NOTE: C&I offers a 20 pounds sterling prize for the best
letter

published in each issue; Peter's letter won the prize.

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
=A399.50 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