LETTER FROM THE EDITOR
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Medical marijuana is legal in 48 countries and in 33 U.S. states and all U.S. overseas territories. We know how it goes with medical marijuana... I have a great bumper sticker idea, yours free for the taking: MEDICAL MARIJUANA MAKES ME SICK! Health care provider: “What are your symptoms?” Patient: “I’m not getting high.” Marijuana has become... well, maybe not exactly “respectable,” but no more worthy of rebuke than walking down Bourbon Street with a Hurricane in a Solo cup. (Although, if you’ve got a doobie in your other hand you can still get ticketed in New Orleans – $40 for a first offense. But to put the social odium in perspective, it’s a $50 fine if you smoke a Marlboro in a Bourbon Street bar.) Marijuana is an accepted fact. And it’s almost a fact that other mind-altering drugs will be accepted. (I love that phrase, “mind-altering drugs.” As if there are no changes in brain function after you drink six cups of coffee before doing your taxes or after you drink four martinis before putting the nut dish on your head, mounting the back of the sofa, and reciting “Charge of the Light Brigade” to the cocktail party. But I digress... which I find I’m doing a lot while writing about the drug culture... It may have something to do with the drugs... I’ll have to go ask Alice when she’s 10 feet tall...)
Wow! This is great f***ing s**t! (Notice that my thoughts were so fuzzy that I was thinking in asterisks.)
In 2014, Scientific American ran an editorial, “End the Ban on Psychoactive Drug Research.” In 2017, the National Institutes of Health publication Neuropsychopharmacology (take a big toke and say that without exhaling) presented a peer-reviewed paper, “Modern Clinical Research on LSD,” supportive of the position taken in the Scientific American editorial. The paper noted, “Clinical research on LSD came to a halt in the early 1970s because of political pressure,” and, “The first modern research findings from studies of LSD... have only very recently been published,” and concluded in its abstract, “These data should contribute to further investigations of the therapeutic potential of LSD in psychiatry.” In 2018, the Journal of Palliative Medicine published an article, “Taking Psychedelics Seriously,” saying that “recent published studies have demonstrated the safety and efficacy of psilocybin [‘shrooms], MDMA [ecstasy], and ketamine [rave drug favorite Special K] when administered in a medically supervised and monitored approach.” Of course, “Palliative Medicine” is the treatment of terminally ill patients, so no
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March 2019
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