Good for Gupta
by digby
I think this could be a pretty big deal. It’s not that it matters so much that an individual doctor has changed his mind on pot, but that it’s this doctor, one who is also a well known TV celebrity and highly respected by the media:
Over the last year, I have been working on a new documentary called “Weed.” The title “Weed” may sound cavalier, but the content is not.
I traveled around the world to interview medical leaders, experts, growers and patients. I spoke candidly to them, asking tough questions. What I found was stunning.
Long before I began this project, I had steadily reviewed the scientific literature on medical marijuana from the United States and thought it was fairly unimpressive. Reading these papers five years ago, it was hard to make a case for medicinal marijuana. I even wrote about this in a TIME magazine article, back in 2009, titled “Why I would Vote No on Pot.”
Well, I am here to apologize.
I apologize because I didn’t look hard enough, until now. I didn’t look far enough. I didn’t review papers from smaller labs in other countries doing some remarkable research, and I was too dismissive of the loud chorus of legitimate patients whose symptoms improved on cannabis.
Instead, I lumped them with the high-visibility malingerers, just looking to get high. I mistakenly believed the Drug Enforcement Agency listed marijuana as a schedule 1 substance because of sound scientific proof. Surely, they must have quality reasoning as to why marijuana is in the category of the most dangerous drugs that have “no accepted medicinal use and a high potential for abuse.”
They didn’t have the science to support that claim, and I now know that when it comes to marijuana neither of those things are true. It doesn’t have a high potential for abuse, and there are very legitimate medical applications. In fact, sometimes marijuana is the only thing that works. Take the case of Charlotte Figi, who I met in Colorado. She started having seizures soon after birth. By age 3, she was having 300 a week, despite being on seven different medications. Medical marijuana has calmed her brain, limiting her seizures to 2 or 3 per month.
I have seen more patients like Charlotte first hand, spent time with them and come to the realization that it is irresponsible not to provide the best care we can as a medical community, care that could involve marijuana.
We have been terribly and systematically misled for nearly 70 years in the United States, and I apologize for my own role in that.
I hope this article and upcoming documentary will help set the record straight.
Some of us out here in the world, living as we have nearly our whole lives in a huge national experiment in which millions of baby boomers smoked pot, some for decades, know very well that it is not only fairly benign as drugs go (certainly less lethal than alcohol) but that it can be powerful medicine. The science has obviously been rigged forever and our policy is being run by drug warrior entrepreneurs whose livelihoods depend upon their ability to confiscate property from American citizens with no due process. And there’s always that bunch of puritans who see any form of pleasure as something to be banned — holding hands with those who gleefully tweak the racist lizard brains of Americans to portray pot as a drug of crazed people of color. It’s nuts and that’s nothing new. Watch Reefer Madness to get a sense of just how stupid this whole thing has been from the get-go.
When legalization of medical marijuana first began in California I fretted that there was going to be a backlash and that we’d end up going back to full prohibition. The storefront dispensaries weren’t very sophisticated and they sometimes seemed designed to scare the straights into calling for restriction. And there’s been a back and forth on just that basis here with the combined efforts of the feds and certain local jurisdictions resulting in various clampdowns and threats to close the dispensaries on trumped up charges.
But they haven’t succeeded completely and as time goes on it looks less and less likely that they will. The fact that the rest of the country is following, either with medical marijuana or just plain old legalization has had a big impact here, I think. At some point it just seems inevitable and the anti-pleasure people move on to the next target.
The big problem we will face is with the federal government which is deeply invested in the drug war and has built up a massive permanent infrastructure to fight it. There’s a lot of money and ambition tied up in anti-marijuana efforts. And that’s where Dr. Sanjay Gupta can make a difference. He’s a member of the club, a political celebrity and one who is welcomed into all the Village salons as one of them. And he’s widely considered by them to be an “expert” on all things medical. He will get a hearing.
I’m not saying his change of heart will change federal policy in and of itself. But it could have an influence. So, good for him.
.