The murderous war on drugs

By Ron Beasley

Two years ago Anthony Gregory presented examples of people killed or dying as a result of the war on drugs.

Speak out too loudly against the drug war, and you might be targeted. Peter McWilliams had AIDS and cancer and was dependent on marijuana to stay alive. It turns out that the people who had been using the stuff medicinally for thousands of years were onto something. No one has ever been recorded as dying from the physiological effects of marijuana. But the federal government wouldn�t let McWilliams, a vocal anti-prohibition activist, have his medicine. They threatened to take his mother�s house away if he used the substance that was keeping him alive. He was found dead in his home in June 2000. The drug war killed him directly.

And now Steve Kubby is in jail, being deprived of the medical marijuana that has kept him alive. About a quarter-century ago, he was diagnosed with an exceedingly rare strain of adrenal cancer that no one else has been able to survive for more than five years. He was expected to die within the same timeframe. His physician, Dr. Vincent DeQuattro, an expert on this rare condition, has credited marijuana with saving his life. Several years ago, Kubby was forcefully deprived of his medicine for three days in jail, during which he suffered extreme vomiting and shivering and went temporarily blind in one eye. In U.S. custody again, after having taken refuge in Canada and being extradited back to the Land of the Free, he now has a good chance of dying, of being murdered by the state, all so it can make an example of this courageous anti-drug war activist.

For Kubby, as was the case for McWilliams, prohibition of life-saving medicine could prove a cruel and unusual execution, all for the non-crime of self-medication, the right to which all humans are born with. Apparently, he has been allowed to use some Marinol, but the synthetic THC simply isn�t a replacement for the complex mixture of cannabinoids in marijuana. Smoking about twelve grams of pot a day has worked for him, allowing him to live a healthy life; the government�s approved version does not quite do the trick, though it might barely be keeping death away. It is very uncertain at this point what will come of his health and legal situation.

The drug war is misdirected. It is foolish. It is stupid, unworkable, disastrous, tragic and sad. But beyond all that it is evil.

Today Paul Armenanto wonders if Senator Ted Kennedy will be one of the next victims of the war on drugs.

In the fourteen years I�ve worked in marijuana law reform, few events have struck me as so needlessly tragic as the federal government�s consistent and deliberate stifling of medical cannabis research. Nowhere is the Feds� refusal to allow this science more overt and inhumane than as it pertains to the investigation of cannabinoids as anti-cancer agents, particularly in the treatment of gliomas.

As noted in today�s wire stories regarding Senator Edward Kennedy�s diagnosis, glioma is an aggressive form of cancer that affects an estimated 10,000 Americans annually. Standard treatments for the cancer include radiation and chemotherapy, though neither procedure has proven particularly effective � with the disease killing approximately half its victims within one year and all within three years.

But what if there was an alternative treatment for gliomas that could selectively target the cancer while leaving healthy cells in tact? And what if federal bureaucrats were aware of this treatment, but deliberately withheld this information from the public?

Armenanto explains that these are not a hypothetical questions and in fact he had written on the subject in 2004.

In fact, the first experiment documenting pot�s anti-tumor effects took place in 1974 at the Medical College of Virginia at the behest of the U.S. government. The results of that study, reported in an Aug. 18, 1974, Washington Post newspaper feature, were that marijuana�s psychoactive component, THC, �slowed the growth of lung cancers, breast cancers and a virus-induced leukemia in laboratory mice, and prolonged their lives by as much as 36 percent.�

Despite these favorable preliminary findings, U.S. government officials banished the study, and refused to fund any follow-up research until conducting a similar � though secret � clinical trial in the mid-1990s. That study, conducted by the U.S. National Toxicology Program to the tune of $2 million concluded that mice and rats administered high doses of THC over long periods had greater protection against malignant tumors than untreated controls.

However, rather than publicize their findings, government researchers shelved the results, which only became public after a draft copy of its findings were leaked in 1997 to a medical journal which in turn forwarded the story to the national media.

In the years since the completion of the National Toxicology trial, the U.S. government has yet to fund a single additional study examining the drug�s potential anti-cancer properties. Is this a case of federal bureaucrats putting politics over the health and safety of patients? You be the judge.

So why is the federal government so concerned about marijuana?  It's really pretty simple - Big Pharma can't make a lot of money. They can't get a patent on it so there is not billions of dollars to be made.  If it actually works it would seriously impact Big Pharma's bottom line.  This is how your government looks after your health.