GINGRICH FLIP-FLOPS ON POT

State Governors Unite and the Closing of Big Daddy's Punishes
Patients

Newt Gingrich is flying high in the polls for the Republican
presidential nomination. So what does the erstwhile speaker of the
House have to say about marijuana?

As Gingrich seems to have an opinion about everything, it's not hard
to find his pontifications on pot. Just a few weeks ago, he said that
medical marijuana is a "joke" and that government should pursue the
War on Drugs more aggressively. He also supports the death penalty for
"high level" dealers.

He must have been wearing a massive pair of flip-flops when he said
that. In 1981, when he was a wet-behind-the-ears congressman from
Georgia, Gingrich had the audacity to introduce legislation to
legalize medical marijuana. Well, what a long strange trip it's been
for him since. Apparently there was a day when he smoked the herb, but
things changed, probably because no one else who was getting high
wanted to hang out with him. As he said in 1996: "See, when I smoked
pot it was illegal but not immoral. Now it is illegal and immoral. The
law didn't change, but the morality did."

I'm not quite sure what that means or how it happened. Perhaps it
means that it was OK for white hippies to smoke pot but not for black
hip-hoppers. That's pretty much the way police enforce the law.

Gingrich explains his flip-flop on marijuana as the outcome of
listening to parents who don't "want their children to get a signal
from the government that it was acceptable behavior." Ah, he did it
for the kids.

Now that the candidates have been so outspoken on the drug war, I
think it should be a topic on the debate circuit. Ron Paul has come
out against prohibition, and Gary Johnson wants to legalize marijuana.
Even suspended candidate Herman Cain said it should be left up to the
states (maybe it helped him with the ladies). It's not the biggest
issue on the docket, but with medical marijuana exploding across the
country and a fair number of state initiatives on marijuana projected
for next year, candidates will be pressed to give it at least cursory
attention.

Maybe that attention will be more than cursory. Recently two
governors, Democrat Christine Gregoire of Washington and independent
Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island, petitioned the Drug Enforcement Agency
to reclassify marijuana so it can be distributed like other medicines.
Actually I hear that Big Pharma has a bunch of cannabis-based
medications coming down the pike. So this may not be that
far-fetched.

The governors cite 700 peer-reviewed studies and reports on medical
marijuana, and call for public hearings so that science can weigh in
on the subject. (The Oakland Press writer who reported a couple of
months ago that there have been no peer-reviewed studies on the
subject should peer into the petition for a few clues.) Gregoire and
Chafee decided to do this in reaction to federal prosecutors who sent
threatening letters to officials in states where medical marijuana is
legal.

Americans for Safe Access is asking people to urge their governor to
sign onto the rescheduling petition. You can find a link for this at
safeaccessnow.org. Hmm, I wonder if nerd Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder ..
naw, his good friend Attorney General Bill Schuette would advise against it.

Speaking of Big Bad Bill (we won't be referring to him as Sweet
William anytime soon), he's managed to chase Big Daddy's Hydro
completely out of Macomb and Oakland counties. The business' location
on Gratiot in Chesterfield Township shut down after Macomb County
Circuit Court Judge John Foster ruled that it couldn't run its
marijuana distribution operations there although it could still sell
grow equipment. Big Daddy's shut down all operations there, but will
continue at their locations on Mack Avenue in Detroit (across from
Grosse Pointe Park) and in the city of Burton in Genesee County. Big
Daddy's was sued by the township for being a public nuisance. It's a
telling twist that Macomb County Prosecutor Eric Smith declined to
join the suit while Schuette did.

"I'd like to think the rest of the state will take notice of what's
happened in Macomb and Oakland and see that this is likely to happen
across the state if we continue to let the attorney general exceed his
office," says Big Daddy's spokesman Rick Thompson. "He should not be
suggesting changes to the law. He should be enforcing the law as
written. He should not be coaching law enforcement on how to punish
patients. And in this climate he shouldn't discourage small business
from helping Michigan economically."

About those kids that everyone seems to use as their excuse for all
kinds of crap: One of the arguments against medical marijuana is that
young people will take it as a signal that it's OK to use it and the
number of young users will balloon and fly them away to Neverland.
That's what federal drug czar Gil Kerlikowske has been telling folks.
He says medical marijuana confuses the issue so that "it shouldn't be
a great surprise to us that young people are now misperceiving the
dangers or the risks around marijuana."

Not so says a report delivered at the American Public Health
Association Annual Meeting and Exposition last month. Dr. Esther Choo
of Rhode Island Hospital led the study looking at the rates of usage
among teenagers in Rhode Island, where medical marijuana was legalized
in 2006, and in Massachusetts, where it isn't legal. Researchers found
that there was no significant difference between rates of teenage
usage in the two states. Apparently neither the message nor "increased
access" in Rhode Island caused teenagers to flock to marijuana any
more than whatever they are hearing in Massachusetts.

While we're tapping science, here's another tidbit from the world of
math and white coats. One of the ailments most sneered at by those who
think medical marijuana is a joke is chronic pain. The National
Centers for Health Statistics notes that more than 76 million
Americans suffer from chronic pain. That's more than the number of
people who have diabetes, heart disease and cancer combined. According
to a paper published in the December issue of Clinical Pharmacology &
Therapeutics, researchers at the University of California San
Francisco found that cannabinoids (active ingredients in marijuana)
administered with opiates (morphine and oxycodone) reduced pain more
than opiates alone. This could lead to therapies in which doctors
administer less of the highly addictive opiates.

"Pain is a big problem in America, and chronic pain is a reason many
people utilize the health care system," said the paper's lead author,
Donald Abrams, MD, professor of clinical medicine at UCSF. "And
chronic pain is, unfortunately, one of the problems we're least
capable of managing effectively."

It was a small study and researchers have called for ... more
research. However, it would be nice if those who sneer at folks
treating their chronic pain with marijuana would just shut up and get
behind more research too.