MEDICAL MARIJUANA

This week I want to honor my mother who is visiting and my father who can't
be here because of a chronic illness.

It is my father's condition that relates my mother's visit to marijuana.

The reason my father can't visit is because he has lost too much of his
brain to function independently or even with my mother's help. He has had a
series of brain losses due to strokes. What are strokes? They are clots of
blood that clog up the arteries of the brain and stop the flow of oxygen to
the part of the brain where the artery is clogged. The clots can be large
when in which case massive function is lost at once or they can be as they
are in my fathers case small where a little section goes out with each
stroke. Kind of like Dave turning off the HAL 9000 in the movie 2001. My
dad's body lives on but his mind is going one small random section at a time.

What does this have to do with marijuana you ask? Researchers have found
that certain components in marijuana ameliorate the damage cause by stroke.

Aidan Hampson a pharmacologist at the National Institute of Health (NIH)
believes that by damping down the production of glutimate which spurs the
production of dangerous free radicals in ischemic strokes (which constitute
80% of all strokes) he can reduce the death of brain cells. Hampson found
that extremely low doses of THC, the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana,
protected brain cells. The researchers were also surprised to find that CBD
another component of marijuana gave as much protection without the high.
Hampson has found that CBD quickly penetrates the brain, works in low doses
and the body can tolerate high doses making it a nearly ideal drug.

Human clinical trials on this promising line of research are under way at
Pharmos a pharmaceutical company in Rehovot, Israel using Dexanabinol, a
synthetic marijuana derivative.

All this research might have come years earlier (in time to help my father)
if not for the prohibitionist lie that marijuana had no medical use.

Our former Drug Czar Barry McCaffrey called marijuana Cheech and Chong
medicine. It turns out the Emperor of Drugs was a Cheech and Chong doctor.
But what can you expect when the government practices medicine?

Which brings me to my friend E.J. who knowning the facts responded to a
medical call from those he thought were suffering. It turns out the only
suffering really taking place was the desire of the prison industrial
complex for one more prisoner.

You can help free a prisoner by visiting the Free E.J. www site at:

http://sites.netscape.net/ejpagel/freeej

Send an e-mail to the governor.

M.L. Simon is an industrial controls designer and Libertarian activist