Marijuana for Pain?
I just cleaned out my RSS collector box, again. This was the first time in about 10 days. I had a mountain of messages in it. (Damn! It really fills up fast!) Several hundred of them were about a renewed allegation that marijuana is actually helpful in treating severe, refractory (resistant to treatment) chronic pain.
I have no clue whether the allegation is true or not. There was a reference to a recently published study, with lots of other references to it focused on the San Francisco Bay area, where Berserkely is.
The older literature is not very helpful in answering the question. Most of the old results were unfavorable.
How can we ever know whether it is helpful, and for what? The how is easy: do a bunch of medical research on the subject. Getting permission from the FDA to even do such research is a serious obstacle.
Why do we even have an FDA, or laws that restrict access to an array of chemicals that may or may not help us? The idea that adults aren’t smart enough to figure out what is good for them comes out of the Progressive movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. That’s why we have the bewildering array of prohibitions and boards and government administrative agencies, designed mostly to spend a lot of tax money while telling our people “no” to a lot of questions.
California, and several other states, are effectively nullifying the federal law by creating their own more liberal laws allowing things that are forbidden under the Federal rules.
Anyone who spends a bunch of time in Egypt will find that Hashish is fairly easy to get, and the authorities spend most their efforts working to not find it and not suppress its use. As a result, there are lots of poor folks spending all they have to get hashish, so they can consume it. They display plainly addictive behavior.
Does this mean that we should ban hashish, or marijuana? I think not.
Why not?
There are some people whose sole function in life is to serve as a horrible example! Their example serves as an effective warning to others to stay away from their self-destructive behaviors.
Another example: Treatment of Cancer with laetrile. In the 1960s I remember stories of people being arrested for smuggling laetrile into the US of A for cancer treatment, because they didn’t like mainstream medical cancer treatment. (I don’t either.)
Finally, enough people wrote about the laetrile to their congresscritters to get the rules against it dropped. It wasn’t legalized, just decriminalized.
Result: Laetrile became widely available, and quickly lost its popularity as a cancer treatment. Decriminalization killed the market for it.
What do I recommend about marijuana for pain. I suggest we just decriminalize the production, possession, use, possession for sale, and use of the weed.
What will happen then? I really don’t know. I think we’ll be happy that we are just a bit freer, and not spending the law enforcement money on suppressing it.
People will figure things out on their own. Americans are smart, and can decide for themselves what is good.
Will I violate the law regarding marijuana? C’mon, do I look that stupid?
