Drugblogging

Mostly sensible piece on medical marijuana by Dr. Henry Miller over at TCS. By “very sensible”, I mean he uses scientific research and also his knowledge of the drug approval system at the FDA, where he worked from 1979-1994 and explains why, under current guidelines, smoked marijuana is not deemed to be medicine.

He is due for a ton of hate mail from the freeweeders, which is ironic because he’s also a fellow at the fairly libertarian Hoover Institute and probably—I don’t know this, but I get this sense reading between the lines in his TCS piece, probably—agrees with them about most points of the drug war. But he simply points out that people’s anecdotal accounts of cannabinoid analgesia don’t meet the standards of what we call a medicine:

What is a “medicine?” In order for a company to sell a drug, and a physician to prescribe it, it must be standardized by composition, formulation, and dose, have been tested for a particular medical condition in rigorous trials, and be administered by means of an appropriate delivery system. From these, as it were, first principles, it is clear that smoked marijuana will have great difficulty in meeting the required scientific and legal standards. There is insufficient evidence that smoked cannabis is a safe and effective medicine (leaving aside the question of whether the federal soldiers in “the war on drugs” have obstructed clinical testing).

Right, well, that last part’s the insensible part. Leaving aside the question of whether Stephen King and Richard Nixon killed John Lennon… Please.

Or, how about this: let’s leave aside for a second the possibility that much of California’s medical marijuana enterprise is a sham, a front for selling drugs to anyone who wants them regardless of whether they’re sick (including, um, ecstasy as well as marijuana) and a money-laundering front for the Chinese Mafia. Oh, wait, that’s all actually true, or at least alleged by Federal prosecutors in a June 2005 indictment.

Miller offers some encouragement that the medical benefits of marijuana will soon be available in pill form called Sativex, which wouldn’t get you high. That would moot an awful lot of the medical weed debate right there—but I wonder which side will oppose it the most strenuously. Drug warriors? Hardly. If I’m going under the knife I’ll take a big shot of morphine, thank you very much, and I don’t care that it started out coming from an opium poppy. Duh, it’s medicine, everybody’s fine with that. But on the other hand, there’s no excuse for growin’ your own when you can get your exact dose in a non-intoxicating pill. The medpot lobby would be left high and dry. So to speak.

Since we’re on the topic of dope, you guys need to check out Junkyard Blog Founder and Editor Emeritus Bryan Preston. I mean, Bryan’s excellent post at Hot Air, entitled ” Ginormous Mexican meth gangs invade America: mom-and-pop meth gangs hardest hit”. Not only the title is worthy of The Onion—the whole thing is really funny and infuriating, since it brings up a good point about the many costs of unpatrolled borders.