JAMA says it's medicine

http://www.eastbayexpress.com/oakland/its-official-marijuana-is-medicine/Content?oid=4381482

The nation's top medical organization released a major series of papers on medical cannabis last week in the Journal of the American Medical Association, in a move that constitutes a small step for the AMA, but a giant leap in cannabis medical history.

In five key papers, teams of researchers systematically reviewed dozens of clinical studies of marijuana, speaking in clear language that the "use of marijuana for chronic pain, neuropathic pain, and spasticity due to multiple sclerosis is supported by high-quality evidence."

The review validated what doctors and patients in California have risked their freedom to say for twenty years. The findings also directly refute critics who maintain that "marijuana is not medicine."

"They concluded cannabis is useful," said Dr. Frank Lucido, a Berkeley physician who specializes in cannabis. "I don't think a single study didn't show benefit. ... I think it was very positive."

"It is somewhat affirming to see this come out," said Clint Werner, best-selling author of Marijuana: Gateway to Health. "It's invalidating that talking point that 'it's just a Cheech and Chong show.'"

What's driving this is a tremendous cultural shift that's preceding the political shift," said Martin Lee, of author Smoke Signals. The AMA is acknowledging "what's been known for 5,000 years."

The AMA actually opposed federal cannabis prohibition in 1937. After losing that round, most doctors have toed the Drug War line ever since. "It's great that they have finally acknowledged there's some medicinal value in cannabis, but the whole thing is so pathetic," Lee said.

Most major news media outlets, however, have spun the JAMA papers negatively, embracing the narrative that many uses for medical pot are still based on poor science. News reports noted that of one of the JAMA studies found that "there was low-quality evidence suggesting that cannabinoids were associated with improvements in nausea and vomiting due to chemotherapy, weight gain in HIV infection, sleep disorders, and Tourette syndrome."

News outlets also pointed to another review that found that "there is some evidence to support the use of marijuana for nausea and vomiting related to chemotherapy, specific pain syndromes, and spasticity from multiple sclerosis. However, for most other indications that qualify by state law for use of medical marijuana, such as hepatitis C, Crohn disease, Parkinson disease, or Tourette syndrome, the evidence supporting its use is of poor quality."

Cannabis experts say the problem with some of the conclusions in the JAMA studies, and the reporting about them, is that they fail to own up to the main reason why study quality has often been poor: the systematic blockade on pot research. For decades, the federal government has refused to authorize research on the medical benefits of cannabis. As a result, the inconclusiveness of some of the research is more a reflection of the federal ban than of the medical effectiveness of pot. "You know how incredibly hard it is to do research that is intended to confirm benefits of cannabis?" said Warner. "It's impossible. We still have a huge catch-22."

Experts also say that the decision by AMA researchers to ignore the research blockade shows their bias. "It's a national embarrassment. The federal designation that cannabis has no medical value is like saying the moon is made of green cheese," Lee said. "It seems the AMA can't say, 'No, the moon is not made of green cheese.'"

The AMA researchers also fail to acknowledge the real world benefits reported by patients. For example, about one in twenty California adults (1.4 million) have used medical cannabis for a "serious" condition and 92 percent of them have reported that it worked. "We have plenty of evidence that it helps for a lot of things," Lucido said. "We should always do more research. But we shouldn't stop people from using it in the meantime."

The AMA researchers also listed the side effects of cannabis without providing context. "Adverse Effects included dizziness, dry mouth, nausea, fatigue, somnolence, euphoria, vomiting, disorientation, and hallucination," one of the reports concluded.

But the AMA researchers didn't compare the adverse side effects of cannabis to those of competing analgesics and anti-inflammatories. Painkiller overdoses are America's leading epidemic. Ibuprofen, for example, regularly causes kidney failure. But those facts were not mentioned in the JAMA studies. "A full third of the Physician's Desk Reference is adverse effects, including death," Lucido said. "Cannabis has about ten adverse effects, at least two of which are often desired."

The AMA researchers' statements about cannabis addiction also lacked context. "I imagine sleeping pills probably have a much bigger dependency ratio," Lucido said.

Still, as half-hearted and equivocal as the JAMA papers were, they contributed to a rising tide of mainstream validation for cannabis that's washing away its prohibition.

"Culturally, the fight is over. We won," Lee said. "The pro-cannabis side has conquered the culture. Now politics is catching up."

I wonder if it would help my butt!

Couldn't hurt... lol. Are you feeling any better? I bet the bruising is in full bloom.

Suppose to help with inflammation.

Bruising, with the help of physical therapy is starting to resolve. Muscle stimulation, deep ultrasound, and sports taping has helped. I spend 3-4 hours a day in my pool ...pain free in the pool. I am able to walk around the house without crutches. Getting better everyday.

Joanimaroni wrote:Bruising, with the help of physical therapy is starting to resolve. Muscle stimulation,  deep ultrasound, and sports taping has helped. I spend 3-4 hours a day in my pool ...pain free in the pool. I am able to walk around the house without crutches. Getting better everyday.

Glad you're getting better.

Here's some history of mj:

https://medium.com/@ReachCASP/health-scientist-blacklisting-and-the-meaning-of-marijuana-in-the-oval-office-in-the-early-1970s-71ea41427b49

In 1970, the Administration of United States President Richard Milhous Nixon drafted and successfully lobbied for ‘substance control’ legislation still in force today that forms the ideological basis of American national policy towards cannabis and psychedelics. The legislation implicitly encoded racist, homophobic, and bigoted views. While prejudicial views were not immediately obvious on the surface, as they were clothed in medical science and a structured review process, they were indeed present at the law’s inception and in its subsequent enforcement. We know this to be true, not only because such legislation marked a continuation of the same century-old pattern of authoritarian hatred towards psychoactive substance use behaviors in certain socially maligned groups, but also because the documented historical record shows that key members of the Nixon Administration, including Nixon himself, privately made their true ulterior intentions explicitly known.

In the generations immediately preceding Nixon, expressions of extreme prejudice and pseudoscience in matters of cannabis and psychedelics federal lawmaking were far more overt and staunch. Thirty-three years before the Nixon law, in 1937, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed into law a bill whose chief proponent, Harry J. Anslinger, a Roosevelt Administration official, argued publicly in Congressional testimony and media interviews that use of cannabis, strategically termed ‘marihuana’ instead of the far more familiar “Cannabis” for the sake of perpetuating an aura of Hispanic foreignness, “makes darkies think they’re as good as white men” and has resulted in the “Satanic music, jazz, and swing” created by “Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos and entertainers”. Furthermore, Anslinger, in an early attempt at using pharmaco-scientific prestige to justify prejudicial policy, brought forth a so-called “scientific expert” to testify before Congress: Temple University pharmacology professor James C. Munch, Ph.D. (George Washington University), who had previously worked for the FDA. Munch argued that, based on his experimental research in dogs, use of cannabis, for even as little as 3 months, resulted in insanity, including a temporary nsanity that Professor Munch himself attested to experiencing after his own self-experimentation with cannabis.

He described the latter the following year when called to the stand in court to testify in his capacity as the Official Expert of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics on marijuana, a title given to him by Anslinger that he held until 1962. Serving as a defense expert witness to support an insanity defense in a Newark, New Jersey capital case homicide courtroom trial in which two women stood accused of robbing, shooting, and murdering a bus driver, Munch testified that use of cannabis (specifically, “two puffs on a marijuana cigarette”) had once caused him to turn into a bat that flew around the room for 15 minutes before ultimately landing in a 200-foot high vat of ink. The insanity defense worked, as it did in several other major cases, and set off a storm of media sensationalism. Thus, in courtrooms across the country, as had occurred in the halls of Congress, along with explicitly racist sentiments, outrageous pseudo-scientific claims about cannabis, advanced by government-backed scientists, were being accepted as matters of fact and law without as much as the slightest of scrutiny.

A similar pattern had developed with psychedelics. To take one example: in the 1930s, and for the few decades preceding, campaigns of overt ethnocentric bigotry were directed against peyote-using Native Americans in the New Mexico area, involving federally sanctioned raids, incarceration, and land grabs. These policies completely suppressed bona fide tribal indigenous spiritual practices, where peyote, a psychoactive cactus known as Lophophora Williamsi native to North America, had found a longstanding home. In the eyes of federal government officials, peyote and its use were seen as dangerous and distorted — a position officially held until 1994 when Congress passed and President William Jefferson Clinton signed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

Culturally imperialistic attitudes toward the religious practices of ‘Sovereign Indian Nations’ was the latest in a pattern of behavior stretching back to the 17th century when Spanish conquistadores arriving in the “New World” directed the Catholic Church’s gruesome Inquisition wrath against the indigenous Aztec population who consumed psychoactive psilocybin-containing mushrooms they called Teonanacatl (“divine flesh”), a practice missionaries had suppressed as they viewed it as an affront to the Christian Eucharist ritual consumption of sacramental wine and bread

Turning back to the early 1970s, it should be no surprise then to discover that the Nixon tapes, which recorded private conversations in the Presidential Oval Office, capture Nixon himself associating cannabis and other psychoactive substance use with anti-war protesters, Jews, psychiatrists, homosexuals, and passivity, all of whom and which he despised. In Nixon’s view, use of cannabis and other drugs was simply “dope” use and a sign of moral social decay. During the 17-month period between when Congress passed the Controlled Substances Act on October 27th, 1970, to March 22nd, 1972 when the Congressionally mandated Presidential Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse issued its report and policy recommendations, Nixon sought to find ways to sabotage the marijuana policy review process. These interventions helped to ensure there would be political momentum to continue to maintain a policy of criminalization of cannabis use, even when the Presidential panel would go on to recommend the opposite.

The conversations recorded on the Nixon tapes (found here, here, and here) provide excellent insight into the bigotry, cultural chauvinism, and anti-intellectualism that undergirds much of the supposedly scientifically neutral national drug policies still in effect today. Nixon’s views are worth a careful look because they were, after all, the sociopolitical views of the highest political officer in the United States, a leading global superpower, and they linger on in many quarters still today. Having access to the recordings of conversations held in private in the Oval Office allows for unprecedented insight into the politics behind laws that have touched the lives of hundreds of millions. The tapes reveal exactly how federal law on marijuana and drugs was molded into the shape that it retains today. Here are a few topically organized excerpts liberally taken from the tapes with annotations.



And the article goes on. I never hallucinated on marijuana but did on fentanyl or how ever you spell that pain killer and I almost lost my damn mind while taking it. Had to stop after about 3 days. I did see bats flying around and in my hair.