MARIJUANA PROHIBITION MAKES WAR ON MIRACULOUS GIFT

If a miracle suddenly appeared, would we try to learn from it or try
to destroy it?

A common plant can relieve pain and muscle spasticity. The plant's
components show promise to inhibit tumor growth and control diabetes.

The plant contains remarkable substances identical to substances
which already flow through human bodies and are thought to regulate
critical functions from memory to mood.

A close relative of the plant also offers profitable but
environmentally-friendly alternative fiber and food crops.

Research continues on the plant in the United States, but most
studies focus on allegedly negative effects.

The plant is cannabis (more commonly known as marijuana), and the
government does not see it as a miracle. The government denies that
marijuana and similar plants (like the very useful buy wholly
non-intoxicating hemp) can ever be good. But that denial took
another hit from the facts recently.

Marijuana prohibitionists have long argued that since cannabis smoke
contains more tars than tobacco, it must cause cancer.

A thorough study presented recently at The American Thoracic
Society's annual conference showed that even heavy marijuana smoking
did not increase the risk for lung cancer. Indeed, in the study by
Donald Tashkin of UCLA's David Geffen School of Medicine, marijuana
smokers showed slightly lower cancer rates than non-smokers.

This is not an entirely new finding, as a review of the literature on
lung cancer and marijuana smoke by Dr. Robert Melamede suggested last year.

Tashkin's study results should have been on the front page of every
newspaper in the nation. Why? Because we have been wasting lives and
resources on a war based on faulty intelligence, only this war has
been going on for close to 70 years. And because the media has
helped to disseminate this faulty intelligence for an even longer
time, it bears the responsibility of correcting the record fully.

The initial reasons given for marijuana prohibition included its
supposed propensity to turn users violent. That misconception
finally got cleared up as the drug became more popular in the 1960s
and 1970s despite prohibition. That era had its own litany of false
stories about cannabis, including the absurdity that it made teenage
boys sprout breasts. More recently we heard that marijuana smoking
will lead to lung, head and neck cancer. It's a lie that is
especially damaging considering the reality.

In other places in the world, marijuana is being studied medically,
and not only for the relief from cancer treatments like
chemotherapy. Research suggests cannabis might actually be an
anti-cancer agent (which would explain why Tashkin's study showed
marijuana smokers with lower lung cancer rates than non-smokers).
Italian researchers last week seemed to show anti-cancer properties
in substances found in cannabis. This hasn't been widely publicized,
similar to other promising research released in 2003, as well as
research that goes back to the early 1970s.

If any other substance was involved, this would have been on the
cover of major U.S. news magazines. As it stands, unfortunately,
most U.S. media have missed most of the amazing new science related
to cannabis and human health.

Substances called cannabinoids found in cannabis plants also occur
naturally human bodies. Special receptors exist around the body
specifically to interact with the cannabinoids that we make or that
cannabis makes. The cannabinoids don't appear in any other plant.
Kind of, well, miraculous, isn't it?

More research needs to be done on how cannabis and cannabinoids can
be used beneficially. For now, that research won't take place in the
United States.

All U.S. government-funded research starts with the presumption that
marijuana is bad. Researchers trying to learn about possible
benefits report being denied a legal supply of the plant.

This notion that sending a wholly negative message about marijuana
(even devoting a multi-billion dollar taxpayer financed ad campaign
equating the plant with badness) will somehow keep our young people
away from marijuana has also been exposed as a lie. For the past
several years teenagers surveyed on drug use say it's easy to get
marijuana if they want it.

There are reasons for young people not to use marijuana. Hearing over
hyped scare stories about the substance isn't one of them. A recent
study of that multi-billion dollar taxpayer financed ad campaign
showed many teenagers who viewed the ads became more interested in
marijuana, not less.

The rationale for the war on marijuana, and the tactics used to fight
that war, have been exposed as false and counterproductive. Each year
police arrest more than 700,000 Americans for marijuana. This summer,
police across the nation will be out cutting down wild hemp plants
that can't intoxicate anyone. Certainly all that police time could be
spent on more pressing issues, and otherwise law-abiding citizens
don't need to get drawn into the criminal justice system.

As it stands, we are wasting vast resources to destroy another
beneficial resource and to ensure that our country stays behind the
curve in terms of scientific research. The next medical breakthroughs
related to this easily available plant won't occur in our country
solely due to ingrained political myopia and cowardice.

We must take off the ideological blinders that decades of drug war
have forced on us. We could have new medicine, new crops for
farmers, even new revenue streams for government through legitimate
taxation, along with regulation schemes to better keep young people
out of the market.

In fact, these things will happen one day. It's all coming, and we
could all save ourselves a lot of shame and misery by trying to learn
from the miracle now, instead of wasting billings trying (but
failing) to destroy it.

The miracle itself does not suffer for our actions, but we do.