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In a disappointing setback, Arizona’s top public health official, Will Humble, is denying a request to increase the number of conditions medical marijuana may treat. He told the Arizona Republic that there is not enough scientific evidence to prove post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, depression, and migraines can be treated with marijuana.
Question: Will you put post-traumatic stress disorder on the list of qualifying conditions for medical marijuana? Why or why not?
Answer: No. There’s just not the scientific evidence out there yet to support permanently adding any of the conditions to the qualified list, at least right now. I recognize there’s a real shortage of studies and data that’s out there. You base your policy decisions on science and research, and not ideology or a predetermined political point of view.
This perfectly highlights the absurd legal Catch-22 medical marijuana is caught in. The Obama administration refuses to reschedule marijuana so that it can be legally used medically under federal law, because they claim there is not enough proof of its accepted medical use in treatment. Yet the Obama administration also refuses to allow the scientific studies to be conducted which could prove the potential for marijuana to treat conditions, like PTSD.
Just last year the Food and Drug Administration accepted a protocol by the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies to study the effects of marijuana on PTSD. The potential study was stopped, though, when the National Institute on Drug Abuse denied it the marijuana to conduct the research with.
There aren’t enough FDA-approved studies “proving” marijuana has an accepted medical value because the government won’t even let the studies happen in the first place. Yet the lack of data showing cannabis has value is the justification the Obama administration uses for keeping it a schedule I drug, which in turn allows them to make it nearly impossible for doctors to do any FDA-approved research.
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There’s too much money in Prohibition, and money is what the investor class needs in an era of declining global growth.
It’s a shame that the effects of marijuana can’t be properly researched. My own experience many, many years ago was that it gave you the munchies and led me to listen to Firesign Theatre. That sounds a whole lot better than experiencing PTSD.
And yet synthetic marijuana is an approved drug. Or was. My mother took it during her leukemia treatment at MD Anderson Hospital in Houston in 1996.
So how does that work? Synthetic marijuana is approved, but real marijuana is not?
PTSD in returning vets from Iraq and Afghanistan:
American: 30%
British: 4%
http://www.psmag.com/health/ptsd-affecting-more-american-soldiers-than-british-32096/
Chomsky calls Arizona “occupied Mexico.”
So? Nobody has the right to forbid an adult American his right to do anything he wants to his body. Nobody. They might have the power, but they will never have the right. Never. Meddlers and nosebags.