FDA Rejects Marijuana for Medical Uses
On the same day that sfgate.com ran a story on the Psychiatric DSM being largely written by drug company shills, they run a story stating that the FDA has found no medical use for marijuana. The FDA has approved every single drug the PharmCo’s are pushing in the DSM, so I have no problem imagining that politics has once again overridden reason and science. Large PharmCo interests pump a huge amount of money into the FDA approval process, and that amount of effort helps to promote the legitimacy of the FDA process. How can the FDA survive if natural remedies that are not backed by million/billion dollar development investments are acceptd by the public?
I love this… the FDA said, in regards to a number of states that have passed legislation allowing marijuana use for medical purposes: “These measures are inconsistent with efforts to ensure that medications undergo the rigorous scientific scrutiny of the FDA approval process and are proven safe and effective.”
I have a few rebuttles to this: Vioxx, Fen-Phen, Suicidal Antidepressants, Trovan, etc. The FDA is not my shining light of ‘rigorus scientific scrutiny‘ and the FDA process does not seem that effective at making sure drugs ‘are proven safe and effective‘. Profitable, yes; safe? Since when? One word: Thalidomide
Soap box time… I believe that Science is a useful tool. Tools are easily misused though. Our modern approach is to find something good, distill and purify it, and consume it in excess until a problem shows up. Fruit and sugar cane into Diamond Cane Sugar. Willow bark into aspirin. Cocoa leaves into cocaine. Coffee and tea into caffeine pills. These are all natural substances that have been used for thousands of years that in the last century have been subjected to scientific dissection until their active ingredients have been abused.
If you believe in evolution, jump to the next paragraph. OK, the godless heathens jumped ahead and are not reading this part… According to the bible, God created the Heavens and the Earth and everything in between. That means that God created both Man and Marijuana. The interactions between the two are part of The Plan. Who is the FDA to stand between the ill and a God given natural medicine that eases their pain?
Unless you are a fan of the Stokes Monkey Trial, please skip ahead to the next paragraph since this deals with accepting the facts that in front of your face… If life on this Earth evolved to the place where it is now, there have been million of years of selective breeding and survival of the fittest that have resulted in a balanced ecosystem. Life has had an unimaginable amount of time to establish balance. That which does not kill us makes us stronger, or at least kills our pain. If a natural medicine works, it is because we have had millions of years to adapt to it. How can any drug developed in a lab over the past ten years compare to a drug to which we have been adapting for thousands, if not millions, of years? We’ve come a long way scientifically in the past thousand years, but not far enough. Our own biology is a mystery to us, and our lab work in pharmaceuticals is still largely trial and error, with a little luck thrown in for spice.
Alcohol is a poison in large doses, and legal form of entertainment in slightly smaller doses. Nicotine can kill in doses as small as a drop, but can be purchased at every convenience store in the country. Pot makes people giggle, but can land you in jail for years; and I don’t think there is a known toxic dose. Why does the FDA allow poisons to be sold at the grocery store, but limits a natural drug with proven benefits?
The Institute of Medicine, part of the National Academy of Sciences, reported that “marijuana’s active components are potentially effective in treating pain, nausea, the anorexia of AIDS wasting and other symptoms, and should be tested rigorously in clinical trials.”
The answer is simple: Money. Is this any surprise in a socio-economic society where Capitalism is the real God? The FDA’s mandate is to protect consumers from products sold with false claims, such as the snake-oil remidies of old. Since when is their mandate to protect us from that which grows in the wild? I guess it is when it puts the PharmCo’s at risk…
-Chris