Stoner Schematics

“Everything around us is changing… laws, society, personal idiosyncrasies, as well as the realm that cannabis resides. Sometimes it is time to sit down the bowl and really focus on the issues… well then pick it back up because politics are stressful…”

Back in late 2010 we wrote an article on a young child who turned in their parents for smoking pot under the instruction of the D.A.R.E program. In that situation, the officers replied to the incident by saying “That’s what they’re told to do, to make us aware.” In some of the most recent scholarship by David J. Hanson, Ph.D., he notes that D.A.R.E has been used in up to 80% of the continental United States as well as within other countries to teach over 36 million children across the world “to just say no.” He declares D.A.R.E. to be a “counterproductive, program” that chews up over a billion dollars in US funds, even when such authorities as the U.S. General Accounting Office, the U.S. Surgeon General, the National Academy of Sciences, and the U.S. Department of Education have discovered the program to be an ineffective abomination of the political-legal system against drug abuse. In fact, Tana Dineen, a local Houston columnist, found that the D.A.R.E program had raised drug usage by 29% during its occupation instead of lowering it, and this is the state of affairs across the whole continental United States.

Pot is inter tangled within this discussion, as D.A.R.E. propagates an agenda which designates any drug as harmful, hazardous, and life-ending, when in fact cannabis has been proven to be one of the safest substances a person can consume. For this reason among others, Ayelet Waldman, author of the book Bad Mother, has made it her responsibility to reveal the blemishes related to the D.A.R.E. program in order to derive a new approach to teaching children about drug use. On June 16th at Books Inc. in San Francisco California, she gave a speech on what she named the Harm-Reduction Approach. This idea proposes teaching kids about the world, a landscape littered with drug use, in a way that distinguishes between what is truly harmful and what is not on a physiological basis. For Waldman, this means drawing a difference between drugs such as weed and methamphetamine or heroin, substances that deteriorate the human body over time and frequency of use. I applaud Waldman for attempting to restructure the pedagogical framework of drug education among youth as their perspective has a profound influence on drug laws as well as the social construction of stigmas related to certain drugs. Below I have posted an excerpt from the aforementioned speech she gave, so take a look and see if it is something you support, I know I do.

“Everything around us is changing… laws, society, personal idiosyncrasies, as well as the realm that cannabis resides. Sometimes it is time to sit down the bowl and really focus on the issues… well then pick it back up because politics are stressful…”

Prohibtion in 1874 was started by the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and a party of hyper conservatives aimed at social cleansing. Unfortunately for them, people realized the necessity for substances that lull the mind out of the rigors it experiences everyday. In juxtaposition, marijuana is put into the same light, as a useless substance that can only lead to savage, heathen, primitivism in the eyes of this church throttled propagation machine we call the “United” States. Prohibition didn’t work then and it will not work now.

“Everything around us is changing… laws, society, personal idiosyncrasies, as well as the realm that cannabis resides. Sometimes it is time to sit down the bowl and really focus on the issues… well then pick it back up because politics are stressful…”

Here is an image detailing some of the research done to prove the existence of health benefits vis-à-vis the industry surrounding marijuana. If I was ranking them from 1 to 10 I would probably switch up the order some, but that is a minor qualm with an excellent piece of information.

“Laws are changing everything around us as well as the world that cannabis lives in. Sometimes it is time to sit down the bowl and really focus on the issues. Well then pick it back up, politics is stressful…”

The war on drugs here in the U.S. affects our neighboring countries more than we would like to admit. In Ross Kemp’s show, Extreme World, he takes us beyond our boarders to the war torn streets of Juarez, Mexico where drug cartels battle government forces day and night. Juarez sits right on the U.S./Mexico boarder and consequently is a prime location for the illegal transport of Marijuana and other drugs into the U.S. The Mexican drug cartels are ruthless and operate on a “silver or lead” policy; “silver” being the option of bribery where they offer large sums of money for people to look the other way, and anyone who won’t take their bribes or refuses to help them receives a bullet, or the “lead.” Most of the Cartel soldiers come from the Barrios (local shanty towns) with little to no opportunity to advance save for joining the cartel brotherhood. Many members see their gangs as family, and are willing to kill for them if required. Cartel hits even take place during broad daylight on the streets of Juarez, as the cartels have little to fear from law enforcement as 95% of murders that occur within the city go unsolved.

The documentary is a little long, but luckily broke into five sections. You should definitely check them out when you get a chance.

“Laws are changing everything around us as well as the world that cannabis lives in. Sometimes it is time to sit down the bowl and really focus on the issues. Well then pick it back up, politics is stressful…”

Recently, The National Cancer Institute just released their new findings concerning Cannabis. This report breaks down Cannabis into several different categories: General Information, History, Laboratory/Animal/Preclinical Studies, Human/Clinical Studies, Adverse Effects, Overall Level of Evidence for Cannabis and Cannabinoids. These prospective categories then delve into each of their respective categories while using scholastic research articles in order to buttress the research that they propose. Over several posts (this being the first) I plan to go through these findings by the NCI highlighting or debunking the research findings and methods.

Cannabis has several chemicals inside of it that the scientific community lumps together and places under Cannabinoids. Cannabinoids are technically any chemical that has phytocannabinoids or that show effects similar to that of phytocannabinoids (or C21 aromatic hydrocarbons). Many of these, as we have explored before, have an outstanding potential for treating multitudes of diseases and ailments (refer to the graph below). The National Cancer Institute themselves recognize this potential in the statement:

“The potential benefits of medicinal Cannabis for people living with cancer include antiemetic effects, appetite stimulation, pain relief, and improved sleep. In the practice of integrative oncology, the health care provider may recommend medicinal Cannabis not only for symptom management but also for its possible direct antitumor effect.”

This is an outstanding change for the formal recognition of the remedial abilities of Cannabis as the NCI has this statement in their General Information section. Another important part that I lavished especially was underneath the Adverse Effects section.

One study done by the Department of Medicine of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio (The association between marijuana smoking and lung cancer: a systematic review.) set out to prove that there was a correlation between Cannabis and lung cancer. Unfortunately for the man…

“[A] systematic review assessing 19 studies that evaluated premalignant or malignant lung lesions in persons 18 years or older who inhaled marijuana concluded that observational studies failed to demonstrate statistically significant associations between marijuana inhaling and lung cancer after adjusting for tobacco use.”

Finally, a sensible research facility came to a conclusion that does not support ignorant fallacies and flaws in method in order to uphold a biased opinion! This new concession is especially important since the president Ronald Reagan paraded a study by Berkeley in the 1970′s that found ganja to be “one-and-a-half times as carcinogenic as tobacco”. That study, unlike this one, compared both the broad plant leaves of both marijuana and tobacco in order to find their carcinogenic properties. Funny thing is (as you all know) marijuana is smoked through the flowers not the broad fan leaves that are purely there in order to factory larger buds. People will say anything… stand by for part 2.

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