Editorial

Don't go to pot

For the sake of your health

At least a couple of proposals legalizing "medical" marijuana are now angling for a place on November's ballot. Which means the state's Health Department may be called on to issue many a clarification between now and then. The first one came out last week. To quote Nathaniel Smith, M.D., and director of the department: "There was a statement by one of the proponents of medical marijuana that she had spoken to the Department of Health and that we were gearing up, expecting this ballot initiative to pass. That's not correct."

Dr. Smith added: "This so-called medical marijuana doesn't meet either standards of safety or effectiveness and for all of these [medical] conditions, there are FDA-approved alternatives. That's why I can't--either as a physician or director of the Health Department--support it. That's been our consistent position, even under the previous administration."

There's been a lot of smoke and more than a few mirrors used to obfuscate this whole issue. Here is the sponsor of a competing pot amendment, David Couch, dismissing opposition to his Arkansas Medical Cannabis Amendment as a nefarious conspiracy by the pharmaceutical industry: "For decades, big pharma has stifled all research on medical marijuana." He went on to use his concern for veterans as cover: "Eight veterans die each day as a result of post-traumatic stress disorder." Which is longhand for PTSD, formerly shell shock. "Medical marijuana is one of the recognized treatments for that. We shouldn't let any more veterans die."

All of which demonstrates only that, when the facts fail to back up an argument, yelling Conspiracy! is the next resort. It's not clear which is the more despicable: Trying to sell the public some snake oil in the guise of medicine, or using vets to hide behind when exposed.

To all of which Director Smith of the Health Department responds by citing the facts, noting that there is "a study here or a study there, but not the kind of controlled trials for something to be marketed or classified for a medical treatment. In the U.S., THC [the essential feelgood component of marijuana] has been produced synthetically . . . and that's marketed as Marinol. That's approved specifically for management of loss of appetite related to AIDS and for nausea, particularly associated with chemotherapy . . . . As an HIV physician, I did prescribe that medication, used it years ago, during the time we were treating AIDS patients before we had really effective treatments . . ." So not only are supporters of "medical" marijuana wrong factually, they're pushing a long outmoded treatment. But reasoning with them may prove an exercise in futility, for they put on their ideological blinders long ago.

There's a simpler way to use marijuana's key ingredient: Get a prescription from your doctor. But that would mean cutting out the possibility of a lucrative monopoly in the stuff. What's really being stifled here are the simple facts of the matter.

Why open the floodgates to all these dangers? Maybe it's part of the distrust of all authority in this age of Trump. To quote another authority the rest of us should listen to, namely Greg Bledsoe, the surgeon general of this state: "There's a significant number of people in this country who feel they've been dealt a wrong hand by their government and by their political leaders and I've begun to think that part of this medical marijuana popularity is not so much the people are in favor of medical marijuana. It's almost they want to push back against whatever this is that they feel like is causing some of their problems."

In short, the current demand for locoweed addresses a political and cultural condition rather than a medical one.

Call this two non-endorsements for medical marijuana. And the list keeps growing.

Editorial on 07/18/2016

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