RE: Lords Back Cannabis For Pain Relief, Mon, 7 Dec 1998

Sir: You report, The British Medical Association said it was disappointed
that the Lords had not made the distinction between cannabinoids, the
active ingredient in cannabis, and the crude form of the drug which
contains a number of toxins.

Your article is saturated with hidden convictions of questionable validity.
And the BMA does no better! Calling high-grade, medically-effective
cannabis "crude" may be the lingo of the pharmaceutical paradigm, but
thankfully the drugs industry hasn't yet taken over the farms whereupon
they will be informing us of the risks in eating "crude" wheat when
perfectly safe synthesized nutrients are available which have been
double-blinded on entire civilizations (only [pound sterling] 99.50 a bushel).

To expose another current fallacy: Nothing is today toally free of "toxins"
as we all know, and even most foods *naturally* have various toxins in
them. And the most dangerous toxins are not those found naturally in our
environment, in the plants and herbs we use daily, but those produced by
industry: the products and by-products now polluting the entire globe.

The complaint that even high-quality cannabis is nevertheless "crude" and
"contains toxins" reflects a very narrow pharmaco-medical reductionist
paradigm about the substances we ingest for various reasons, and suggests a
distinction between foods and drugs which is far more arbitrary than can be
admitted. Certainly its narrowness has more than a little to do with
corporate profits, and studiously ignores the wider view in which foods,
herbs, and refined drugs form a spectrum of substances useful for a
correspondingly wide spectrum of human needs.

Peter Webster
email: vignes@monaco.mc