Note to mods: I am not advocating anything. I am simply reporting on events.
Over the last few months, the Colorado Springs Gazette has been running occasional articles on a unique strain of medical marijuana that is being grown in the region. As the articles state, families are beginning to move here, after trying many other things, so that they can try this strain for their children, many of whom have intractable seizures.
I find this to be simultaneously hopeful and troubling. Hopeful because early indications are promising. Troubling because thanks to the federal government, it’s currently impossible to do proper scientific testing of this marijuana strain. However, if a sufficiently large number of children are helped by this, without any major side effects, maybe rigorous testing can be done.
I’m bumping my own thread because the Gazette had another article about this a couple days ago.
I find it highly significant that NO major side effects have yet been reported for this particular strain of marijuana–especially considering that most approved medications have a long list of potential side effects. I admit that the sample size is still quite small, but the list of preliminary successes is growing longer by the month.
I’m kind of shocked that your OP didn’t garner a single reply. I thought at first it might have gotten lost in the background of jkander’s Cannabis Extract thread, but this was from a week before that started.
I still don’t understand why nobody is willing to talk about this. Maybe I’m being too calm and rational about the issue. After all, there were pages and pages of responses to jkander’s thread.
Yeah, I’m not really sure what to say other than, “I agree.”
I think it’s shameful that the War on Drugs has driven parents to doing their own uncontrolled research with their own children as guinea pigs, rather than proper safety controlled studies. I also think that if I had a child with this sort of medical condition that wasn’t responding to conventional therapies, I’d be doing the same thing.
My Mom had a Med MJ Rx for a year. I was her caregiver for it and made a salve/lotion for her. It did seem to help (she has serious back issues). We did let the Rx lapse since we will be able to buy it legally pretty soon.
The difference is that we are not just taking the raw opium sap and using it for everything under the sun without studies. No one is claiming that opiates are a cureall for cancer and diabetes and so on and so on.
That said, the fact that pot is a Sched. 1 drug is damn fucking stupid.
I do think there’s a lot of potential but it still needs to be subject to testing like everything else.
Which I suppose is my point. Pot and Opiates are all Schedule 1. It’s clear they both provide pain relief, though cannabis probably relief in other areas too.
Yet, somehow the same line isn’t being drawn with opiates and heroin as it is with cannabis and joints. What’s more, even if such a line is drawn, cannabis is no where near in the same destructively addictive and dependent camp as opiates.
Yet, opiates are dolled out with hardly a second thought to patients that need such management. And cannabis derivatives? Cannabis research?
Rich people take opiates. They get them (at first) legitimately prescribed by upscale doctors. Poor and lower-class people smoke dope. They get it from hoodlums on street corners.