I realize that this is an opinion piece, and everyone’s entitled to their own opinion, even when it’s wrong 
But as it purports to be written by a “journalist”, and includes some references, some people might actually think it’s factual. That’s why I’m bothering to comment on it.
See, it’s absurdly easy to laugh at a tool like Michele Leonhart, because she’s actually legally constrained from telling the truth about cannabis due to her job. But a journalist is supposed to report the truth, not merely come up with cleverly-written emotional arguments to support his particular bias.
This Durine fellow does that in spades, starting off with a completely-out-of-left-field strawman attack on the religion of the Ancient Egyptians, of all things, and then blithely dismissing anyone who uses the strawman technique a few paragraphs later. Easy to attack ancient Egyptians when you think there aren’t any left, isn’t it? A bit harder for your ego to remember that their civilization lasted far longer than ours has.
Now let’s talk about cannabis. Durine rattles off a few of the benefits of cannabis, while using scare quotes to subliminally convince you that any studies that find positive benefits couldn’t possibly be scientific. In fact, his penultimate sentence strongly implies that anyone who even does research on cannabis is probably an illegal user themselves. I guess we can’t really trust the results of those three studies he quotes, then! While exhorting us to worship only his hand-picked scientific studies, he insults all scientific researchers in practically the same breath.
Against his three studies, I submit to you Granny Storm Crow’s PDF list of annotated links to real research studies and results. It’s almost 700 pages…not of results, but of links. You can use it yourself to look up and refute many of the nonsense charges that Durine makes. Didn’t realize there was so much actual evidence, did you?
He also uses the trendy technique of listing some benefits, then implying that it’s claimed to be a “wonder drug” (scare quotes again, I hope you’re keeping track). Ha ha. “Everyone knows that pot can’t be a medicine, and therefore it’s even more ridiculous to call it a wonder drug.”
Yawn. I’ve already dealt with all these kind of lies and fake debating techniques in The Top Five Myths Of Medical Marijuana. It’s a PDF file with around four dozen references, and addresses many other of his points, including the cute bit about “smoked marijuana” not being medicine. We get it, and that’s why most patients do not smoke marijuana, and they don’t get high either.
But, of course, Durine — who writes like a paid shill for Big Pharma — doesn’t want you to know that, or that his precious Marinol pill is directly responsible for a number of deaths, while the actual plant hasn’t killed anybody in the 5,000 years that people have been using it. That’s why we like the plant, Durine…because it is safe, not because we want to get high.
And if we wanted to get high, the medical cannabis community wouldn’t be researching (and getting so excited about) things like CBD, microdosing, and juicing raw cannabis leaves — none of which get you high.
Nugs and hugs,
Old Hippie
P.S. Thanks to Google for randomly finding me this “gem” :rolleyes:
Thank you, Hippie, I get tired of trying to refute the a88es who insist i only wanna be high !~!~ You are a rock star. I love that the CBDs are getting easier to find and the pain control gets better and better.
Great to hear from you again! Hope you are doing well! Nugs and hugs!
Here was my response to one who gave a visceral response to one of my posts concerning cannabis:
In America in the 20′s there were bloody gun battles over booze turf rights, last I checked the Budwiser trucks dont come with tommy guns, what’s changed? Prohibition. I really think that what is at issue here is the visceral response some seem to have towards the unknown, unfamiliar and “the other”. There are several things at work here. First, since around the 40′s there has been a propaganda campaign against cannabis which instilled fear into society. Second, antintellectualism resulting in a phenomena of “sheeple” (sheep + people). A segment of society that believes everything it’s told by “authority figures”. Tied into that is the misdirection and misapplication of “Faith”. Example: misdirected faith causes sheeple to fly aircraft into buildings. Misapplied faith is an entire belief system that that is not grounded in Truth. This has the effect of muting reasoning skills and critical thinking because if the outcome of thinking doesn’t comply with misguided faith one is left with a disconcerting dilemma. A belief system should be grounded in Truth supported by displined, critical, logical, reasoning, with Faith at the pinnacle, believe me it works much better that way. Now, the problem, when “the other” confronts a sheeple with Truth, the response has to be visceral because nothing else works. Sadly, there is nothing that can be done for a sheeple, it has to come from within. “There are none so blind as those who will not see.”