Allspace in a Notshall

I came across another fascinating article today. This time from the website called DoubleX and is about two parents who give their autistic kid marijuana in a variety of ways in order to calm his demeanor and his rampant tantrums.  Most interesting quotes below:

Question: why are we giving our nine-year-old a marijuana cookie?

Answer: because he can’t figure out how to use a bong.

My son J has autism. He’s also had two serious surgeries for a spinal cord tumor and has an inflammatory bowel condition, all of which may be causing him pain, if he could tell us. He can say words, but many of them—”duck in the water, duck in the water”—don’t convey what he means. For a time, anti-inflammatory medication seemed to control his pain. But in the last year, it stopped working. He began to bite and to smack the glasses off my face. If you were in that much pain, you’d probably want to hit someone, too.

A prescription drug called Marinol, which contains a synthetic cannabinoid, seemed mainstream enough to bring up with J’s doctor. I cannot say that with a few little pills, everything turned around. But after about a week of playing around with the dosage, J began garnering a few glowing school reports: “J was a pleasure have in speech class,” instead of “J had 300 aggressions today.”

The coordinator of our patient group introduced us to a licensed grower. A recent horticulture school graduate, he’d figured out how to cultivate marijuana using a custom organic soil mix. His e-mail signature even quoted Rudolph Steiner. The grower arrived at our house with a knapsack containing jars of herbs. We opened the jars to sniff the different strains of “bud”—Blueberry, which did smell fleetingly of wild blueberries, and Sour Diesel, which had a rich, winey scent. The grower also had cured some leaves for tea, and he brought a glycerine tincture, a marijuana distillate in olive oil (yes, organic), cookies (ditto), and a strange machine that looked, fittingly, like a lava lamp. Basically an almost-bong, this vaporizer heated the cannabis without producing carcinogenic smoke.

But since we started him on his “special tea,” J’s little face, which is sometimes a mask of pain, has softened. He smiles more. For the last year, his individual education plan at his special-needs school was full of blanks, recording “no progress” because he spent his whole day an irritated, frustrated mess. Now, April’s report shows real progress, including “two community outings with the absence of aggressions.”

Even the limited studies that have been done suggest marijuana’s potential as an adjunctive therapy for cancer. Marijuana, you need some rebranding. Maybe a cool new name.

Meanwhile, in treating J with pot, we are following the law—and the Hippocratic oath: primum, non nocere. First, do no harm. The drugs that our insurance would pay for—and that the people around us would support without question—pose real risks to children. For now, we’re sticking with the weed.

What are you thoughts on this?  I think it’s really amazing and shows we are actually making progress in the sanity of this country.  With the Government’s announcement that they would no longer prosecute medical marijuana users at the federal level, you can almost feel the weights shifting to our side.  Keep it going!

I originally came across the article here at Disinfo.com.

Soldiers are seen through a burning pile of over a ton of marijuana, various illegal pills and cocaine being incinerated at a military base in the border city of Ciudad Juarez September 9, 2009. (REUTERS/Alejandro Bringas)

Here’s an up close and brutal essay about the War on Drugs from Boston.com.

From the opening paragraph:

The 2009 United Nations World Drug report, released earlier this year, notes that 2009 marks “the end of the first century of drug control (it all started in Shanghai in 1909)”, and that the illicit drug market worldwide has now become a $320 billion-per-year industry. As drug-related violence in Mexico appears to continue unabated, and crackdowns in Afghanistan are being made against its massive opium crops, new efforts are also being made worldwide in methods of enforcement and treatment of recovering addicts. Collected here are a handful of recent images from the rough world of illegal drugs across the globe. (37 photos total)

Some of the images are kind of graphic. Just a warning to you soft-stomached folks.  Still a good idea to take a look though.  Some outstanding photohraphy.

There is a fascinating article in this month’s issue of Mother Jones about the brilliant and inspriring work of fungi-fanatic/mycologist Paul Stamets.  I’ve been a subscriber to Mother Jones for a few years and I was excited to see on the cover this month the headline “Flu-Fighting Fungi.”  I knew it was going to be an article about Stamets and I was correct.

I actually got to see him give a talk about a lot of what’s featured in the article at the Denver Green Festival earlier this year. It was an amazing speech and I’m glad I was there.

I was also able to pick up his latest book, Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World and am still plowing through it.  It’s incredibly dense with mycology terminology but makes up for it with its beautiful photography and artwork.  It’s a must buy.

The article itself is a well-done 5-page layout.  I tried searching around for it on the net but it’s simply too new to link to anything.  So I’ll go ahead and type out a few small subjective highlights.

In the old-growth forests of the Pacific Northwest grows a bulbous, prehistoric-looking mushroom called agarikon. It prefers to colonize century-old Douglas fir trees, growing out of their trunks like an ugly mole on a finger. When I first met Paul Stamets, a mycologist who has spent more than three decades hunting, studying, and tripping on mushrooms, he had found only two of these unusual fungi, each time by accident–or, as he might put it, divine intervention.

A few months earlier, the University of Illinois-Chicago’s Institute for Tuberculosis Research sent Stamets its analysis of a dozen agarikon strains he’d cultured in his own lab. The institute found the fungus to be extraordinarily active against XDR-TB, a rare type of tuberculosis that is resistant to even the most effective drug treatments.

Stamets began distancing himself from the magic mushroom crowd about nine years ago. “The problem with the psychedelic scene,” he told me while driving near his vacation home on Cortes Island, the Grateful Dead playing on the stereo, “is that people contemplate their belly buttons and don’t get anything done. I wanted to save lives and the ecosystem.”

I’ll provide a link to the article as soon as it becomes available on the Mother Jones website.  But I highly recommend it, especially if you’re into the psychedelic scene, mushrooms, and people who are on the cutting edge of actually accomplishing  amazing things, especially with regards to the stigma-filled world of mushrooms.

***Update (03/02/10) – Read the full article here.***

A move that should have happened years ago but understandably did not:

The Justice Department told federal prosecutors Monday they shouldn’t pursue medical-marijuana users who comply with state laws, a step activists said may encourage more states to partially legalize the drug.

Read the rest of the Wall Street Journal article.

I also found an interesting article on Slate about the announcement which I thought was a great read.  Quotes below:

The Justice Department’s announcement that the feds will no longer crack down on medical marijuana sellers who follow state laws will surely cheer the liberal/libertarian axis that wants the government to take a more relaxed stance on drug laws. It should also please conservatives who champion states’ rights as the highest political ideal. But unlike most policies with such broad support, it might actually accomplish something.

Where the new federal guidelines could have an effect is on states currently considering medical marijuana laws. Right now, 13 states allow some degree of medical marijuana consumption. (There are 14 if you count Maryland, which reduces the penalty if the marijuana you’re caught using is for medical purposes.) Another dozen or so have bills moving through their legislature. In many cases, lawmakers have been skittish about OKing dispensaries for fear that the Drug Enforcement Administration would come and shut them down. Now that’s no longer a concern. The memo also changes the way the federal government treats marijuana vendors in states that already allow medical marijuana. The drug is technically legal for medical purposes is New Mexico, but the only person with a license to sell it has refused reveal her identity for fear of federal punishment. Without that looming threat, the number of dispensaries is likely to increase.

I find this a great move by the Federal Government not only because Obama said he would but because it’s just the right thing to do. Our society should make available any means out our disposal to help aid the sick into recovery, within reason of course. I’m not even really that ecstatic about the announcement, it’s more of a “about damn time, sons a bitches.”

This also makes the idea of legalization of marijuana in all facets closer to a possibility. Living in Denver, today there was a general rejoice in the air and this was before the Broncos win over the Chargers. :)

Just a good day in general for the people who are taking us where we all need to be, hopefully we can get there even quicker.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Feds to stop prosecuting medical marijuana users (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
• Justice Dept. To Stop Pursuit of Medical Marijuana Use (nytimes.com)
• Medical Marijuana Proponents Breathe Easier Under New Guidelines (abcnews.go.com)
• New Medical Marijuana Policy Outlined (nytimes.com)

Just came across a controversial but sane article over at The Star, talking about the idea that Afghanistan should legalize and legitimize its poppy fields.  Most interesting quotes below:

Today, it’s Afghanistan. Ongoing attempts by the United States to obliterate the poppy fields of that embattled land have been a fiasco. Afghan fields now supply the opium for 92 per cent of the global heroin trade.

And Turkey? It’s still growing opium poppies and selling the product – but not to the black market. It earns $60 million (all figures U.S.) a year exporting the raw materials that are turned into medical morphine and codeine.

It says that legitimizing the poppy crop is the only feasible solution to Afghanistan’s drug crisis. Licensing not only would cut out the drug-lord insurgents, but also correct the shortfall in painkilling medicines available to the developing world.

Washington, however, remains implacably opposed, saying complete eradication, no matter how long it takes, is the only acceptable outcome.

And my biggest question is answered in this paragraph:

The 12 countries that currently produce legal opium, the bureau said, all have strict controls and sophisticated law enforcement, neither of which exists in Afghanistan. “Without safeguards, licit and illicit opium would be indistinguishable. Opium really destined for the black market would be produced under the pretense of a legal system.”

»Finish reading at The Star.

Related articles

• Taliban ‘stockpiling world’s opium supply’ (cnn.com)
• In Afghanistan, U.S. Shifts Narcotics Strategy (nytimes.com)
• Russia, Plagued by Heroin Use, to Press U.S. on Destroying Afghan Poppy Crops (nytimes.com)
• Poppy Season Poses Test for U.S. Opium Policy (abcnews.go.com)