Hemp for Health

by Chris Conrad

  A major study on driving was undertaken in Holland (to keep American streets free of scientific research), and in 1993 was reported to the sponsoring U.S. Department of Transportation. Researchers identified a “moderate degree of driving impairment which is related to the consumed THC dose. The impairment manifests itself mainly in the ability to maintain a steady lateral position on the road, but its magnitude is not exceptional in comparison with changes produced by many medicinal drugs and alcohol. Drivers under the influence of marijuana retain insight in their performance and will compensate where they can, for example, by slowing down or increasing effort. As a consequence, THC’s adverse effects on driving performance appear relatively small.”9

  As far as distraction goes, cannabis does not even begin to compare with common behavioral patterns, such as using a cellular phone while driving. A study showed that people with cellular phones in their cars run a 34 percent higher risk of having accidents than other drivers.10 Meanwhile, it is feared that the microwaves used in cellular phone communications could damage brain cells or cause other side effects. Evidence assembled by scientists in Australia, the U.S., and Sweden indicates links to diseases such as asthma, Alzheimer’s, and cancer.11 Where are all the double-blind, controlled, clinical research studies the government should have required before it legalized cell phones?

  In fact, marijuana is used to distract people from real public safety issues. For example, consider the fifteen people who died and 176 who were injured in a 1987 Amtrak–Conrail train wreck. Almost before the bodies had been recovered from the twisted carnage, a ghoulish group of publicists were trumpeting that the wreck of the Colonial had been caused by marijuana. At least two critical mechanical failures were largely responsible for that train wreck, and either one alone could have caused an accident. A warning whistle was disabled, and a signal light was missing from the engine’s control panel.12 All the urine tests in the world will never replace those lives, nor will they solve the mechanical problems that caused that wreck. Three questions arise, then. Why did those who are entrusted with protecting our lives and safety use an anti-marijuana scare campaign to conceal the real causes of this accident, how much evidence in other accidents has been covered up over the years, and who stood to profit from this?

  This brings us to the multimillion dollar urine testing industry. Testing for cannabis is a fraud being perpetuated against the working class by government subcontractors. Tests are easy to beat and easy to fail without breaking the law, and when the testing companies make a mistake, they get to charge for a second test to corroborate the first one. They do not measure impairment or ability. They don’t give any economic benefit to the firm that pays the bills or the employees forced to submit to this invasion of personal privacy. These tests serve two purposes: to intimidate employees and to make a lot of money for people with little cups and chemistry kits. A government-sponsored study of urinalysis characterized drug testing as “a costly testing procedure [that] . . . says nothing about the individual’s work ability, competence or impairment. . . . Drug testing is concluded to be a method for surveillance, not a tool for safety.”13

  Looking for inert cannabinoid metabolites in the hair, urine, and excrement of hardworking Americans—now there’s something worth eliminating.

  HORMONES AND SPERM COUNTS

  Men are particularly vulnerable to any perceived threat to their virility, so the Drug War disinformation network aims below the belt. An alarming worldwide drop in human fertility has occurred in the last fifty years. Measured sperm counts have fallen by half. To hear the scare campaigns, you would think marijuana is the greatest birth control device ever invented. In fact, there is a minute, temporary drop in sperm production during the first few months of human male cannabis consumption, but not enough to keep anyone from making babies. A 1974 study found slightly lower mean plasma testosterone in heavy-smoking novices than in a control group, with a “swift return to normal” on abstention from cannabis.14 High-dosage marijuana intake did not suppress testosterone levels in another study. A group of twenty-seven young men who had smoked cannabis an average of 5.6 years each refrained from smoking for two weeks and were tested. Then they were admitted for a thirty-one–day stay in a locked hospital ward. No cannabis was permitted for six days. Testosterone levels registered in “the upper range of normal adult male levels.” Over the next twenty-one days they gradually increased their consumption, some to very high levels, and their hormonal count remained stable.15

  Once again, hemp has been scapegoated for the real culprit—in this case, probably pesticides. A study by a team of researchers at Copenhagen University compared sperm from fifty-five members of the Danish Association of Organic Farmers, each of whom dedicated at least a fourth of his diet to pesticide-free produce, with samples from 141 airline workers. On average, the farmers produced 43 percent more sperm per milliliter of semen than did the airline workers. This report, in the June 1996 Lancet, adds more weight to the growing volume of evidence that man-made chemicals are to blame for the problem. Of course, other factors warrant looking into, such as the fact that the farmers have a cleaner environment and do not eat packaged foods which may contain phthalates, chemicals that leach out of packaging materials.16 If you were the newscaster, which story would you find sexier to report? It certainly is easier to blame marijuana than to learn to pronounce “phthalates!”

  MAKING IT UP AS THEY GO ALONG

  Many anticannabis crusades are based on the premise that no one will ever read the reports or look at the data that is being misrepresented. Every once in a while they get a surprise.

  California legislators claimed in 1991 that the state’s “lenient” marijuana laws gave tacit approval for the use of cannabis, and that its decriminalization in 1975 had resulted in a huge increase in marijuana usage. Statistics for the period provided by the Department of Justice, however, revealed that marijuana use had actually decreased during that time period.17 What had increased was public awareness of the medical benefits of this herb. To counteract the growing reputation of medical marijuana, the California Narcotics Officers Association pronounced in 1996 that “more than 10,000 studies” had found harmful effects from marijuana, citing the University of Mississippi’s Research Institute. A Harvard University professor asked the Institute to verify that report. Within a short time, the Institute’s research staff flatly denied the CNOA claim. While the research center has a bibliography with more than 12,000 references to marijuana, a spokesperson noted that, “we have never broken down that figure into positive/negative papers.” She was “totally in the dark as to where the statement . . . could have originated.”

  The Drug War is based on the notion that suppressing every use of cannabis, be it medical, industrial, or social, must be maintained without exception to protect children from the evils of drug abuse. Every year since 1980, the laws have gotten harsher, the penalties stiffer, the rhetoric more absurd. Yet surveys of school drug use seem to rise and fall completely of their own accord, regardless of all the posturing. Just as the medical marijuana issue came before voters in California and Arizona in 1996, frightening new reports were released showing a sharp rise in adolescent drug use. They were peddled around by narcotics officers and the prison lobby to campaign against the initiatives. Just weeks before voters took to the polls, new headlines screamed “Teen drug use highest in study’s history,” and worse “Teenagers’ use of drugs may be underestimated.”18 Just one week later, we find this amazing news report: “Just Say No groups mark 10 effective years.”19 Talk about short-term memory loss! If teenage drug abuse is at an all time high, just what effect were these campaigns trying to have on kids? Apparently, the forbidden-fruit effect.

  THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON CHOCOLATE

  While research develops new data on cannabinoids and anandamide, recent studies also found that cannabis resin is not the only source of cannabinoids. Three such compounds have now been identified in chocolate.20 In a statement released by the Neuro
science Institute in San Diego, researcher Daniele Piomelli conjectured that these compounds may “participate in the subjective feelings associated with eating chocolate.” Other researchers warn that such conclusions are premature because there is no evidence that chocolate’s cannabinoids stay in the body long enough or occur in high enough concentrations to be of any significance. A spokesperson for the Institute of Mental Health estimated that a person would have to ingest the equivalent of 20 percent of their total body weight in chocolate at one sitting to get any psychoactive effect, which means they would get physically sick long before they felt any euphoria.

  Cannabis, therefore, clearly remains the best source of natural cannabinoids. Still, this raises important questions about where our bodies get the compounds necessary for our physical and mental health, and how food plays a role in maintaining our chemical balance. And watch out; one day PDFA may target Hershey’s, rather than pot, as the stepping-stone drug for kids.

  Chapter 14

  The Legal Prognosis

  A BRIEF HISTORY OF DRUG POLICY

  Europeans who settled in America were not lawyers; they were farmers, merchants, and service providers. The fictitious principle that all lands originally belonged to the British king was instituted through the issuance of real estate grants. People readily accepted these titles, since initial rents were low and the papers lent legitimacy to their property claims—as well as providing a handy rationale to drive native peoples off their land. As long as things were going well, there was no urgent reason to expose the pretense, wrote Thomas Jefferson, “but a series of oppressions, begun at a distinguished period and pursued unalterably through every change of ministers, too plainly prove a deliberate and systematic plan of reducing us to slavery.”1 The colonists rose up and asserted their own sovereignty, and wrote a simple Constitution in the clearest English of their day. The federal government existed to defend the land and to protect interstate commerce. Criminal law belonged to the States. Just in case future leaders missed the point, the Bill of Rights was added to clarify the limits of federal jurisdiction: leave the States and the people alone.

  It is ironic that this book needs a chapter on legal issues surrounding cannabis, since drug prohibition is patently unconstitutional, as proved when Prohibition was repealed by the Twenty-First Amendment. This is why the narcotics police resorted to the smoke screen of a “regulatory” Marihuana Tax Act of 1937 to suppress cannabis. In a case involving Dr. Timothy Leary, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on May 19, 1969, that the punitive tax is double jeopardy that violates the Fifth Amendment’s ban on self-incrimination. Rather than comply with the supreme law of the land, however, the drug bureaucracy came up with a system for classifying substances as banned drugs, Schedule I, then arbitrarily listed hemp in this forbidden category, while listing hard drugs like cocaine and morphine in Schedule II, ”safe to prescribe.” It may no longer be politically correct to call it prohibition, but to label cannabis “illicit” or “illegal” is to disguise reality. This violation has been ignored by the courts under the assertion of a vague overriding interest—a principle that does not exist in the Constitution—based on crude Reefer Madness-style propaganda. This has created a de facto Drug War exception to the Bill of Rights, peppered with selective enforcement, that is equivalent to having federal martial law.

  Unfortunately, once Congress created the legal fiction that banned cannabis, the lesion on the surface of the Constitution quickly tumored into a bureaucratic cancer that has grown uncontrollably ever since. The United States has the developed world’s highest incarceration rates. Enforcement budgets that began at a few hundred thousand dollars now surpass $16 billion per year. A thin hope for cannabis reform policy came during President John F. Kennedy’s administration. The United States had lobbied hard under President Dwight Eisenhower for the United Nations to adopt the Single Convention Treaty on Narcotic Drugs, but in 1961 the Kennedy administration decided not to sign it. Harry Anslinger, the first American “Drug Czar,” was removed from office, opening up more than a decade of scientific investigation. The President himself was rumored to use cannabis for his back pain. His advisory commission on drug policy made its recommendations in 1963. “This Commission makes a flat distinction between the two drugs [cannabis and heroin] and believes that the unlawful sale or possession of marijuana is a less serious offense.”2 That same year, Kennedy was assassinated, and U.S. drug policy took a turn for the worse, particularly under the leadership of Richard Nixon. In 1968 the United States signed the Single Convention Treaty.

  Nixon launched a Drug War against his political opponents. As J. Edgar Hoover said in a 1968 memo to all FBI field offices, “Since the use of marijuana and other narcotics is widespread among members of the New Left, you should be alert to opportunities to have them arrested by local authorities on drug charges.”3 Hoover did not want the FBI to become directly involved in narcotics enforcement, however, because he saw this as the area most likely to corrupt police.4 Nixon did not share his concern, and announced that, “As I look over the problems in this country, I see one that stands out particularly: The problem of narcotics.”5 Congressional reports state that nearly 15 percent of the soldiers who fought in Vietnam came back to the United States as addicts. While Nixon denounced drugs, the CIA smuggled heroin into the United States inside body bags with dead American servicemen. The agency made billions of dollars between 1967 and 1973 on heroin flown out of Laos in Air America planes.6 Most of the heroin was refined at a Pepsi-Cola bottling plant in Laos, funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development and promoted in the early ’60s by Richard Nixon himself. A House Government Operations subcommittee report made this sublime understatement in 1977: “It was ironic that the CIA should be given the responsibility of narcotics intelligence, particularly since they are supporting the prime movers.” Nixon consolidated a number of federal drug agencies into the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). He sent D.C. police to disrupt a May 3, 1971, peace rally by arresting as many protesters as possible for pot, and some 8,000 political activists were rounded up and held in Kennedy Stadium until after the protest.7 A few days later Nixon asserted, “I can see no social or moral justification whatever for legalizing marijuana.” When his hand-picked panel of experts came out against criminal penalties on cannabis use, Nixon rejected it. “I will not follow that recommendation.” The commission noted the “distinct impression among the youth that some police may use the marihuana laws to arrest people they don’t like for other reasons, whether it be their politics, their hair style or their ethnic background.”8

  There was a lull in the Drug War during the Ford and Carter administrations. California and other states decriminalized possession of cannabis. Legalization was generally thought to be close at hand. President Carter asked Congress on August 2, 1977, to end criminal penalties on less than an ounce of cannabis. However, Carter found it politically embarrassing to be portrayed in the media as “soft on crime.” He recanted on drug policy and authorized the spraying of Mexican cannabis fields with the deadly herbicide paraquat. Long gas lines and the Iranian hostage crisis sealed his fate in the 1980 election. By that time about half of college freshmen had smoked cannabis, eleven states had decriminalized it, and a few patients in the federal IND program were getting it for free, compliments of Uncle Sam.

  Enter Ronald Reagan promising to “get big government off our backs.” During his first term Reagan paid little more than lip service to the Drug War, but after his reelection, things got ugly fast. When a little girl at a school auditorium asked her how to avoid drugs, Nancy Reagan spouted, “Why, just say no,” and a children’s crusade was born. All drugs including cannabis were condensed into one ultimate evil. Media hysteria was whipping Congress and the country into a fury in 1986 when a college basketball player named Len Bias died of a cocaine overdose. It was a personal tragedy that became much more. Bias was the number one draft pick of the Boston Celtics, the beloved home team of Representative Tip O’Neill. O
n hearing the news, the infuriated House Speaker called his staff together and ordered, “Give me some goddamn legislation!” The resulting crime bill was a smorgasbord of cruel and unusual punishments, including property seizure, conspiracy law, mandatory minimum sentences for first-time nonviolent offenders, and a nebulous category of “designer drugs” for substances that don’t exist. Reefer madness returned with brutal Zero Tolerance enforcement. Normally political opponents, Reagan and O’Neill discovered a common target. Ever since, the two major political parties have tried to outdo each other in a futile, yet expensive, surveillance-and-prison model, plump with their pet projects.

  Former CIA director George Bush succeeded Reagan as President. He held out a bag of crack on television and demanded tougher penalties while ignoring evidence that his agency had smuggled tons of cocaine into our country and partially fueled the crack epidemic. When CIA trained Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega got too cocky about his drug running, Bush made an example of him. The United States invaded the tiny Central American nation, and blasted its governmental compounds back to the stone age with tons of missiles. Noriega was dragged to a Florida prison and locked away, and the drug trafficking went on. But a little-noticed change was underway as the public became better educated about cannabis. A generational shift began to occur, and Bush lost touch with the concerns of the middle-class voter.

  While running for office, candidate Bill Clinton admitted that he had opposed the Vietnam war and even tried cannabis while in college, claiming that he “didn’t inhale.” He spoke out against mandatory minimum sentences for first-time nonviolent offenders. What happened once we elected him? Cannabis arrests went up by 40 percent during his first term of office. He reprimanded Surgeon General Joycelin Elders for voicing support for medical marijuana, and fired her shortly after her guarded comment that we should take a look at ”the possibility” of legalizing drugs. He signed a crime bill in 1994 that set the death penalty for growing a tenth of an acre of cannabis—a crop raised by Presidents Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Madison, and thousands of our nation’s founders. When voters in Arizona and California voted by large majorities in 1996 to permit medical use of cannabis, the federal drug czar, General Barry McCaffrey, threatened to arrest any doctor that recommended it, and Clinton signed off on the idea. So, once again Americans are enduring a series of oppressions, and the federal government is practicing medicine without a license.