(WATCH VIDEO OF ALL BUT LAST 2-3 mins of speech here: http://youtu.be/Fv_QfrOTFtQ)

Look at how far we’ve come on the elevation of cannabis respect and
human dignity.  It used to be that you would be looked at with stigma
and scorn if you wanted to invest time and energy into procuring
cannabis or growing some at home so you can consume it – no
exceptions.  Now, at least it pretty much makes common sense to folks
and legal sense in the eyes of 17 states and DC’s laws if you use
cannabis for particular doctor or prescriber-approved medical
purposes…such as if you have cancer, if you are undergoing cancer
treatment, if you have HIV/AIDS, if you have to take HIV antiviral
drugs, if you have multiple sclerosis, or other neurodegenerative
disorders, if you suffer from chronic persistent pain, or need strong,
more risky medicines to treat pain, if you have a seizure disorder, an
inflammatory bowel disorder like Crohn’s or Ulcerative Colitis, if you
have a wasting syndrome, poor appetite, glaucoma, and many other
conditions.  There has been a major shift in the state-by-state,
region-by-region attitude on this over the last 15 years.  There are
approximately 1,000,000 approved medical cannabis using patients under
the authorization of over 10,000 physicians and prescribers across the
United States.  People are being seriously helped!  Certainly, there
is much more that needs to be done to make cannabis treatments more
available for these types conditions which are often treated with more
severe side-effect producing medications. Many patients and doctors
are simply in the dark.
Unfortunately, instead of supporting education and the development of
these local medicine systems, federal government leaders and
bureaucrats have gone the way of facilitating a pharmaceutical
privileged-legitimacy monopoly on this 37 million year old
commonwealth medicinal plant.  They have given the go-ahead for a
pharmaceutical company to go through US testing of a highly
characterized hash oil made from a big grow-op in Great Britain. At
the same, the federal government has given nothing but grief and
permission-DENIED slips to well-meaning academics and non-profits,
even here in Massachusetts, who want to grow cannabis for similar
testing.  Yes, this is the American federal government giving
privileged access to venture-capital infused PHARMA companies and
ruining, throwing in jail, and pointing guns at the heads of people
who are doing a complementary and alternative medicine approach with
this ancient medicinal herb in places like CA, CO, MT, WA, and other
states.
Since this is a freedom rally, let me take a moment to recognize here
and now how our UNIVERSAL SCIENTIFIC FREEDOM to explore and
investigate very exciting and promising medical applications for
cannabis is being explicitly restricted in this country.  Thanks to
the wonder of how compounds in cannabis known as cannabinoids interact
with our body’s evolutionary ancient endocannabinoid system,
applications for cannabis such as brain cancer killing and other types
of cancer killing, Lou Gerhig’s disease halting and Multiple Sclerosis
slowing or halting, Alzheimer’s disease preventing, stroke and brain
injury recovery boosting, osteoporosis fighting, PTSD alleviating,
MRSA bacteria-superbug destroying, mad cow disease fighting, HIV
suppressing – all have strongly been suggested over and over in high
quality pre-clinical and early clinical scientific research in
reputable labs here and around the world.  We are not free in this
country, this “land of the free”, to test these applications out in
big clinical and treatment trials in humans using our own local grows
of cannabis because of these irrational prohibitionist laws. It is not
that the testing is expensive, too dangerous, or beyond our
technological and scientific means.  It is just a straight up
ideological ban.  This is like, 400 years ago in Europe, yanking away
Galileo’s telescope just after he’s caught a glimpse of the moons of
Jupiter and imagined a new celestial map.  This is just what Catholic
Church leaders—the power-that-be back then—did, out of fear of losing
their control and power.  But the world did move on and astronomy
moved forward.  How many years will advancement in the field of
medicine and human health be delayed by the federal government’s
obstinacy?
Please chant with me: WHAT DO WE WANT? FREEDOM TO EXPLORE CANNABIS!
WHEN DO WE WANT IT?  NOW! (repeat)

(WATCH VIDEO OF SPEECH UP TO HERE AT: http://youtu.be/Fv_QfrOTFtQ)
There are plenty of reasons people might want to use cannabis – for
example to improve their quality of life, expand their horizons, or
facilitate social bonding.  We are getting to a point culturally and
scientifically where we recognize that the human desire to alter
consciousness with psychoactive substances other than alcohol,
caffeine, energy drinks, tobacco, chocolate, hot chilies, and sugar is
normal and should be treated in a non-criminalizing, non-stigmatizing
public health manner which maximizes benefits and minimizes harms.
For now, we have remember: repression breeds obsession!  We have to be
careful not fall for the knee-jerk reaction of obsession with the
forbidden fruit cannabis—because that itself is a diminishment of
freedom.

Here are some things you can do to advance the cause of health and
scientific freedom:
1.      IF YOU LIVE IN MASSACHUSETTS, REGISTER TO VOTE AND VOTE YES ON
QUESTIONS 2 and 3 this November.  QUESTION 2 will allow terminally ill
patients of sound mind with less than six months to live the right
exercise the option of physician-assisted death if they so choose to
minimize needless suffering.  QUESTION 3 will legalize the medicinal
use of cannabis for patients who have been authorized to use it under
a doctor’s care. In this state possession of small amounts of cannabis
has been decriminalized already so that will help keep the program
less susceptible to fraud.  Both of these measures will leap
Massachusetts ahead in the cause of improved health and respect for
human rights and patient autonomy.
2.      If are a licensed medicine prescriber—a physician, a
physician-assistant, or nurse practitioner—or if you know one, please
visit or have them visit americansforsafeaccss.org, ASA, where I’m a
board member, and sign a sign-on letter saying that you agree that
there is an currently accepted medical use for cannabis in the United
States. This should help raise the profile of a case in federal court
next month in which the government’s archaic position will be
challenged once again.
3.      Visit my website at cannabinergy.com and my instructional videos at
howcast.com!  Support the Boston Freedom Rally!  They went through
great efforts to keep this space alive!

The Institute for Transpersonal and Cannabinergic Integrative Medicine

A Visioning:

Here at the ITCIM, we are interested in exploring the applications of two overlapping groups of naturally produced medicinal agents.  First, we study medicinals that have transpersonal effects, which is to say that they help to lead subjects beyond ordinary egoic states of consciousness into broader and potentially therapeutic alternate states of consciousness.  Secondly, we study medicines, mainly derived from the botanical Cannabis sativa, that exhibit cannabinergic effects in subjects, which means that part of their activity involves augmenting or modifying endogenous cannabinoid signaling and related physiological processes  which can have a direct or indirect impact on mood state, memory, inflammation, pain experience, muscle tone, appetite, energy expenditure, bone growth, neuroprotection and neurogenesis, tumor surveillance and apoptosis , immune function, HPA stress axis modulation, and seizure threshold, amongst other systemic functions.   We are interested in being a self-sufficient research, treatment, and training institute that sustainably produces these medicinal agents through controlled breeding, cultivation, and development using donated germplasm accessions from around the world and tests them on subjects in inpatient and outpatient clinical and empiric treatment trials, thereby generating a robust body of clinical and agronomic  data to further substantiate and uncover their already-known and future-promising therapeutic utilities for the benefit of humankind.

In order to accomplish this in the current legal environment, we require federal government licenses to possess, produce, and prescribe many of these medicinals, an academic institutional home with production and testing spaces, significant funding, and a highly qualified team of researchers.  All of this can be done.

Health conditions which we would be interested in studying for treatment, both palliative and curative, include:

Existential Death Anxiety in the Terminally Ill

Multiple Sclerosis

Cancers

HIV

Seizure Disorders

Chronic Pain Syndromes

Neurodegenerative Disease

Spinal Cord Injuries

Brain Injuries

Depression

Anxiety

Substance-Related Disorders

Prion Diseases

to name a few…

References:

Scotton BW, Chinen AB, and Battista JR. (Eds.) 1996. Textbook of Transpersonal 
Psychiatry and Psychology. New York: Basic Books

Pacher P, Batkai S, Kunos G.  2006.  The Endocannabinoid System as an Emerging 
Target of Pharmacotherapy.  Pharmacological Reviews, 2006 Sep;58(3):389-462.  
Available at: http://pharmrev.aspetjournals.org/cgi/reprint/58/3/389.pdf

Cracker LE and Gardner ZE.  2006.  Medicinal Plants and Tomorrow’s Pharmacy: An 
American Perspective, in R.J. Bogers, L.E. Craker and D. Lange (eds.), Medicinal and 
Aromatic Plants, Chapter 2, 29-41

Aggarwal SK.  Cannabinergic Pain Medicine: A Concise Clinical Primer and Survey of 
Randomized-controlled Trial Results.  Clinical Journal of Pain.  2012 Feb 23.  Epub 
ahead of print.  PMID: 22367503

Chuck Stovall with Dr. Sunil Kumar Aggarwal, on the day he helped me move

If you were to ask me if there was one particular spark or catalyst that finally led me to do the open investigations and health advocacy that I have done thus far with cannabis and banned botanicals in general, I would have to say yes, there was indeed.  It came about as I was progressing through stages of coping after a seemingly amicable informal employee relationship in my life ended abruptly with violent threats in a typewritten letter left for me on my kitchen table about compromising my academic standing and my ostensible ‘free person, clean record’ status by presenting to relevant authorities (professors, police) a Volcano Vaporizer cannabis flower heating instrument that had been stolen from my house in my absence by the letter-writer.

I had purchased the vaporizer online to personally explore non-smoked cannabis delivery methods, as I found occasional cannabis consumption to be beneficial to my overall health and well-being, and had previously shown the device to this person and had utilized it once to help an ailing elderly acquaintance of his at a moment’s notice.  The letter-writer also referenced his 50 caliber gun, suggesting that he would come by to “show it to me” some time, a reference that could easily be interpreted as a threat of armed violence.  The man who made the threats also stole some cannabis flower material and related accoutrements that I had in a drawer, and I was concerned that he may have stolen some of my home movie tapes that I had also kept in the same drawer which had footage of, among other things, myself and college chums consuming cannabis privately and sometimes discussing lofty philosophical and mystical ideas which sometimes involved claiming ourselves to be “chosen prophets” and other such classic self-empowering talk.

When queried, this man who made these threats one or two days later verbally agreed over the phone that he had also taken some of those tapes, and I believed that he may have for many months, until I finally mustered up the courage to go through and view my several hours long tape collection and was not able to find anything missing from what I remembered to be there.  Nevertheless, over several scattered phone conversations with this individual asking to at least get my tapes back, he reacted angrily and said that he was going to burn the tapes (which he in all likelihood did not have in fact).  I lived for many months with the threat that videotapes showing my private cannabis use occasioning easily-misinterpretable spiritual-mystical insight could be possibly exposed publicly if this man wanted to try to possibly “smear me”.  This was in additional to the armed threat, police “rat-out”, and academic standing threats in the letter, and it made for a very difficult, painful, personally challenging, and emotionally and psychologically draining process of coping and recovery which heightened my paranoia and sense of lack-of-control in my life over my safety, freedom, well-being, and at times even tested my sanity…

Who was this man who was able to direct such violent threats to the very core of my being?  His name was Chuck Stovall.  We met for the first time when I was moving from my old house in Seattle and had posted an ad on craigslist for someone to come and take one of my halogen torch lamps for free.  He responded and came and picked up the lamp which was sitting just outside the house next to the room I was in.  He later noted that it was the fact that I had extended my hand through the horizontal glass slit window to shake his hand as a completion of the “free pick up” transaction that led him to his act of generosity at our next meeting.  A few days later, I called up someone who had posted on craigslist a ‘services offered’ ad to do moving and hauling with their truck to see if I could get some help with moving furniture.  It turned out (coincidentally) that this ad (out of the several posted) that I was responding to was placed by Chuck, the same guy who had responded to my ad about the free lamp.  When he made the connection after I called, he agreed to come and help me move some of my furniture over to my new place, and he even brought his kids, his three daughters, with him.  He didn’t actually want any money for helping me with the move, and he said this was because I had been generous and cordial when I had given him the halogen lamp, even though he told me it was not exactly the kind of halogen lamp that he was looking for (he wanted one for painting).  When he was dropping off the new stuff, I proposed that perhaps I could hire him to do some other work that was going to be needed in my new place, such as the installation of a garbage disposal and the installation of a dishwasher and a the building of a platform for it.  He was quite agreeable to this and was insistent that we talk about compensation some other time.  Over a series of weeks and months, we had trips to Lowe’s, we had periods of long work sessions in which he variously did electrical work, plumbing, and carpentry.  Everything went pretty well with the quality of work, with the exception of one time in which a plastic stopper was not removed inside the garbage disposal leading a veritable water overflow to occur when the dishwasher was run on a high setting overnight, ultimately leading to some water damage occurring to the ceiling of the unit below mine in the building.  This was luckily able to be rather inexpensively patched up.

As time went on, we came to know more about each other’s backgrounds and personalities.  I learned that Chuck was from Montana, that he was part-Native American (Cree tribe), and that he had worked various maintenance man jobs over the years.  He sustained a pretty severe fall while doing some roof work a number of years before and sustained some kind of bilateral calcaneal (heel bone) shatter injuries since he landed on his feet when he fell.  He wore special springy orthotic shoes, he suffered from chronic pain, and he sometimes had a bit of a passive-aggressive edge about him.  I felt like I could trust him some, because it turned out one of my best study buddies and friends in medical school, Jonathan Griffin, had a wife who actually knew of Chuck via Chuck’s sister from their days together in Billings, Montana.  Ashley, Jonathan’s wife, knew Chuck’s sister from her childhood and maybe even had her over at her house once or twice.  So I figured this man wasn’t a complete stranger, as there were in fact only a few degrees of separation between us.

So, I lent him my key to do work when I wasn’t home, I eventually let him on to the fact that I enjoyed cannabis use, but definitely wanted to keep it quiet due to fear of authorities.  I even eventually offered some to him.  We consumed this together on one or two occasions.  Once, I even read aloud from Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States about the mistreatment of the Native Americans historically, as I was very keen on such intellectual endeavors when I enjoyed the calming and sharpening effects of cannabis.  He found that to be extremely amusing.  Over time, he started making on-the-spot demands such as one time asking for $100 to buy some materials for the home projects.  I eventually agreed, but I was confused by what he was trying to purchase.  Later, he started asking me to find some cannabis to purchase, and later still, he drove me down the street in his truck and asked me to be involved in some kind of inter-state cannabis trade deal with his buddies in Montana.  I vehemently refused this.   He started to talk about some prior anger management classes he had taken, and he started to talk about him and his wife possibly divorcing.  Eventually, he told me that he was going to leave town for several months.  He said that he could do a little bit of work to finish up the home project.  When I came home one evening, I found my key on my kitchen table with a copy of the type-written letter.

I later realized that I should have been much more forthcoming and clear about giving him some money for his labors.  It probably appeared to him that was “stiffing” him – perhaps he didn’t have the courage or manners to directly ask me for it, and his anger over this may have percolated.   Not that this type of reaction that he had is in any way justified or a normal reaction to what he may have been feeling; however, this is possibly how he got to issuing the threats and stealing from me.

I don’t think he ever got any of my videotapes after all…but he really did send me into a bit of an emotional tailspin and a huge amount of paranoia and sense of out-of-controlness about my ability to be safe and free in the world with some modicum of control over my destiny.  I constantly fretted about this.  I began to sometimes believe that I saw his red truck driving by and would try to hide.  I worried that there was some kind of malicious messages that were being sent to me in spam emails that I was receiving.  I was concerned that an attempted vandalism of breaking one of our windows in the basement and defacing of the keyboxes at the front door were somehow connected to what was happening to me.  I sometimes conceived that a kind of psychological “reign of terror” was being foisted upon me.  I had the lock on the door to my apartment changed.  I had the misfortune of being randomly selected to participate in the National Crime Victimization Survey, some annual survey conducted by a federal government agency.  I felt yet again the helplessness of not having any legal recourse for what happened to me because I knew that the “crimes” against me could not be “reported” on a government survey because they could somehow end up criminalizing me.  I had a more than a few very negative “trip” experiences with high dose cannabis where I felt that I was being followed and even one time, that an outside force was psychologically torturing me!  These types of experiences truly did border madness!

In thinking about why this violence was inflicted upon me, I started to think more about the violence that people inflict upon each other in the world in general and I began to become interested in this as a kind of research topic of human pathology.  Eventually, one day, it may have been a New Year’s Day when I was taking an air flight somewhere with my sister – I had the epiphany –the violence that I can study is that related to the drug wars…. I resolved to open up this as an area of inquiry and study.  I resolved to have some modicum of control over my predicament by making strides to question and ultimately challenge this social framework in which I felt that I was trapped.  Eventually, this brought me to studying cannabis, in line with my prior interests in endocannabinoid signaling, green botanical medicines, violence, and health…

More than a year after the incident, I was in the mood of recalling what may have happened to Chuck Stovall.  I had already done a tremendous amount of personal psychological work in moving towards “letting go” of what had happened to me, to the losses and vulnerabilities that I felt I had experienced.  After I googled his name on the computer, I was dumbstruck—several months prior, according to an article I found in a local newspaper, Chuck had died in a freak automobile accident while driving in inclement weather.  There was a fund set up for his children.  There was talk of how he was loving and honest and all the rest.  It was unbelievable.  It was finally over.  It took me some time to really believe that this was actually true.  I found that it had also been printed in the Billings newspaper online.  That helped to legitimize it for me.

Scanned copy of Chuck's letter

 

Desis and the Drug Wars: Why South Asians for Justice Are Needed To Dismantle the Drug War, Free People and Plants, and Foster Health and Development for Millions – Part 2

First, a needed preamble for Part 1.  At the first SAFJ-NYC meeting, I expressed an interest in doing a type of ‘teach-in’ on the relationship between South Asian for justice issues and the drug war.  The group collectively expressed some interest in my doing this, as did some people individually.  Given the way of our schedules and the difficulty of arranging meetings, I figured starting off virtually would be the most appropriate.  This also is a way for me to convey rather complicated trains of thought that link the concrete radical and queer-politic approaches mentioned in the SAFJ Vision statement with the cause that has become one of my major foci of activism and public education – the dismantling of the American-led war on drugs institutionalized machine of violence, oppression, and ongoing mass incarceration and its replacement with a decriminalized model of real public health regulation for all psychoactive substances which recognizes people’s rights to cultivate natural plants.

Why this matters for South Asians for Justice is that 1) the history and foundation of the modern drug war has its roots in colonialism and racism, significant threads of which can be traced back to animosity and discrimination directed at South Asian people, South Asian migrant diasporas, and long-standing South Asian cultural practices (e.g., see Links 1 and 2 below) and 2) the dismantling of the present wave of racially disproportionate mass incarceration does intersect, as the vision statement points out, with the wave of undocumented immigrant holding centers that target South Asians and other immigrant groups and 3) liberating people to make use of the plants that are suppressed by the drug war could do a great deal for health and development the world over, given the extreme shortages of opium-derived pain medicines around the world (esp. in places like India where so much is produced and exported) and given the thousands of uses of the cannabis hemp plant for food, shelter, medicine, paper and other valuable products, to name a few examples.

Now, comrades, let me recap some of what I discussed in Part 1.  In a US-led colonial effort, India and other South Asian countries were ordered by the United Nations (UN), despite their official protest, to give up their long-standing cultural practice of cannabis consumption in 1961, and were given a 25-year grace period to do so, which India has only partially done.  In 2010, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on the Human Right to Health, a South Asian man appointed by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, finally called for global respect for the enduring cultural legacy of cannabis use in India.  This begs the question: would such a treaty agreement dictating mandatory ‘stamping out’ of culturally accepted close contact with a plant even be politically possible in today’s UN?

South Asians seeking justice, concerned as we are about the ongoing problem of mass incarceration in the United States, ought to be questioning the principles of the prisoner-taking drug war, which is THE major force behind the gargantuan rise in the US prison population.  And if indeed we want to be radical, we must get to the heart of the drug wars, and when you do that, you find that 3 key plants, depending on where you are in the world, are at the heart of it: cannabis, opium, and coca.  And in the United States, it’s all about cannabis.

Allow me to take three extended quotations from a book that really succinctly explains the symbolic politics of drugs in the US and the key role that cannabis criminalization plays in the drug war.

Drug use was popularized and romanticized as a portion of the general rebellion against the rules and norms of the pre-1960s explicitly racist, sexist, militarist, puritanic nation. Drugs became a symbolic and substantive act by which much of the population thought and declared itself free from old constraints. Though the counter-culture achieved a great deal of attention, as well as some of its agenda, the larger population despised them for changing the old rules which were comfortable for many persons. As the dominant culture reasserted itself, initially under Nixon but much more vigorously under Reagan, the body politic did a very traditional thing and criminalized the opposition culture. Marijuana growers and users totaling in the millions were made to suffer the majority’s backlash.” (p. 160-1)

“The absence of physical harm from smoking pot has required that all the punitive force be government created. Punishment for marijuana is thus the great frontier of authoritarianism. A widespread popular behavior detested by the ruling class has justified war propaganda, police engagement and mass punishment.” (p.141)

“Marijuana is at the heart of the War on Drugs precisely because the criminalization of 600,000 Americans each year is nearly all about ideology and culture and emphatically not about health.  Marijuana is the only drug specifically mentioned by Ronald Reagan in his drug war kickoff address.  It is the drug that has remained the exception from any claim of government victory.  There is no national drug crisis or reason for focus on drugs if marijuana is undemonized.  All other drugs together have fewer than 2 million users, as opposed to 70 million people who have tried marijuana.  Police budgets could no longer be justified and prison construction would end if marijuana ceased to be a crime.  The acceptance of legitimate medical use inevitably raises the question of how criminalizing of others for their use is conscionable.  Medical sanction politically contradicts decades of propaganda that already stands contradicted by each person’s personal experience.  It certainly says that drug use and drug abuse are not synonymous.  It also says that if the people lead against the war effort they actually can frustrate the great federal war machine.  It creates the potential for dialogue rather than a “Just Say No” chant.”

Source: Baggins DS. 1998. Drug Hate and the Corruption of American Justice. Westport, CT: Praeger.

Marijuana arrests now comprise more than one-half (52 percent) of all drug arrests in the United States.  In 2010, police made 853,838 arrests for marijuana offenses, which is 1 arrest every 37 seconds.  There have been 23 million arrests made since 1937 and 7.9 million since the year 2000.  June 2011 marked the 40^th anniversary of when Nixon declared the War on Drugs formally.  Since that time, over a trillion dollars have been spent on this endeavor.

So, the wave of immigrant detention centers is linked to the despicable situation of mass incarceration.  Mass incarceration is intricately tied to the war on drugs.  The heart of the war on drugs is all about the suppression of cannabis.  And the suppression of cannabis use is tied to racism and colonialism, a significant proportion of which was directed against South Asians.

This has to be challenged at its roots.

Links:  1) http://www.tc.columbia.edu/centers/cifas/Drugsandsociety/news/gj_lvs_19990824_1.html

2) http://jamaica-gleaner.com/pages/history/story0057.htm

Desis and the Drug Wars: Why South Asians for Justice Are Needed To Dismantle the Drug War, Free People and Plants, and Foster Health and Development for Millions – Part 1

The Vision Statement for South Asians for Justice acknowledges the private-prisons-backed, corporatist-police state-driven, racially-skewed ‘new Jim Crow’ era of mass incarceration that currently reigns in the US.  What we must also see is the unjust racist-colonialist ideology that underpins its legitimation, here and abroad, and seek to challenge that ideology and articulate new visions.  For this, we must familiarize ourselves with the ubiquitous matrix of US-led national and international, low-intensity deadly conflicts predicated on saving and punishing certain people who consume certain substances, many plant-based, known as drugs.  The fact of the matter is that the key factor in growth of the incarceration industry has been the enforcement of drug control laws.  We must develop a more critical and radical understanding about these ‘drug plants’ and understand how their suppression is responsible not only for cultural suppression but also the hamstringing of scientific and medical progress, the disallowance of relief from pain and suffering, the propagation of epidemic diseases, and the perpetuation of brutal violence against masses caught in the crossfire of cartels and gangs.

While we look at how circuits of power cause and influence the production of mass social disparity, as we stare just above and beyond the vigil of Occupy Wall Street and face the growing, yawning chasm between the haves and have-nots, it is sensible to look at what resources are available in our immediate environments … beneath the heel of state-cartel monopolies.. and what may be reclaimed and beneficially cultivated so we may be enriched, well, and socially reformed towards tolerance and understanding.

Being post-colonial and aware of casteism, South Asians can appreciate the subtle ways that domination can be achieved through the seemingly arbitrary categorization of customs and practices as impure or pure, and through the association of certain states of being and behaviors as underclass and upperclass.  Based on racist colonialist ideology, whole practices can become interpreted as foreign, exotic, bizarre, or mad, based on the idea that the dignity of a pukka-sahib, an English gentleman, is greater than the inherent dignity of an Indian laborer such as a coolie.  It was under such prevailing ideological conditions that a subset of South Asian and Oriental cultural consumption practices over the last 100 years came unjustly to be seen as inherently less dignified, and the now-global state-cartel policy of systematically excluding certain botanicals from everyday common use and practice by threatening criminal penalty was born and fostered.

As we reflect on our common vision of the archipelago of jails, prisons, and holding centers that dot this landscape, filled with human bodies that are incarcerated en masse, disproportionately of non-white racial makeup– a literal caging and warehousing of millions of human lives, I want to argue that it concretely represents the actual continuation of the original colonialist-racist framework, which has grown in its reach as awareness and underground trade in banned substances has spread from the margins of the empires to the centers.   It has matured as racist-colonialist moralistic attitudes became veiled with the patina of medico-scientific legitimacy that is then inculcated into schoolchildren and their parents.

What are some of these banned plants?

First, the great Green Botanical that may be the most widely domesticated plant in the world, a 37 million year old plant that evolved in South/West Asia that is sacredly figured into numerous South Asian cultural-spiritual-religious traditions and has various names: Bhang, Vijaya, Soolphia, Ganja, Charas, Indian Hemp, Cannabis Indica, Cannabis, Marijuana, Marihuana.  Its use has spread around the world and a significant portion of that can be traced back to waves of low caste migrants from South Asia in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries who brought with them the practice of cannabis use.

Denigrated as Pot, Weed, or Dope, this plant actually can be used in deliberate and rational ways to bring better health and well-being, to ease stress and pain.  When the UN meetings were held in 1961 in NYC to Internationally prohibit cannabis save for an elite monopoly and categorize it as a substance which ought to be removed entirely from medical practice because of its risk to public health, the delegate representing the Indian government stated that “India would not be able…to enforce prohibitions on the use of those substances [ganja and bhang], particularly in remote localities where, as inexpensive sedatives, they were used for medical and quasi-medical purposes.”  Delegates from countries such as Ghana, Pakistan, France, United Kingdom, Germany, Uruguay, and Burma verbally supported the Indian concerns and mostly wished to see cannabis treated like opium, for indigenous and traditional uses to be tolerated, and for future medical applications to not be foreclosed.

Interestingly, it is a South Asian leader of human rights at the UN nowadays who is championing the cause of recognizing the traditional use of cannabis and doing away with criminalization in matters related to drugs.  His name is Mr. Anand Grover.  The United Nations Human Right Council appointed him as the Special Rapporteur on the right of everyone to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health at its eighth session held in June 2008.  Mr Anand Grover, a practicing lawyer in the Bombay High Court and the Supreme Court of India, who was instrumental in overturning in the Indian Supreme Court colonial-era anti-sodomy law, took up his functions as Special Rapporteur on 1 August 2008.  I invite you to read his report on the right to health and international drug control: http://daccess-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/N10/477/91/PDF/N1047791.pdf?OpenElement

More in Part 2….

American Alliance for Medical Cannabis (AAMC)

Ten years ago the American Alliance for Medical Cannabis was formed by Dr. Jay R. Cavanaugh to promote the medical uses of marijuana. AAMC became a member of the Coalition for Rescheduling Cannabis which filed a petition with the federal government to remove marijuana from their “no medical use” classification. Nine years later the government has denied the petition.

AAMC now has directors active in 19 states (Arizona, California, Colorado, Georgia, Idaho, Kansas, Kentucky, Michigan, Nebraska, New Jersey, New Mexico, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Rhode Island, Utah, Washington, West Virginia, and Wisconsin). We are helping patients find the resources they need in order to benefit from medical cannabis.

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Dr.Cannabinergy, Sunil Kumar Aggarwal, MD, PhD, Physician-Scientist and Medical Geographer

Who’s Who in Medical Cannabis -Sunil K Aggarwal, MD, PhD – by C.A.Riley

Who?

Dr Aggarwal is one of the most effective medical cannabis proponents few people outside the Seattle area have ever heard of.

It has been easy to find documentation of his myriad achievements in education, research, medicine, medical cannabis advocacy and more, but it has been nearly impossible to ferret out any personal information on Dr Aggarwal.

As a University of Washington medical student, Aggarwal told the crowd at the 2008 Seattle Hempfest, “We have to change the way people think about people and cannabis. This is a staple of the earth and a basic medicine for a lot of people.”

Long before his time at the University of Washington, in the early 1990s Sunil Aggarwal attended high school in Muskogee, Oklahoma until his Junior year when he went on to the Oklahoma School of Science and Mathematics in Oklahoma City.

After finishing high school, Aggarwal left the Midwest in 1997 and traveled to the west coast, where he resumed his education at UC Berkeley–which included a semester of study abroad in Edinburgh. After 4.5 years at Berkeley, Sunil moved to Seattle and continued his studies at the University of Washington in the Geography Department.

There, he completed his first two years of med school, completed his doctorate in geography, writing his dissertation on the “medical geography of cannabinoid botanicals in Washington State.” Two more years of med school followed, in which Aggarwal focused on the Medical Scientist Training Program and the Global Health Pathway, graduating in June, 2010, some two years after his Hempfest proclamation. Dr Aggarwal also holds degrees in chemistry, philosophy and religious studies.

In conjunction with his dissertation, Dr Aggarwal conducted research with 176 chronically and critically ill patients in two groups, one from a rural pain clinic and the other from an urban cannabinoid botanical delivery clinic. At this writing, two peer-reviewed published articles have come from this work.

So, what led Dr Aggarwal to the medical cannabis movement?

It began while he was an undergraduate.

He says that when he discovered “marijuana wasn’t a horribly dangerous thing” he wanted to study it thoroughly and he has done so for at least the past decade.

When medical student Sunil K. Aggarwal convinced the UW chapter of the medical student group of the AMA to support a resolution he had written in support of rescheduling cannabis, he presented the idea and his research to the American Medical Association (AMA) at its annual meeting in 2008. The organization agreed to study the issue for a year.

At its 2009 meeting, the country’s largest physicians’ organization formally adopted a policy urging the federal government to reclassify, or “reschedule,” cannabis.

It was Aggarwal’s research, dissertation, and the two articles derived from it and published in the Journal of Opioid Management that helped convince the American Medical Association (AMA) of the potential for medical uses of cannabis and led the organization to reverse previous policy and call for the rescheduling of cannabis so that more research could be conducted upon it.

So far, the government has not changed its policy and, incredibly, has stepped up efforts to quash medical cannabis production in the states that have legalized it for medical use.

Dr Aggarwal also holds degrees in chemistry, philosophy and religious studies and is a much-sought-after speaker at medical, drug policy reform and other conferences and conventions.

Here’s a link to an interesting article by Dr Aggarwal. Aggarwal-Macroed.pdf

His new website: cannabinergy.com

The report drafted by the AMA’s Council on Science and Public Health asks for a “review” of marijuana’s classification but neither demands the government reschedule the drug nor emphasizes the need Aggarwal believes hundreds of thousands of patients have for the drug’s medicinal properties.

“I tried as best as I could to make the language stronger than it was, but that was as far as it was going,” Aggarwal said. “But I realized that even at that level, it would still be a big shift.”

And not just for the medical community. Speaking at Hempfest last year, Aggarwal urged the crowd not to feel like criminals.

The government hasn’t shown any sign of following the AMA’s suggestion just yet, though it’s hardly the first organization to call for change. Last year, the American College of Physicians also urged the government to reconsider marijuana.

Aggarwal, who expects to stay in what he calls the now “exploding” field of cannabinoid science after he graduates in June, is sure change is coming.

“I’m pretty happy,” he said. “This Schedule 1 thing is going to be a thing of the past.”

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Dr.Cannabinergy, Sunil Kumar Aggarwal, MD, PhD on Human Intoxication

Weapons of mass destruction (weapons-grade fissile nuclear material (reprocessed plutonium or yellowcake uranium), biological weapons (e.g. Ebola, Fusarium)), Chemical Toxins (lead (Pb), mercury (Hg), NOx emissions, fine particulate matter, PBTs such as PCBs and PBDEs, mixed radioactive nuclear waste), Greenhouse Gas emissions (CO2­­, CH­4, H2­O(g)­) –

These are the substances and chemicals that, for the sake of a healthy, peaceful, and sustainable world, we need policies implemented to heavily curtail, reduce and/or abolish their production and use.

What can obscure and retard these goals are public policies that attempt to control/eradicate substances that are treated as if they were nuclear fissile materials or virulent contagions. “Drugs” are one set of substances that get in the way of these goals due to the influence of powerful interest groups who persist in claiming that drugs require massive curtailment, reduction, and total eradication.

This rhetoric, while sounding totally normal and familiar due to its oft-repetition, is not based on science or reason. Drug-taking is a normal and ordinary aspect of human culture that has appeared universally cross-culturally and throughout recorded history and prehistory. Not everyone is satisfied with the national “un-drug” drug alcohol, and it is chauvinistic to force people to be so.

Allow me to quote from a manuscript by a Canadian drug policy analyst that is about the debunked mythology of the Marijuana Gateway:

We also need to learn to accept the reality that mental health is as important as physical health. The Vedas are believed to be among the oldest, if not the oldest, religious scriptures extant. One of them, the Rig Veda, specifically focuses on the worship of a psycho-active substance that opens the doors to intense spiritual experience. A number of other scriptures, from various religions, seem to cover the same ground, although usually in a more disguised form. Even the Bible has numerous entries that could plausibly be references to cannabis and powerful psychedelics.

The need to explore human consciousness is as vital as the need to eat or sleep. Since time immemorial and until the end of time, humans have been, and will be, using drugs or plants that seem to facilitate interesting or productive explorations and, without the opportunity to use them under supervised conditions, many people will inevitably be misusing them as long as their dominant cultures, to which they’re pressured to conform, continue to insist that these substances have no legitimate use.

Some psychopharmacologists have described this acquired human drive to psychoactivate as “the fourth drive.”

Thus, taking it into account is essential for a full understanding of human health.

The ‘war on drugs’ or ‘drug abuse prevention and control’ is therefore more appropriately seen as a low-grade, persistent, prisoner-taking war on the acquired human drive to psychoactivate steeped in an ideology of pharmacologicalism in which some substances are allowed and encouraged for psychoactivation (e.g, tobacco, alcohol, caffeine, sugar, cacao, “better than well” mood brighteners) and others are morally forbidden.

Pharmacologicalism is a matrix of centralized powers and discursive practices whose object is to reinforce an essentialism of drugs, of angel drug and demon drugs.

Take a peek into the racist, morally panicked and drug scare history.

Former Congressman, Spanish-American War hero, and prohibition propagandist Richmond P. Hobson issued the following national radio broadcast in 1928 during the “Narcotic Education Week”:

Heroin addiction can be likened to a contagion. Suppose it were announced that there were more than a million lepers among our people. Think what a shock the announcement would produce! Yet drug addiction is far more incurable than leprosy, far more tragic to its victims, and is spreading like a moral and physical scourge.

There are symptoms breaking out all over our country and now breaking out in many parts of Europe which show that individual nations and the whole world is menaced by this appalling foe…marching…to the capture and destruction of the whole world.

Most of the daylight robberies, daring holdups, cruel murders and similar crimes of violence are now known to be committed chiefly by drug addicts, who constitute the primary cause of our alarming crime wave.

Drug addiction is more communicable and less curable than leprosy. Drug addicts are the principle carriers of vice diseases, and with their lowered resistance are incubators and carriers of the streptococcus, pneumococcus, the germ of flu, of tuberculosis, and other diseases.

Upon the issue hangs the perpetuation of civilization, the destiny of the world and the future of the human race.

(quoted in The American Disease: Origins of Narcotic Control by Dr. David Musto, Yale Professor and UW Medical School graduate)

My main point is that psychoactivity is not the same as dangerous toxicity, despite the histrionic ranting of Mr. Hobson!

Despite this, the United States Drug Enforcement Administration/Agency maintains over 78 offices in 56 countries outside the US, reflecting the hegemonic status that the United States has enjoyed since the early 20th century in matters related to international drug control.

This is total insanity.

When are we going to separate the effects of drug prohibition from drug use?

Why do we not strengthen our call for the eradication of dangerous substances by pointing out the violence and irrationality of spending approximately 100 billion dollars a year on curtailing naturally occurring seeds which mature into plants that satisfy the natural human drive to psychoactivate?

Let’s advocate for the public-health backed policy of harm reduction and strengthen our credibility on speaking up for the truly dangerous substances.

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Hempenomics:

True hemp, which is the oldest English language word for the Cannabis sativa plant, has been a valuable crop throughout human history for food, fiber, fuel, and ‘farmacy’. Carl Sagan and others have intelligently argued that hemp was the first plant domesticated by human civilization. Thanks to an orchestrated effort to greatly restrict cannabis hemp in trade in the second and third decades of the twentieth century based on racism, imperialism, and junk science, most people in 2011 have virtually forgotten about the mighty hemp plant. All that is left to remind us of this history are archeological and genealogical remnants in our country. We have towns with names such as “Hempstead” and family surnames such as “Hemphill” which point to this historical import that stretches back to the early seventeenth century. The restoration of hemp into our industrial culture is, I believe, an essential component of our new greening revolution.

Consider this basic argoeconomic science: The hemp stalk after it is grown, harvested, and dried is broken down into two parts: long, strong thread-like bast fibers and wood-like bits of “hurd”, or pulp. The hurds are 77-85% cellulose and can be made into tree-free, dioxin-free paper, non-toxic paints and sealants, construction materials, plastics, and much more. Most importantly, hemp is one of the best energy crops; the biomass from the stalk can be used to make methanol, charcoal, and even gasoline. The most important product is methanol. With an estimated yield of 10 (and perhaps as high as 18) tons of biomass per acre of hemp grown, and through pyrolysis an expected yield of 100 gallons of methanol per ton, there is a potential to produce 1000 gallons of methanol per acre of hemp.

A fully mature crop can be grown four times per year.

The reason that hemp needs a boost is that it is the only alternative energy source whose implementation is retarded on extremist ideological grounds that have become codified into law. Wind, geothermal, tidal, hydrogen, solar, cellulosic corn/soy/etc are theoretically implementable (and should be implemented much much more so) because, at root, no one owns the sun, the wind, the oceans, soybean seeds, the hydrogen molecule, and so on.

These natural resources are part of the global commons that we all share.

Cannabis hemp seeds (genetic resources), however, have been robbed from the global commons through a US-led international monopoly-ownership ban by world governments that was formally implemented in 1961 (Single Convention on Narcotic drugs, even though cannabis is not a narcotic).

The ban in the US went into effect in 1937 due some argue to the undue power and influence of WR Hearst paper interests, DuPont Petrochemical interests (makers of nylon and patent-holder of the process to convert wood-pulp into paper, the leading cause of dioxin pollution in the environment for decades), and other post-Prohibition bureaucratic interests.

There was, however, a militarist hemp promotion effort by the USDA in the 1940’s during WWII war effort (“Hemp for Victory” campaign). Despite the fact that hemp can yield 18 tons of biomass per acre in only 4 months (more per four month period then sugarcane, maize, napier, kanaf and other); despite the fact that it is low-moisture and does not exhaust soil fertility; despite the fact that it solves the food/energy crop dilemma by providing both in one (methanol from pyrolysis of the cellulose and highly nutritious food from the seeds), a single plant of it cannot be legally grown in the United States of America.

They own the germplasm.

One single sample of the germplasm of cannabis, if allowed to be cultivated and propagated by agriculturalists and chemurgic specialists, would bring about nothing short of a green revolution.

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Dr.Cannabinergy, Sunil Kumar Aggarwal Showing His Skills

Cannabis Policy Reforms:

Greetings, Fellow Internet Users,

People have been asking what the ol’ doctors’ trade guild association, the AMA, have resolved about Cannabis and its use as a medicinal agent.  Well, a few interesting things.  First, a brief review from last year.   The AMA filed a report written by their Council on Science and Public Health entitled “Use of Cannabis for Medicinal Purposes” on November 9, 2009, in which it was acknowledged that short-term clinical trials of smoked cannabis grown in Mississippi with federal tax dollars had demonstrated evidence of its ability to relieve neuropathic pain, stimulate appetite, and ease muscle spasms in humans.  They furthermore adopted a policy recommendation from the report saying that “Our AMA urges marijuana’s status as a Schedule I drug be reviewed…”  The report also said that rescheduling of marijuana could be supported if it aided in the development of cannabinoid medicines.   Since last November, the report was kept on a website open only to AMA members and was to be published in a peer-reviewed journal, but this never occurred.  Members of the press did get copies if requested, and human rights activist groups quickly shared it online, as did eventually the Board of Pharmacy of Oregon.  Worldwide headlines took “reviewed” to mean “reconsidered”, which it essentially does in this context.  It was also interpreted as saying the AMA calls on the Feds to stop classifying marijuana as dangerous.  The phrase “AMA marijuana” has generated hundreds of google news alerts since that time.  Earlier language that the Medical Student Section and several Pacific and Mountain state medical delegations had supported which called on “reclassification of marijuana’s status” to a more appropriate Schedule, did not make it.

Tthe AMA did disseminate its own news releases about their policy change.  The AMA president was interviewed about the policy change on National NPR and said that the issue was brought forward in the AMA by the pain and palliative care doctors (sadly, it was not in fact).  In the press since last year, AMA board members have made said stronger statements about cannabis.   For example, in Dec. 09, AMA board member Dr. Edward Langston told CNN, with regards to Cannabis, “We believe it is time for rescheduling, consideration of that…” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zocYnuEuaSA  At another time, an AMA spokesperson told the press that more medical societies should adopt the AMA policy if change is to be seen in federal law (I cannot find the link to the article that said this).

This year, the Hawaii delegation, led by Dr. Webb, introduced a resolution to call for Cannabis to be scheduled no higher than THC (which certain formulations of are found in III).  In the process of considering this resolution (you can read it here: http://www.ama-assn.org/ama1/pub/upload/mm/2010i/hawaii1.pdf), a few things happened at the AMA meeting this year.  First, they summarized what action they had taken from the previous year’s resolution:

1. Status:

“A copy of the Council report and AMA policy statement requesting federal review of the current scheduling status of cannabis was forwarded to the Drug Enforcement Administration immediately after the 2009 Interim Meeting.”

2. Next, when the AMA Council on Science and Public Health was writing briefing notes about their positions on the various resolutions before them, with regards to the aforementioned resolution from Hawai’i, they wrote:

“The Council on Science and Public Health studied the issue of cannabis scheduling in a report issued at the 2009 Interim Meeting. This report also discussed the current processes and barriers to conducting clinical trials with a substance that is contained in Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act. Nothing substantial has changed since that report was written in terms of the established science base for medicinal use of cannabis except that more states are considering adopting statutes or regulation to facilitate medicinal use outside of the traditional prescription and over-the-counter classifications of pharmaceuticals. Current policy urges that the federal government consider removing cannabis from Schedule I to facilitate the conduct of clinical research but does not endorse state-run programs.”

3. Ultimately, this resolution did not pass.  But the AMA House of Delegates took the opportunity to spruce up their current policy on this topic (pg 9 here: http://www.ama-assn.org/assets/meeting/2010i/i-10-annotated-k.pdf).  For example, the title of their policy is no longer “Medical Marijuana” but “Cannabis for Medicinal Use” — nearly all instances where “marijuana” is mentioned in the policy have changed to “cannabis”.  Finally, some new language saying that “a special schedule should be developed for Cannabis” was introduced at the last minute by American Society of Addiction Medicine representatives who have been hostile to the policy change at the AMA since the beginning.  It probably means nothing, since no special schedules can be developed, except to make it seem like the AMA is not asking for Cannabis to move to a lower schedule, but a different and new one just for itself.  It really is nonsensical, and will probably amount to nothing.  However, the federal government might be able to have an easier time saying that it is acting in accordance with the wishes of the AMA when they keep Cannabis in Schedule I (which is clearly not true), which it seems they have every intention of doing for now.  After this meeting, again, the AMA sent out a meeting recap to all its members.  It said in the email: “The House weighed in on public health issues by extending support for universal influenza vaccination of health care workers to include seasonal and H1N1 influenza. It also urged that marijuana’s status as a federal Schedule I controlled substance be reviewed to facilitate clinical research and development of cannabinoid-based medicines.” (bold in original here).

Finally, the AMEDnews, the AMA’s official newspaper, wrote:

“Delegates also voted to ask the federal government to re-evaluate the Schedule 1 status of marijuana and related cannabinoids used for medical care to facilitate research. Much meaningful research is blocked by the current status, because researchers have to get special certification for studies involving Schedule 1 drugs, said Timothy McAvoy, MD, an internist from Waukesha, Wis., and a delegate for the Wisconsin Medical Society.”

http://www.ama-assn.org/amednews/site/house-more.htm

So, in a nutshell,this month, we got a second AMA house of delegates to vote on marijuana liberalization and got the AMA to say a second time that marijuana’s schedule I status is suspect.  I think the fact that it was on the agenda at the meeting again this year, that the meeting was held in San Diego a few days after the election, and that the policy was essentially re-endorsed in possibly more friendly language is why there was a flurry of interest in the AMA stories from last year on this issue.

Thank you for your interest and support,

Sunil Aggarwal, MD, PhD

AMA member in good standing

By the way, here is an interesting article to read again in light of what the DEA head nominee said at her recent Senate hearing:

http://www.cannabisculture.com/v2/content/2010/04/22/Marijuanas-Drug-Status-Should-Change-Lawyers-Say

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When Drug Control Was Handed to the Cops — 1966

by Sunil Aggarwal on Sunday, 07 November 2010 at 01:09

Man of Vision Testifying during a recent Senate subcommittee on juvenile delinquency, Timothy Leary tells the group that the LSD fad among the young is a “crisis of challenge” and not a “crisis of peril.” He was one of the chief witnesses called to the Washington hearings.

IMAGE: © Bettmann/CORBIS DATE PHOTOGRAPHED May 28, 1966 LOCATION Washington, DC, USA COLLECTION Bettmann

“The inevitable backlash from this new message of individual power began in 1966 when various legislatures and Congress began considering bills to criminalize L.S.D. and similar drugs. In this year I testified before two Senate committees urging that control of all mind-changing drugs be assigned to the medical profession supervised by Federal and State health agencies. I predicted that if control of drugs were administered by law enforcement agencies, the result would be a black market more irrational and widespread than that of alcohol prohibition and the growth of the enormous police-state repressive bureaucracy.

And who, indeed, wanted that?

My political position then was by no means radical or solitary. Indeed, during the Johnson administration, a bitter battle was fought on this issue. Medical and scientific people (backed by the Kennedys) urged that drugs be administered by the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, while law-and-order people politicked for the Department of Justice. History may well decide that the second belligerent disaster of the Johnson administration was the decision to turn drug control over to the police. L.S.D. was made illegal and most of the top drug scientists began their steady exit from government responsibility. Another war on heresy had been declared.”

–Timothy Leary, PhD, “Seeds of the Sixties” in Neuropolitics, 1977, but originally written in 1973 from Folsom State Prison. (page 18 in this  pdf, and pg 4-5 in book))

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