From RKSTROUP@aol.com Tue Sep 18 08:18:36 2001 Date: Tue, 18 Sep 2001 08:29:10 EDT From: RKSTROUP@aol.com To: NORML Affiliates Subject: [affiliates] Lester Grinspoon - Part II Address messages for this group to 'affiliates@mail.norml.org' --- A government scientist told me that marijuana doesn't really make people feel better, they only think they feel better. What is that supposed to mean? It doesn't matter whether it's the psychoactive effects of pot that make patients feel better. The doctor's bottom line is whether a drug helps patients find relief. We balance this with the risks of the medication. In the case of marijuana, since the toxicity is so limited, it's certainly worth trying. How do you respond to people who claim that marijuana is addictive? Addiction is difficult to define. We hear people talk about addiction to food, addiction to sex. There was a time when we thought we knew what addiction was. The withdrawal syndrome with identifiable severe symptoms was essential to that definition. You knew what it meant, and it wasn't just that you like something a lot and you miss it when it's gone, which is the case with marijuana. People love sex and it makes them feel good, and when they don't have it, it makes them unhappy, but that isn't an addiction. There are people who use a lot of cannabis and don't like being deprived of it, but they don't fall apart when they can't get it. When I helped Ramsey Clark defend the Ethiopian Zion Coptic Church members, I had occasion to find out something about whether marijuana is addictive. They believe that God resides in each of us and that smoking ganja helps a person realize his or her godliness. I observed them for three days in Jamaica. You wouldn't believe the huge amounts they smoke. I examined them in prison after they had been deprived of ganja for about a week. There wasn't an iota of any kind of addiction withdrawal syndrome. They missed ganja, because it was part of their religion, and they felt that not having it was affecting them spiritually, but there were no withdrawal symptoms. Do you disagree with the claim that marijuana causes memory deficits? Marijuana's effects on memory and concentration are the opposite of what the critics allege. Marijuana gives you hyperattention so that you concentrate fully on one thing at a time. It limits your peripheral awareness so you're not investing as much of your focus on other things. In normal consciousness, people are monitoring many aspects of their lives, both internally and externally. With cannabis you are focused in the moment; the concerns about future or past, or less interesting events, drop off while stoned. I don't think it's a question of memory so much as it is a concentration of attention. What's behind criticisms of medical marijuana? The government sees it as a dangerous threat to their decades of reefer madness propaganda. They worry that when Americans see cannabis easily and safely used medically by aunts, uncles, parents, grandparents, and friends, then they will not support this prohibition which involves arresting 700,000 people per year. And that is why the government wants to get cannabinoids into pill form so they can say, "No you don't have to use whole cannabis, we now have pharmaceutical company produced pills.' Most patients who come to me for Marinol only want it because they face drug testing, and Marinol is a legal explanation for a urine test that shows the presence of cannabinoids. They find marijuana more useful than Marinol, but they are afraid of the law. The only way these pharmaceutical products will sell is if the law keeps people from using regular marijuana. On a level playing field, whole marijuana will be used more than pharmaceutical cannabinoids. Millions of Americans have tried marijuana, and at least 10 million regularly use it, despite criminal penalties and other disincentives. Unless we are prepared to believe that all these people are driven by "Reefer Madness" cravings, we must conclude that they find something in the experience attractive and useful. And yet there is very little open exploration of these uses, with the growing exception of its medical value. Even here, government officials want to mute the discussion out of a fear expressed by the chief of the Public Health Service when in 1992 he discontinued the only legal avenue to medicinal marijuana: "If it is perceived that the Public Health Service is going around giving marijuana to folks, there would be a perception that this stuff can't be so bad... it gives a bad signal." Tell us about your continuing efforts to document marijuana's usefulness and share cannabis knowledge. Most people believe that marijuana use is primarily for recreational purposes, and in recent years many thousands of people have discovered its medical utility. But there are many uses that do not fit into these two generic categories, and that's why I've described a new category called "enhancement." People use cannabis to enhance a wide range of activities n from dining, to music, to sex, to art. They also use marijuana to catalyze new ideas and insights. Enhancement uses overlap, to some degree, with medicinal and recreational uses, but I view it as a discrete category. I have been gathering essays by people who use marijuana to enhance their lives. Some of your readers may wish to look at some of the essays, or even possibly to contribute to the collection, at my website (www.marijuana-uses.com). The site is attracting 32,000 hits a month, and eventually I hope to publish the best essays as an anthology. The essay I just sent to our webmaster is called "I'm an addict." It's written by a 26-year-old man who spent a lot of time in jail because he has a violence impulse disorder. As a kid, he spent a lot of time in juvenile detention. As an adult, he's been in jails and prison. Now he's discovered that marijuana helps him control that violence. He's now married, has a young daughter, and a legitimate job. He says he's "addicted" to a lifestyle of not being violent- all he has to do is smoke marijuana every night and he isn't violent. A New York City police officer recently wrote an essay. He said marijuana makes him a better officer, especially in drug arrest situations. There's a lot of range in these essays, including the one you wrote. You also have a medical marijuana website that can best be described as an online doctor's office. The medical marijuana site, www.rxmarijuana.com, gets 100,000 hits per month. It's keeping me very busy. People from all over the world write in to ask medical questions. I can only answer a fraction of them. We get hits from Yugoslavia, Ukraine, New Zealand, Australia, India, Europe, China, North and South America. I even get questions from Sweden, which has a very bad marijuana policy, especially since it has a reputation for being so progressive. It's probably the worst of western European countries. I was there to give a speech, and was referred to on the front page of a major newspaper as "the devil from America." You're a Harvard physician and professor who risked a lot to become publicly involved with marijuana advocacy. Isn't it difficult to combine privacy and security with advocacy? Yes, but it's essential that more people come out of the closet about their marijuana use. Just as gays and lesbians coming out has decreased the level of homophobia, when people of substance and achievement publicly proclaim that they've used marijuana, it will help diminish the prevalence of cannabinophobia. During an interview on a popular talk show, the host asked me whether I used marijuana. He hadn't prepped me for the question, and I was surprised by it, but I replied that I did use marijuana. After the show I told him I was surprised he would ask about my personal life without running it by me either before the show or during a break. I asked him what he would have done if I had directed the cannabis question back to him. He was irritated and alarmed by that prospect, and said, "That's different, Lester. Everyone already knows you use marijuana." Many famous and highly accomplished people use marijuana, but most of them are afraid to admit it. Too few people in the public eye have voluntarily acknowledged cannabis use. Except for the well-known physicist Richard Feynman, academics have been the most cautious. Feynman courageously acknowledged his ongoing use of marijuana, and I applaud his courage. I'm not discounting the potential dangers of coming out, however. People who acknowledge cannabis use are at risk for being taken less seriously by their peers, and there could be even worse consequences. You've been on the board of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) for many years. Will you continue? I recently resigned from the NORML board, and have taken emeritus status from Harvard Medical School. My wife retired from her position as a professor of mathematics. We wanted to have more time to play together while we are still fairly fit. I love NORML. Keith [Stroup] and Allen [St Pierre] are wonderful people, heroic people. They work very hard for the movement. When Keith was gone, Allen and Dick Cowan kept NORML together in some very desperate times. There wouldn't be a NORML if not for them. I will continue to do public appearances for NORML and help them in every way I can. What did you think about the allegations that High Times and its parent company, the Trans-High Corporation, might owe NORML money? I very much doubt there is any money there that NORML was gypped out of. High Times has helped NORML a lot over the years. But even if there was some missing money, to hire lawyers and do discovery and all that, it's just a waste. I can't see money going for lawsuits when we should be spending it working for our cause. If somebody was clever enough to gyp NORML out of money, they were probably clever enough to hide it so you'd never find out. There's no point in pursuing it. You'd end up with nothing but a big bill from the lawyers and a lot of animosity. If we had pursued it the way some wanted us to, it would have created another rupture in this movement. There have already too many internecine conflicts. The only people we want to battle are the drug warriors. What are your predictions about marijuana's future? I think the Bush administration will try to destroy the medical marijuana movement, but they will not succeed. The new attorney general, Ashcroft, says we need to rev up the drug war. The biggest threat to these folks is medical marijuana, because people will see this plant works and with minimal toxicity, that the drug warriors have been dishonest all these years, and there will be no way they can long maintain the faAade. Patients are teaching their physicians about marijuana. How is the government going to crush that? Are they going to attack doctors as they unsuccessfully did in California? Imprison sick and dying people? It's absolutely inevitable that marijuana will become increasingly acceptable as a medicine, no matter what the government does. The momentum is unstoppable. Marijuana prohibition is like a mass hysteria. It's like the Crusades or the witch-hunts of previous eras, when entire societies go crazy and do irrational things. Someday, we will look back on the war on marijuana and recognize it as a kind of madness, a destructive mass pathology! i To order Dr Grinspoon's books and find out more about medicinal marijuana vist these websites: www.marijuana-uses.com and www.rcmarijuana.com --- This article was sent to you by someone searching the Cannabis Culture Magazine archives. The URL for this article is http://www.cannabisculture.com/articles/2013.html Cannabis Culture Magazine - www.cannabisculture.com PO Box 15, 199 West Hastings, Vancouver BC, Canada V6B 1H4 --- You are currently subscribed to affiliates as: norml@missoulaweb.com To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-affiliates-30930M@mail.norml.org