester Grinspoon, "A recent poll conducted by Medscape, a website directed at health care providers, 76 percent of physicians and 89 percent of nurses said they thought marijuana should be available as a medicine. The dramatic change of view is the result of clinical experience. Doctors and nurses have seen that for many patients Cannabis is more useful, less toxic, and less expensive than the conventional medicines prescribed for diverse syndromes and symptoms, including multiple sclerosis, Crohn's disease, migraine headaches, severe nausea and vomiting, convulsive disorders, the AIDS wasting syndrome, chronic pain, and many others." [xxiv] High-ranking government officials in the United States have referred to the concept of medical marijuana as a hoax. One might ask why the government of the United States, the leading oppositional force to its legalization, clings so tenaciously to its insular and harmful policy? Dr. Kate Scannell writes passionately about this issue saying, "I've seen one too many old men spend their final hours nauseated and vomiting while their distressed and helpless families watched. One too many women with cancer who linger, bone-thin and languid, as their loved ones beg for "something" to make them feel better. And I, like so many doctors, have witnessed the therapeutic relief that many such patients experience after using marijuana. Their illnesses become less miserable, their difficult deaths are made more tolerable. And those reasons explain precisely why the federal government's relentless attempts to bar patients from access to medical marijuana constitute both cruel and unusual crimes against us all. They are wrong-headed and politically driven obsessions, not compassionate advisements intended to relieve human suffering." [xxv] "I live very close to the Clements Unit prison farm that houses nonviolent drug offenders. On a daily basis I see these young men, most of them my age and younger, spending their days working in the fields harvesting cotton and corn. These men were convicted of selling drugs to their peers or perhaps caught bringing drugs across the border from Mexico. Yet the man that administered my son a lethal cocktail of vaccinations then refused to pay any attention to the symptoms of the reaction is still in practice. This man in essence murdered my son, yet he goes to work in the morning and sleeps well every night," wrote Jennifer Johnson. And she continued with, "My mother is also a breast cancer survivor. As her daughter I suffered watching her fight the medication given to her to combat the disease. Days would go by that she would cry because of the effects of the chemo. Years after the cancer has gone into remission the flashbacks of the chemotherapy is what haunts her. She remembers the taste in her mouth and the feeling in the pit of her stomach. I firmly believe that marijuana would have benefited her in so many ways and perhaps spared her a lot of the discomfort she had to deal with." [xxvi] So why is it people like Bush and Ashcroft and many others defend criminal laws which are cruel in their inception? The answer is really simple. They are defenders of pharmaceutical terrorism, defenders of companies like Eli Lilly Company which is responsible for decades of injecting thimerosal/mercury into infants. Why? Just look at the facts reported recently by the CBS Sixty Minutes show. "Since 1999, these legislators have accepted more than a million and a half dollars in campaign contributions from people working in the pharmaceutical industry. President Bush alone has received more than half a million dollars." [xxvii] There is a whole group of men who are guilty of insanity, a crime or great ignorance the world is blind to. And they will continue to remain culpable because, like most insane people, the last thing they will ever become aware of and admit is their own insanity of purpose, thought, deed and being. Just look at the fact that the present Secretary of Defense is responsible almost single-handedly for driving through the approval of aspartame into the world,s food chain and you will begin to see the dimension of an inclination toward the chemical rape of humanity. What you see is a vast madness that has the FDA approving the most harmful toxic substances and drugs for public use while holding back and making illegal the safest most benign and useful substances like marijuana. And now even vitamins and other health products are under attack. To continue on 3
The Mulindwas Communication Group
"With Yoweri Museveni, Uganda is in anarchy" Groupe de communication Mulindwas "avec Yoweri Museveni, l'Ouganda est dans l'anarchie" |
