It looks complicated but this women speaks in simple, plain language that everyone can understand and talks about amazing findings. I'm positive that if you watch the full thing you'll come make a comment about how your mind was blown.
For the first time in my life I agree with Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, Ron Paul, and even Geraldo! Finally we all have an issue that we can agree on because it is so blatantly obvious - LEGALIZE MARIJUANA!
All the regulars here at LP know that I support Obama and worked my ass off to get him elected. Overall I think he's done a "good" job - not great, not fantastic, not amazing, just good. So objectively there's a lot of room for improvement, but comparatively he's doing pretty well. By that I mean "good" is good enough considering that the other option is "insane and horrible".
One of the areas where he's doing worse than a Republican is Marijuana. He campaigned saying he would direct the federal government to leave Medical Marijuana states alone and not use their resources to go after anyone under the Medical Marijuana umbrella. At first the Justice Department declared they were going to follow that directive, but the reality is much different. Here in CO there have been more raids on Medical Marijuana by the DEA under the Obama Administration than there were under the Bush Administration. Some of you won't believe that I'm saying this, but on the issue of Marijuana Obama is WORSE THAN BUSH. Obama promised better treatment and gave more verbal support to MMJ than bush did, but that rhetoric isn't being applied in reality.
It seems to me like he's getting so beat up on all the other issues that he's abandoned ship on Marijuana. That's somewhat understandable, and I do agree that education, clean energy and health care are more important than legal MMJ. But the crazy thing is that an issue like Health Care is much more controversial than MMJ, and when looking at the facts MMJ is a much clearer and easier issue than health care is. I'd hoped that Obama would be capable of sitting down, looking over the facts and coming to a rational and logical conclusion, but on the issue of pot, where the information is there to be understood, he hasn't made the connection. And the fact that he could have so much trouble figuring this easy issue out worries me about his ability to deal with the more complicated ones.
I'm ready for our politicians to get up and pronounce their support for Marijuana. The fear is illogical and when our leaders continue to act like there's a reason to fear weed it perpetuates the cycle. Our current leaders are all a bunch of cowards. I'm an independent voter who has been siding with the democrats lately cause they're not as crazy as the republicans, but god they do overall suck. I'm sick of this 2 party system filled with liars and cowards. I hate having to vote for the lesser of two evils, to choose between warm shit and cold shit. I'm sick of it.
Anyway here's what I originally meant to post but then I started ranting. Oh, and do note that this article, which is very critical of Obama and calls him out for lying, is from the Huffington Post, a place that people often consider to be Obama lover central:
Election 2008: What a wonderful time to be a medical marijuana patient in Colorado! Voters had just elected Barack Obama as the President of the United States of America. "Hope" was in the air. Thousands of Colorado medical marijuana patients and caregivers were certain that the Federal government would cease trampling on their State constitutional rights after Inauguration Day.
Candidate Barack Obama had explicitly stated, "I would not have the Justice Department prosecuting and raiding medical marijuana; it is not a good use of our resources." Watch:
Later in the campaign, Obama promised, "I will not be using Department of Justice resources to try to circumvent state laws on the [medical marijuana] issue," since America has violent crimes and terrorism to deal with. Watch:
Instead, mere hours after the new President was inaugurated, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration ("DEA") unleashed a campaign of terror on medical marijuana patients in California. Optimists in the marijuana movement attributed this to nasty Bush holdovers and career bureaucrats throwing one last temper tantrum.
In the wake of these raids, new U.S. Attorney General, Eric Holder, laughingly reassured us that Candidate Obama's statements are "American policy" now that Obama has become President:
On October 19, 2009, our hope was further bolstered with the issuance of formal written guidance (PDF) from the U.S. Justice Department related to medical marijuana.
The issuance of that guidance seemingly removed one of the last significant impediments to upstanding business entrepreneurs serving Colorado's suffering medical marijuana patients. A new industry started to form, creating jobs, paying taxes, and leasing vacant commercial space. The cobwebs began to clear from Colorado's dormant economy.
Then, on February 2, 2010, amid gasps from nearly the entire marijuana reform movement, medical marijuana patients, and other open-minded science-based thinkers, Obama formally nominated former Bush DEA Administrator Michelle Leonhart, to head the Obama DEA.
Leonhart has a notorious career as a jack-booted administrator of the least successful government program in modern history, i.e. the Drug War, and has a fawning affection for the highest-paid DEA snitch of all time, Andrew Chambers, a criminal who has been found to have committed perjury by at least two federal appeals courts. Any hope that Obama would chart a new course on drug policy was dashed by this horrible nomination.
Only ten days after the Leonhart nomination, the belligerent Obama DEA dropped the equivalent of a nuclear bomb on Colorado's medical marijuana patients with an armed militarized raid on small-time home-based medical marijuana farmer Chris Bartkowicz. The day of this raid, the DEA Agent in Charge, Jeff Sweetin, declared open federal warfare on Colorado's entire nascent medical marijuana community.
"Technically, every dispensary in the state is in blatant violation of federal law," Sweetin told the Denver Post. "The time is coming when we go into a dispensary, we find out what their profit is, we seize the building and we arrest everybody. They're violating federal law; they're at risk of arrest and imprisonment."
Sweetin's apocalyptic declaration of war and threat to "arrest everybody" terrified Colorado's sick and suffering medical marijuana patients. The day after the raid, I filed a formal complaint with the U.S. Department of Justice Office of Professional Responsibility against the DEA agents involved in the raid. My complaint was quickly and decisively backed by U.S. Congressman Jared Polis.
To this date, months later, neither Congressman Polis nor myself have received any response to our pleas to the Obama administration to uphold its "American policy."
Although Sweetin eventually backed away from his full frontal declaration of war, and Obama sent him to Quantico, Virginia, Sweetin's words pale in comparison to what Obama's Justice Department had in store next.
On February 16, 2010, the U.S. Attorney for Colorado filed a criminal prosecution against Bartkowicz in federal court. Obama appointed John Walsh as U.S. Attorney, and Obama's hand-picked federal prosecutor further upped the ante, successfully requesting that the Court place a gag order on the Bartkowicz defense from even mentioning his intent to comply with Colorado state law at the jury trial.
The Obama Administration's court filings reveal that Bartkowicz faces a grotesquely disproportionate 20 years to life in prison only because he went on television to discuss what he believed were legal actions in growing medical marijuana.
Progress is being made against Marijuana Prohibition. Soon, this modern-day Prohibition will be as extinct as a saber tooth tiger. In the meantime, however, that cornered tiger still has sharp claws and long teeth that can destroy human life and freedom. Obama has done the opposite of what we thought, and what he promised. Instead of caging that tiger, he has unleashed it.
Colorado's medical marijuana community should fear the Obama Justice Department. An objective analysis reveals that, as far as Colorado medical marijuana is concerned, eight years of George W. Bush were better than one and a half years of Obama. Bush Justice did not prosecute a single Colorado medical marijuana grower or patient over eight years. Obama has conducted numerous medical marijuana raids and property forfeitures, and seeks to steal Chris Bartkowicz's youth from him. With Obama's term not even half over, there seems little "hope" for "change."
One of the most common attacks against Marijuana these days is that weed "kills your memory". The degree of memory loss depends on who you're talking to, but ranges from "only mild short term memory loss" to "life long memory damage". The truth? Life long damage is a crock of shit, and the short term memory loss depends on the type of weed you smoke.
All of the previous studies on MMJ in labs in the USA were using low quality government provided MMJ or solely THC extracted from the plants. It is found that THC does mess with your short term memory, making it harder to remember things that are learned while high, though it's not very severe and it is still possible to learn new information while high and then remember it later while sober. But another ingredient in MMJ called CBD actually counteracts THC and totally eliminates any memory impairment.
Finally a study actually used a realistic setting to test the affects of MMJ, having people smoke their own supply in their house before undergoing testing. The results have researchers thinking that CBD might be a cure or treatment for people suffering from memory related diseases like Alzheimers.
The findings suggest that an ingredient more plentiful in some types of marijuana than in others may help to reduce the memory loss that some users suffer.
The key difference between the types of cannabis is the ratio of two chemicals found in all strains. Tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) is the primary active ingredient, and is responsible for the effects associated with the classic 'high', including euphoria and giddiness but also anxiety and paranoia. The second chemical, cannabidiol, has more calming effects, and brain-imaging studies have shown that it can block the psychosis-inducing effects of THC2. Skunk-type strains of cannabis contain a higher ratio of THC to cannabidiol than do hashish or herbal types.
To test this hypothesis, Curran and her colleagues travelled to the homes of 134 volunteers, where the subjects got high on their own supply before completing a battery of psychological tests designed to measure anxiety, memory recall and other factors such as verbal fluency when both sober and stoned. The researchers then took a portion of the stash back to their laboratory to test how much THC and cannabidiol it contained.
The subjects were divided into groups of high (samples containing more than 0.75% cannabidiol) and low (less than 0.14%) cannabidiol exposure, and the data were filtered so that their THC levels were constant. Analysis showed that participants who had smoked cannabis low in cannabidiol were significantly worse at recalling text than they were when not intoxicated. Those who smoked cannabis high in cannabidiol showed no such impairment.
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The results suggest that cannabidiol can mitigate THC's interference with memory formation. This is the first study in human to show such effects. One previous study, led by Aaron Ilan, a cognitive neuroscientist at the San Francisco Brain Research Institute in California, failed to find variations in cognitive effects with varying concentrations of cannabidiol3.
Ilan attributes the positive finding of Curran and her team to their more powerful methodology in analysing subjects' own smoking preferences. In the United States, government policy dictates that only marijuana provided by the National Institute on Drug Abuse can be used for research — and it "is notorious for being low in THC and of poor quality", says Ilan.
Lester Grinspoon, professor emeritus of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachussetts, who has studied the effects of marijuana on patients since 1967, says that Curran's study is important. "Cannabis with high cannabidiol levels will make a more appealing option for anti-pain, anti-anxiety and anti-spasm treatments, because they can be delivered without causing disconcerting euphoria," he says.
I've been doing a shitload of research on Marijuana and this is one of the charts I came across which I think does a great job of illustrating some of the insanity behind our ridiculous war on drugs:
I'm finally learning how the hell our bodies work, and more specifically how our brains work, and it has led me to do a lot of research on how Marijuana affects the brain. I stumbled upon this little list of great facts that most people don't know because we've all been lied to, fooled, scammed, tricked and scared into thinking Marijuana is bad. The crazy thing is that not only is it NOT BAD for us, it is actually very good for us in many situations. But I'll get into that another time.
For now just browse over this and I'm curious to know how many of you already knew these facts, which facts you had no clue about, and which facts contradict the perception of MMJ that you built while growing up.
"Marijuana" refers to the dried leaves and flowers of the cannabis plant [1], which contain the non-narcotic chemical THC at various potencies. It is smoked or eaten to produce the feeling of being "high." The different strains of this herb produce different sensual effects, ranging from sedative to stimulant.
There is no simple profile of a typical marijuana user. It has been used for 1000s of years for medical, social, and religious reasons and for relaxation [2]. Several of our Presidents [3] are believed to have smoked it. One out of every five Americans say they have tried it. And it is still popular among artists, writers, musicians, activists, lawyers, inventors, working people, etc.
Marijuana has been used since ancient times [4]. While field hands and working people have often smoked the raw plant, aristocrats historically prefer hashish [5] made from the cured flowers of the plant. It was not seen as a problem until a calculated disinformation [sic] campaign was launched in the 1930s [6], and the first American laws against using it were passed [7].
No, it is not [8]. Most users are moderate consumers who smoke it socially to relax. We now know that 10% of our population have "addictive personalities" and they are neither more nor less likely to overindulge in cannabis than in anything else. On a relative scale, marijuana is less habit forming than either sugar or chocolate but more so than anchovies. Sociologists report a general pattern of marijuana use that peaks in the early adult years, followed by a period of levelling off and then a gradual reduction in use [9].
No; not one single case, not ever. THC is one of the few chemicals for which there is no known toxic amount [10]. The federal agency NIDA says that autopsies reveal that 75 people per year are high on marijuana when they die: this does not mean that marijuana caused or was even a factor in their deaths. The chart below compares the number of deaths attributable to selected substances in a typical year:
No [11]. The only crime most marijuana users commit is that they use marijuana. And, while many people who abuse dangerous drugs also smoke marijuana, the old "stepping stone" theory is now discredited, since virtually all of them started out "using" legal drugs like sugar, coffee, cigarettes, alcohol, etc.
No. In fact, Federal Bureau of Narcotics director Harry Anslinger once told Congress just the opposite - that it leads to non-violence and pacifism [12]. If he was telling the truth (which he and key federal agencies have not often done regarding marijuana), then re-legalizing marijuana should be considered as one way to curb violence in our cities. The simple fact is that marijuana does not change your basic personality. The government says that over 20 million Americans still smoke it, probably including some of the nicest people you know.
Smoking anything is not healthy, but marijuana is less dangerous than tobacco and people smoke less of it at a time. This health risk can be avoided by eating the plant instead of smoking it [13], or can be reduced by smoking smaller amounts of stronger marijuana. There is no proof that marijuana causes serious health or sexual problems [14] but, like alcohol, its use by children or adolescents is discouraged. Cannabis is a medicinal herb that has hundreds of proven, valuable theraputic uses - from stress reduction to glaucoma to asthma to cancer therapy, etc. [15].
9 Q. What About All Those Scary Statistics and Studies?
Most were prepared as scare tactics for the government by Dr. Gabriel Nahas, and were so biased and unscientific that Nahas was fired by the National Institute of Health [16] and finally renounced his own studies as meaningless [17]. For one experiment, he suffocated monkeys for five minutes at a time, using proportionately more smoke than the average user inhales in an entire lifetime [18]. The other studies that claim sensational health risks are also suspect, since they lack controls and produce results which cannot be replicated or independently verified [19].
No independent government panel that has studied marijuana has ever recommended jail for users [20]. Concerned persons should therefore ask their legislators to re-legalize and tax this plant, subject to age limits and regulations similar to those on alcohol and tobacco.
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