01/03/2012 by Steve Rendall
http://www.fair.org/blog/2012/01/03/new-audio-of-hannitys-homophobic-history
Sean Hannity got his start in radio on UC Santa Barbara's KCSB in the late 1980s, where he got in trouble for promoting homophobia and disinformation about HIV and AIDS. I wrote about this in a 2003 Extra! profile of the then-Fox News show Hannity & Colmes:
After airing for less than a year, Hannity's weekly show was canceled in 1989, when KCSB management charged him with "discriminating against gays and lesbians" after airing two shows featuring the book The AIDS Coverup: The Real and Alarming Facts About AIDS (Independent, 6/22/89). Written by homophobic Christian-right activist Gene Antonio, the book crankily argued that AIDS could be spread by casual contact, including coughs, sneezes and mosquito bites. Antonio charged that the government, medical establishment and media covered up these truths in the service of "the homosexual movement."
When Antonio appeared by phone on one of the shows, Hannity and his guest repeatedly slurred gay men. At one point, according to the UCSB campus newspaper the Daily Nexus (5/25/89), Hannity declared: "Anyone listening to this show that believes homosexuality is a normal lifestyle has been brainwashed. It's very dangerous if we start accepting lower and lower forms of behavior as the normal." According to the campus paper, Antonio responded by calling gay men "a subculture of people engaged in deviant, twisted acts."
When a fellow KCSB broadcaster called the show to challenge the host and his guest, Hannity pointed out that the caller, a lesbian, had a child through artificial insemination, and Antonio dubbed the child a "turkey-baster baby." When the caller took issue with that "disgusting" remark, Hannity followed up with "I feel sorry for your child" (Independent, 6/22/89; KCSB, 4/4/89).
This information as indicated was gleaned from local Santa Barbara and UCSB print media. At the time, I was unable to get audio of Hannity's KCSB shows, a situation now remedied by KCSB programmers Elizabeth Robinson and Richard Flacks, who have packaged two of the original Hannity shows in a station archival retrospective, "50 Years of People-Powered Radio."
What Hannity said on the air more than 20 years ago would perhaps not be overly relevant today but for the fact that he has always denied being homophobic...and his homophobia continues: For instance, reacting to the 2009 Academy Awards broadcast featuring a montage of romantic film kisses (not exactly a new feature of cinema), Hannity paraphrased his wife in protesting the inclusion of same-sex kisses in the montage (Hannity, 2/23/09): "They keep showing the scenes of men kissing. And I'm thinking, do we have to expose our children to more and more sex, more and more violence, you know, more and more controversy?"
Showing posts with label AIDS. Show all posts
Showing posts with label AIDS. Show all posts
Monday, January 30, 2012
Thursday, December 2, 2010
Pope seeks to start debate on condoms and AIDS
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5iHdhpWg0cErNmNvWWR5D4EtVdgng?docId=be8ec61528f04f009b3a01338b7a1d47
Pope seeks to start debate on condoms and AIDS
11-22-10
VATICAN CITY (AP) — Pope Benedict XVI sought to "kick-start a debate" when he said some condom use may be justified, Vatican insiders say, raising hopes the church may be starting to back away from a complete ban and allow condoms to play a role in the battle against AIDS.
Just a year after he said condoms could be making the AIDS crisis worse, Benedict said that for some people, such as male prostitutes, using them could be a step in assuming moral responsibility because the intent is to "reduce the risk of infection."
The pope did not suggest using condoms as birth control, which is banned by the church, or mention the use of condoms by married couples where one partner is infected.
Still, some saw the pope's comments as an attempt to move the church forward on the issue of condoms and health risks.
For years, divisions in the Vatican have held up any effort to reconcile the church's ban on contraception with the need to help halt the spread of AIDS. Theologians have studied the possibility of condoning limited condom use as a lesser evil, and reports years ago said the Vatican was considering a document on the issue, though opposition apparently blocked publication.
One senior Vatican official said Monday he believed the pope just "wanted to kick-start the debate." He spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.
For the deeply conservative Benedict, it seemed like a bold leap into modernity — and a nightmare for many at the Vatican. The pope's comments sparked a fierce debate among Catholics, politicians and health workers that is certain to reverberate for a long time despite frantic damage control at the Vatican.
In a sign of the tensions, the Holy See's chief spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, rushed out a statement to counter any impression the church might lift its ban on artificial birth control. Lombardi stressed the pope's comment neither "reforms nor changes" church teaching.
While much of the world hailed Benedict's statement as a major shift toward lifting the church ban, conservatives insisted the pontiff was not "justifying" condom use from a theological point of view.
Many Vatican observers were struck by the example the pope used — that of a male prostitute — though the comments clearly were not meant to condone prostitution or homosexual conduct, which the church condemns as "intrinsically disordered."
And while Benedict made only a tiny opening, he stepped where no pope has gone since Pope Paul VI's 1968 encyclical "Humanae Vitae," which was supposed to have closed debate on church policy barring Catholics from using condoms and other artificial contraception.
Notably, the pope chose to make his statement in an interview with a German journalist, Peter Seewald, and not in an official document. Excerpts of Seewald's book, "Light of the World: The Pope, the Church and the Signs of the Times," first appeared Saturday in the Vatican newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano.
Luigi Accattoli, a veteran Vatican journalist who will be on a Vatican panel launching the book Tuesday, said Benedict had taken a "long-awaited" step that only the highest authority of the church could do."
Also on the panel is an influential prelate who showed his independence last year when he argued that Brazilian doctors should not be excommunicated for aborting the twin fetuses of a 9-year-old child who was allegedly raped by her stepfather. Monsignor Rino Fisichella argued the doctors were saving the girl's life and should be shown mercy; he was forced out as head of the Vatican's bioethics advisory committee for his stance.
Benedict previously had shown little sign of budging on the issue of condoms. Last year while en route to Africa, the continent hardest hit by HIV, he drew criticism from many health workers by saying condoms not only did not help stop the spread of AIDS but exacerbated the problem.
With Benedict prone to gaffes and crises — such as his remarks likening Islam to violence that caused a fury in the Muslin world and his lifting of the excommunication of a Holocaust-denier — some wondered whether it was again a communication problem.
However, Seewald wrote in the preface that Benedict had reviewed the text and made only small corrections. Seewald, who wrote two other books of interviews with Benedict while he was a cardinal, spent six hours over six days with Benedict at the papal summer residence in Castel Gandolfo in July.
The German-born pope appears comfortable talking with his fellow countrymen. The only other interview the pope has given was to German television in 2006.
Beyond the debate within the Roman Catholic church on its condoms policy, it is unclear how much effect the shift could have on health policy in Africa.
Kevin O'Reilly, a World Health Organization AIDS expert in Geneva, said the pope's comments "will remove some barriers in Africa."
"The fact that the Vatican is demonstrating any flexibility at all, and is considering the real-world use of condoms, is encouraging," O'Reilly said.
"Some of the churches there have been actively campaigning against condom use," he added. "But I don't think there are a lot of people making decisions about condom use while worrying about what the Vatican is up to."
Still, Sister Christine Schenk, executive director of FutureChurch, a liberal church reform group in the United States, said the pope expressed a principle about the benefits of using condoms to prevent disease that could apply to women too.
"You can probably take from that example and extend that to other examples," Schenk said. "Clearly, there will be many women who will also be prevented from getting HIV if you look at the principle of what he said."
Associated Press religion writer Rachel Zoll in New York and medical writer Maria Cheng in London contributed to this report.
Pope seeks to start debate on condoms and AIDS
11-22-10
VATICAN CITY (AP) — Pope Benedict XVI sought to "kick-start a debate" when he said some condom use may be justified, Vatican insiders say, raising hopes the church may be starting to back away from a complete ban and allow condoms to play a role in the battle against AIDS.
Just a year after he said condoms could be making the AIDS crisis worse, Benedict said that for some people, such as male prostitutes, using them could be a step in assuming moral responsibility because the intent is to "reduce the risk of infection."
The pope did not suggest using condoms as birth control, which is banned by the church, or mention the use of condoms by married couples where one partner is infected.
Still, some saw the pope's comments as an attempt to move the church forward on the issue of condoms and health risks.
For years, divisions in the Vatican have held up any effort to reconcile the church's ban on contraception with the need to help halt the spread of AIDS. Theologians have studied the possibility of condoning limited condom use as a lesser evil, and reports years ago said the Vatican was considering a document on the issue, though opposition apparently blocked publication.
One senior Vatican official said Monday he believed the pope just "wanted to kick-start the debate." He spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.
For the deeply conservative Benedict, it seemed like a bold leap into modernity — and a nightmare for many at the Vatican. The pope's comments sparked a fierce debate among Catholics, politicians and health workers that is certain to reverberate for a long time despite frantic damage control at the Vatican.
In a sign of the tensions, the Holy See's chief spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, rushed out a statement to counter any impression the church might lift its ban on artificial birth control. Lombardi stressed the pope's comment neither "reforms nor changes" church teaching.
While much of the world hailed Benedict's statement as a major shift toward lifting the church ban, conservatives insisted the pontiff was not "justifying" condom use from a theological point of view.
Many Vatican observers were struck by the example the pope used — that of a male prostitute — though the comments clearly were not meant to condone prostitution or homosexual conduct, which the church condemns as "intrinsically disordered."
And while Benedict made only a tiny opening, he stepped where no pope has gone since Pope Paul VI's 1968 encyclical "Humanae Vitae," which was supposed to have closed debate on church policy barring Catholics from using condoms and other artificial contraception.
Notably, the pope chose to make his statement in an interview with a German journalist, Peter Seewald, and not in an official document. Excerpts of Seewald's book, "Light of the World: The Pope, the Church and the Signs of the Times," first appeared Saturday in the Vatican newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano.
Luigi Accattoli, a veteran Vatican journalist who will be on a Vatican panel launching the book Tuesday, said Benedict had taken a "long-awaited" step that only the highest authority of the church could do."
Also on the panel is an influential prelate who showed his independence last year when he argued that Brazilian doctors should not be excommunicated for aborting the twin fetuses of a 9-year-old child who was allegedly raped by her stepfather. Monsignor Rino Fisichella argued the doctors were saving the girl's life and should be shown mercy; he was forced out as head of the Vatican's bioethics advisory committee for his stance.
Benedict previously had shown little sign of budging on the issue of condoms. Last year while en route to Africa, the continent hardest hit by HIV, he drew criticism from many health workers by saying condoms not only did not help stop the spread of AIDS but exacerbated the problem.
With Benedict prone to gaffes and crises — such as his remarks likening Islam to violence that caused a fury in the Muslin world and his lifting of the excommunication of a Holocaust-denier — some wondered whether it was again a communication problem.
However, Seewald wrote in the preface that Benedict had reviewed the text and made only small corrections. Seewald, who wrote two other books of interviews with Benedict while he was a cardinal, spent six hours over six days with Benedict at the papal summer residence in Castel Gandolfo in July.
The German-born pope appears comfortable talking with his fellow countrymen. The only other interview the pope has given was to German television in 2006.
Beyond the debate within the Roman Catholic church on its condoms policy, it is unclear how much effect the shift could have on health policy in Africa.
Kevin O'Reilly, a World Health Organization AIDS expert in Geneva, said the pope's comments "will remove some barriers in Africa."
"The fact that the Vatican is demonstrating any flexibility at all, and is considering the real-world use of condoms, is encouraging," O'Reilly said.
"Some of the churches there have been actively campaigning against condom use," he added. "But I don't think there are a lot of people making decisions about condom use while worrying about what the Vatican is up to."
Still, Sister Christine Schenk, executive director of FutureChurch, a liberal church reform group in the United States, said the pope expressed a principle about the benefits of using condoms to prevent disease that could apply to women too.
"You can probably take from that example and extend that to other examples," Schenk said. "Clearly, there will be many women who will also be prevented from getting HIV if you look at the principle of what he said."
Associated Press religion writer Rachel Zoll in New York and medical writer Maria Cheng in London contributed to this report.
Friday, July 2, 2010
AIDS researcher cleared of misconduct
http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100622/full/news.2010.310.html
22 June 2010 | Nature
AIDS researcher cleared of misconduct
Berkeley cites academic freedom and lack of evidence as it wraps up investigation over contentious paper.
Zoë Corbyn
Peter Duesberg has been cleared of wrongdoing.Controversial researcher Peter Duesberg has been cleared of wrongdoing following formal complaints made after he and others published a paper arguing that there is "as yet no proof that HIV causes AIDS".
Duesberg, who is well known for denying the link between HIV and AIDS, escaped censure from the University of California, Berkeley, after an investigation upheld his academic freedom and found no clear evidence that he broke faculty rules in publishing the paper.
A letter dated 28 May from Sheldon Zedeck, vice-provost for academic affairs and faculty welfare, to Duesberg effectively clears him of any wrongdoing. It states that there was "insufficient evidence" available to pursue any disciplinary action against him, although it stresses that the investigation was not concerned with the "accuracy or validity of the article".
Duesberg told Nature that he felt "officially exonerated" by the outcome but was disappointed that Berkeley had not dismissed the allegations sooner. "There was no basis for a misconduct charge," he says.
The professor of biochemistry and molecular biology, who won international acclaim for his work on cancer genes in the 1970s before focusing on AIDS, says that his detractors will now find it more difficult to make a case against him. "Now they will have to find something else ... maybe my parking permits," he suggests.
Contentious hypothesis
Berkeley launched an investigation last November, questioning whether Duesberg had violated the university's code of conduct when submitting an article to the journal Medical Hypotheses, which at the time did not peer review its papers.
The article argued that there is "as yet no proof that HIV causes AIDS" and described claims that the virus had killed millions as "unconfirmed". Duesberg had previously submitted the manuscript to the Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndromes, where one reviewer warned that he could face misconduct charges were the paper to be published.
The warning concerned the alleged cherry picking of results and the failure to declare a conflict of interest for co-author David Rasnick, previously an employee of Matthias Rath. Rath sells vitamin pills as remedies for AIDS. Rasnick has denied any conflict of interest and says that he has had no connection with Rath since 2006 (see: AIDS contrarian ignored warnings of scientific misconduct).
The paper's publication led to a storm of protest from scientists, and retrospective peer review later led to its being permanently withdrawn. The journal's editor was sacked and publisher Elsevier vowed to make changes to Medical Hypotheses, including introducing peer review.
Two formal complaints were also lodged with Berkeley, between them alleging that Duesberg had made false claims in the paper and accusing him of failing to declare Rasnick's alleged conflict of interest. One complaint came from Nathan Geffen, treasurer of the South Africa-based Treatment Action Campaign — which campaigns for the rights of people with HIV/AIDS. The other complainant has remained anonymous.
Geffen told Nature that he submitted his complaint because he believed Duesberg had behaved unethically. "I would like them to have taken action against him but I understand their position. I am willing to accept that this is a grey area in terms of their code," he says.
He adds that having "insufficient evidence" to proceed is not the same as exoneration. "This is anything but an exoneration."
Berkeley spokesman Robert Sanders confirmed that the investigation into Duesberg had now concluded.
"Academic freedom protects a professor's right to engage in scholarly research, even if it is controversial. The university relies on the scholarly peer-review process, rather than disciplinary procedures, for evaluating the value of scientific work," he says.
22 June 2010 | Nature
AIDS researcher cleared of misconduct
Berkeley cites academic freedom and lack of evidence as it wraps up investigation over contentious paper.
Zoë Corbyn
Peter Duesberg has been cleared of wrongdoing.Controversial researcher Peter Duesberg has been cleared of wrongdoing following formal complaints made after he and others published a paper arguing that there is "as yet no proof that HIV causes AIDS".
Duesberg, who is well known for denying the link between HIV and AIDS, escaped censure from the University of California, Berkeley, after an investigation upheld his academic freedom and found no clear evidence that he broke faculty rules in publishing the paper.
A letter dated 28 May from Sheldon Zedeck, vice-provost for academic affairs and faculty welfare, to Duesberg effectively clears him of any wrongdoing. It states that there was "insufficient evidence" available to pursue any disciplinary action against him, although it stresses that the investigation was not concerned with the "accuracy or validity of the article".
Duesberg told Nature that he felt "officially exonerated" by the outcome but was disappointed that Berkeley had not dismissed the allegations sooner. "There was no basis for a misconduct charge," he says.
The professor of biochemistry and molecular biology, who won international acclaim for his work on cancer genes in the 1970s before focusing on AIDS, says that his detractors will now find it more difficult to make a case against him. "Now they will have to find something else ... maybe my parking permits," he suggests.
Contentious hypothesis
Berkeley launched an investigation last November, questioning whether Duesberg had violated the university's code of conduct when submitting an article to the journal Medical Hypotheses, which at the time did not peer review its papers.
The article argued that there is "as yet no proof that HIV causes AIDS" and described claims that the virus had killed millions as "unconfirmed". Duesberg had previously submitted the manuscript to the Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndromes, where one reviewer warned that he could face misconduct charges were the paper to be published.
The warning concerned the alleged cherry picking of results and the failure to declare a conflict of interest for co-author David Rasnick, previously an employee of Matthias Rath. Rath sells vitamin pills as remedies for AIDS. Rasnick has denied any conflict of interest and says that he has had no connection with Rath since 2006 (see: AIDS contrarian ignored warnings of scientific misconduct).
The paper's publication led to a storm of protest from scientists, and retrospective peer review later led to its being permanently withdrawn. The journal's editor was sacked and publisher Elsevier vowed to make changes to Medical Hypotheses, including introducing peer review.
Two formal complaints were also lodged with Berkeley, between them alleging that Duesberg had made false claims in the paper and accusing him of failing to declare Rasnick's alleged conflict of interest. One complaint came from Nathan Geffen, treasurer of the South Africa-based Treatment Action Campaign — which campaigns for the rights of people with HIV/AIDS. The other complainant has remained anonymous.
Geffen told Nature that he submitted his complaint because he believed Duesberg had behaved unethically. "I would like them to have taken action against him but I understand their position. I am willing to accept that this is a grey area in terms of their code," he says.
He adds that having "insufficient evidence" to proceed is not the same as exoneration. "This is anything but an exoneration."
Berkeley spokesman Robert Sanders confirmed that the investigation into Duesberg had now concluded.
"Academic freedom protects a professor's right to engage in scholarly research, even if it is controversial. The university relies on the scholarly peer-review process, rather than disciplinary procedures, for evaluating the value of scientific work," he says.
Thursday, March 11, 2010
Bill Gates’ $10 billion vaccine scam
http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_5618.shtml
Bill Gates’ $10 billion vaccine scam
By Thomas C. Mountain
Online Journal Contributing Writer
Feb 24, 2010
ASMARA, Eritrea -- The “richest man in the world,” Microsoft’s Bill Gates, recently announced that he was making a $10 billion donation towards finding vaccines to prevent some of the world’s worst diseases.
Malaria is the number one killer in Africa. From what I’m hearing about $1 billion of BIll Gates donation/tax write-off is for research to find a vaccine to prevent malaria.
The African country of Eritrea, where I live, has reduced malaria mortality by 85 percent in the last seven years. How? By using basic public health methods. By distributing pesticide treated mosquito nets and organizing the pesticide retreatment every three months of mosquito nets. By habitat eradication. And by community medical clinics for immediate treatment.
Malaria is a parasite-based disease noted for its variety and quick development of resistance to medication. Any “vaccine,” if even a billion dollars is able to produce such, would have a limited lifetime and new, patented medications would have to be bought by Africa’s poor every few years.
So “donating” a billion dollars to develop a malaria “vaccine” could turn into tens of billions of dollars in drug sales in Africa alone, and Bill Gates, through his drug company investments, will quietly pocket more African blood money.
All the while a very successful malaria mortality reduction program is operating, effectively, safely and affordably, in Eritrea.
Why isn’t this being publicized internationally? Could it be that such a program is not going to put billions into the pockets of the drug lords of Western finance?
Bill Gates and other assorted financial terrorists through their control of the Western media and “aid” organizations are suppressing implementation of a successful malaria mortality program while investing in a malaria drug addiction for Africa’s people.
These financial terrorists are perfectly willing to see millions die in Africa while they search for their next highly profitable “wonder drug” to cure malaria, all the while deliberately ignoring, worse, engineering a white out/cover up of what could prevent millions of deaths, let alone uncounted suffering.
And HIV/AIDS, Africa’s N0.2 killer? Bill Gates is said to be providing over a billion dollars for research into developing an AIDS vaccine. AIDS, a virus based disease, has already shown to have varieties and to have developed resistance to the medications developed to treat it. Like the flu vaccine, a new AIDS vaccine would most likely have to be developed every few years to combat the latest strain of the AIDS virus; another gold mine of new, patented medications for sale to Africa’s sick.
Eritrea has reduced HIV/AIDS infection rates by 40 percent, according to Physicians for Peace, and is the only country in Africa to reduce HIV/AIDS. How? By using public health education promoting condom use everywhere in the country. Over a billion for a “vaccine” that may never work while an effective program that can reduce HIV/AIDS infection by 40 percent, safely and affordably can be immediately implemented?
Remember, Western billionaires didn’t get that way by being out to really help anyone. Millions die in Africa as the Western drug lords and their financial terrorist stockholders reap their billions in blood money. All the while real heroes in the Eritrean public health service struggle to save people’s lives.
So don’t believe that BIll Gates is up to any good when he donates $10 billion to vaccine research, just the opposite. And don’t forget that as far at the USA is concerned in Africa, no good deed goes unpunished, and, once again, Eritrea is subject to UN Security Council sanctions.
Stay tuned to Online Journal for more news from Africa’s Horn that the so called free press in the west refuses to cover.
Thomas C. Mountain was, in a former life, an educator, activist and alternative medicine practitioner in the USA. Email thomascmountain@yahoo.com.
Bill Gates’ $10 billion vaccine scam
By Thomas C. Mountain
Online Journal Contributing Writer
Feb 24, 2010
ASMARA, Eritrea -- The “richest man in the world,” Microsoft’s Bill Gates, recently announced that he was making a $10 billion donation towards finding vaccines to prevent some of the world’s worst diseases.
Malaria is the number one killer in Africa. From what I’m hearing about $1 billion of BIll Gates donation/tax write-off is for research to find a vaccine to prevent malaria.
The African country of Eritrea, where I live, has reduced malaria mortality by 85 percent in the last seven years. How? By using basic public health methods. By distributing pesticide treated mosquito nets and organizing the pesticide retreatment every three months of mosquito nets. By habitat eradication. And by community medical clinics for immediate treatment.
Malaria is a parasite-based disease noted for its variety and quick development of resistance to medication. Any “vaccine,” if even a billion dollars is able to produce such, would have a limited lifetime and new, patented medications would have to be bought by Africa’s poor every few years.
So “donating” a billion dollars to develop a malaria “vaccine” could turn into tens of billions of dollars in drug sales in Africa alone, and Bill Gates, through his drug company investments, will quietly pocket more African blood money.
All the while a very successful malaria mortality reduction program is operating, effectively, safely and affordably, in Eritrea.
Why isn’t this being publicized internationally? Could it be that such a program is not going to put billions into the pockets of the drug lords of Western finance?
Bill Gates and other assorted financial terrorists through their control of the Western media and “aid” organizations are suppressing implementation of a successful malaria mortality program while investing in a malaria drug addiction for Africa’s people.
These financial terrorists are perfectly willing to see millions die in Africa while they search for their next highly profitable “wonder drug” to cure malaria, all the while deliberately ignoring, worse, engineering a white out/cover up of what could prevent millions of deaths, let alone uncounted suffering.
And HIV/AIDS, Africa’s N0.2 killer? Bill Gates is said to be providing over a billion dollars for research into developing an AIDS vaccine. AIDS, a virus based disease, has already shown to have varieties and to have developed resistance to the medications developed to treat it. Like the flu vaccine, a new AIDS vaccine would most likely have to be developed every few years to combat the latest strain of the AIDS virus; another gold mine of new, patented medications for sale to Africa’s sick.
Eritrea has reduced HIV/AIDS infection rates by 40 percent, according to Physicians for Peace, and is the only country in Africa to reduce HIV/AIDS. How? By using public health education promoting condom use everywhere in the country. Over a billion for a “vaccine” that may never work while an effective program that can reduce HIV/AIDS infection by 40 percent, safely and affordably can be immediately implemented?
Remember, Western billionaires didn’t get that way by being out to really help anyone. Millions die in Africa as the Western drug lords and their financial terrorist stockholders reap their billions in blood money. All the while real heroes in the Eritrean public health service struggle to save people’s lives.
So don’t believe that BIll Gates is up to any good when he donates $10 billion to vaccine research, just the opposite. And don’t forget that as far at the USA is concerned in Africa, no good deed goes unpunished, and, once again, Eritrea is subject to UN Security Council sanctions.
Stay tuned to Online Journal for more news from Africa’s Horn that the so called free press in the west refuses to cover.
Thomas C. Mountain was, in a former life, an educator, activist and alternative medicine practitioner in the USA. Email thomascmountain@yahoo.com.
Peter McWilliams Tribute
http://www.myspace.com/petermcwilliamstribute
Peter McWilliams Tribute
Wonderful Peter Alexander McWilliams burst into this world on August 5th, 1949. He grew up in a Roman Catholic household, outside of Detroit, with two doting parents and brother, Michael. Early on Peter developed a zest for creativity. In 1967, while still in his teens, Peter began publishing his own works of poetry long before we had the ease of the Internet. "Come Love With Me & Be My Life" started a series of poetry books which have sold nearly four million copies. Along with the teenage angst of love, comes loss. In 1971 Peter co-wrote "Surviving the Loss of a Love," with his therapist Melba Colgrove, Ph.D., and Harold Bloomfield, M.D. Now called: "How to Survive the Loss of a Love," this book has sold more than two million copies. Peter also became interested in meditation and wrote the New York Times Bestseller, "The TM Book" plus "The Personal Computer Book." Peter's prolific writings also included New York Times bestsellers: "LIFE 101: Everything We Wish We Had Learned About Life In School—But Didn't," "DO IT! Let's Get Off Our Buts" and "LOVE 101: To Love Oneself Is the Beginning of a Lifelong Romance" to name a few. Not only did Peter display talent in writing, he had a knack for photography and in 1992 he published his first book of lush photography called "Portraits."
Peter was also passionate about personal freedom as long as it would not harm others. In 1993 he wrote "Ain't Nobody's Business if You Do: The Absurdity of Consensual Crimes in Our Free Country." In 1994, after battling his own depression and successfully conquering it, he co-wrote a book with Harold Bloomfield, M.D., "How to Heal Depression." This was followed by "Hypericum (St. John's Wort) and Depression." These books show how depression can be cured naturally.
In later years, Peter became an outspoken activist for the use of medicinal marijuana. He was diagnosed with both Cancer and AIDS and found that marijuana was the cure for the nausea he suffered as a side-effect of his medications. Peter came out as a gay man and also embraced the Libertarian Party when he spoke at their convention. Sadly, Peter passed away in 2000 after his courageous fight against his dis-eases and after championing the use of medicinal marijuana.
Peter was-- and still is many things to a lot of us: Poet. Publisher, Author, Activist. Amazing human being. Peter continues to touch our hearts, minds and lives. This is why I have created "Peter's Page," to honor and remember Peter's art, heart, wit, and heroism. This page is also lovingly dedicated to Peter's equally wonderful Mom, Mary.
Peter McWilliams Tribute
Wonderful Peter Alexander McWilliams burst into this world on August 5th, 1949. He grew up in a Roman Catholic household, outside of Detroit, with two doting parents and brother, Michael. Early on Peter developed a zest for creativity. In 1967, while still in his teens, Peter began publishing his own works of poetry long before we had the ease of the Internet. "Come Love With Me & Be My Life" started a series of poetry books which have sold nearly four million copies. Along with the teenage angst of love, comes loss. In 1971 Peter co-wrote "Surviving the Loss of a Love," with his therapist Melba Colgrove, Ph.D., and Harold Bloomfield, M.D. Now called: "How to Survive the Loss of a Love," this book has sold more than two million copies. Peter also became interested in meditation and wrote the New York Times Bestseller, "The TM Book" plus "The Personal Computer Book." Peter's prolific writings also included New York Times bestsellers: "LIFE 101: Everything We Wish We Had Learned About Life In School—But Didn't," "DO IT! Let's Get Off Our Buts" and "LOVE 101: To Love Oneself Is the Beginning of a Lifelong Romance" to name a few. Not only did Peter display talent in writing, he had a knack for photography and in 1992 he published his first book of lush photography called "Portraits."
Peter was also passionate about personal freedom as long as it would not harm others. In 1993 he wrote "Ain't Nobody's Business if You Do: The Absurdity of Consensual Crimes in Our Free Country." In 1994, after battling his own depression and successfully conquering it, he co-wrote a book with Harold Bloomfield, M.D., "How to Heal Depression." This was followed by "Hypericum (St. John's Wort) and Depression." These books show how depression can be cured naturally.
In later years, Peter became an outspoken activist for the use of medicinal marijuana. He was diagnosed with both Cancer and AIDS and found that marijuana was the cure for the nausea he suffered as a side-effect of his medications. Peter came out as a gay man and also embraced the Libertarian Party when he spoke at their convention. Sadly, Peter passed away in 2000 after his courageous fight against his dis-eases and after championing the use of medicinal marijuana.
Peter was-- and still is many things to a lot of us: Poet. Publisher, Author, Activist. Amazing human being. Peter continues to touch our hearts, minds and lives. This is why I have created "Peter's Page," to honor and remember Peter's art, heart, wit, and heroism. This page is also lovingly dedicated to Peter's equally wonderful Mom, Mary.
Friday, September 25, 2009
How marijuana became legal
http://money.cnn.com/2009/09/11/magazines/fortune/medical_marijuana_legalizing.fortune/index.htm
How marijuana became legal
Medical marijuana is giving activists a chance to show how a legitimized pot business can work. Is the end of prohibition upon us?
By Roger Parloff, senior editor
September 18, 2009
(Fortune Magazine) -- When Irvin Rosenfeld, 56, picks me up at the Fort Lauderdale airport, his SUV reeks of marijuana. The vice president for sales at a local brokerage firm, Rosenfeld has been smoking 10 to 12 marijuana cigarettes a day for 38 years, he says.
That's probably unusual in itself, but what makes Rosenfeld exceptional is that for the past 27 years, he has been copping his weed directly from the United States government.
Every 25 days Rosenfeld goes to a pharmacy and picks up a tin of 300 federally grown and rolled cigarettes that have been sent there for him by the National Institute of Drug Abuse (NIDA), acting with approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
Rosenfeld smokes the marijuana to relieve chronic pain and muscle spasms caused by a rare bone disease. When he was 10, doctors discovered that his skeleton was riddled with more than 200 tumors, due to a condition known as multiple congenital cartilaginous exostosis. Despite seven operations, he still lives with scores of tumors in his bones.
Rosenfeld is one of four people in the United States whom the federal government supplies with medical marijuana. Each is a living anomaly because, officially, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, NIDA, and the FDA all take the position that marijuana has "no currently accepted medical use."
That's the only way federal law can continue to classify marijuana, like heroin, as a "Schedule I controlled substance," forbidden from being prescribed by doctors. (Numerous dangerous, psychoactive, and addictive opium derivatives, by contrast, are more leniently classified as Schedule II drugs, allowing prescription use.)
Over the years the government's position has become progressively more embattled, if not untenable.
Thirteen states now have laws that let residents use marijuana medicinally, typically to alleviate chronic pain (particularly nerve pain caused by diabetes, AIDS, and hepatitis); manage movement disorders and muscle spasticity (especially for multiple sclerosis patients); as an anti-nausea and anti-vomiting agent (for those, say, undergoing chemotherapy); and as an appetite stimulant (yes, as in "the munchies") for those with wasting diseases like AIDS and cancer.
Another 15 states are weighing legislation or ballot initiatives that could turn them into medical marijuana states by next year.
The acceptance of medical marijuana has implications that extend far beyond helping those suffering from life-threatening diseases. It is one of several factors -- including demographic changes, the financial crisis, and the widely perceived failure of the war on drugs -- reopening the country's 40-year-old on-again, off-again shouting match over whether marijuana should be legalized.
This article is not another polemic about why it should or shouldn't be. Today, in any case, the pertinent question is whether it already has been -- at least on a local-option basis. We're referring to a cultural phenomenon that has been evolving for the past 15 years, topped off by a crucial policy reversal that was quietly instituted by President Barack Obama in February.
First, some necessary background. Under President George W. Bush (and under President Bill Clinton before him, for that matter), the U.S. Justice Department treated state medical marijuana laws as nullities. Such laws were contradicted and therefore preempted by federal drug laws, the Justice Department reasoned, and the U.S. Supreme Court upheld that position in 2005.
Accordingly, the federal government has periodically raided and prosecuted defendants who at least claimed to be complying with state medical marijuana laws, and when it did, defendants were forbidden from telling juries about the existence of those laws.
In late February, President Obama signaled a new approach. His attorney general, Eric Holder, confirmed at a press conference that he would no longer subject individuals who were complying with state medical marijuana laws to federal drug raids and prosecutions.
Pot from Uncle Sam
This understated act -- a simple pledge not to act, really -- could have enormous consequences. It potentially leads to exactly the same endpoint as the Twenty-First Amendment, which repealed the federal prohibition on alcoholic beverage sales.
Here's how. When states make a legal loophole allowing medical use of marijuana, they must grapple with the messy question of what precisely constitutes medical use. After all, doctors regularly prescribe powerful drugs like Valium, Viagra, Prozac, and -- give us a break -- Botox to patients who are hardly at death's door.
If a state doesn't tightly limit what "medical use" means, the camel can get its nose under the tent.
That's what happened in California. Like most medical marijuana states, California permits doctors to "recommend" marijuana use for patients who suffer from specific serious diseases. (Drafters of the law avoided the word "prescribe" in an attempt to sidestep conflict with federal law.)
California's law then adds a catchall provision that lets doctors also approve marijuana use for "any other illness for which marijuana provides relief." In practice, doctors -- largely protected from second-guessing by confidentiality privileges -- have been free to make the final call as to which conditions those might be.
This is, after all, the norm vis-à-vis medicines. Once a pharmaceutical has been FDA-approved for one use, doctors can lawfully prescribe it for other, so-called off-label purposes, even though the drug has not yet been certified as safe or effective for them.
Accordingly, California doctors are authorizing patients to take marijuana to relieve such ailments as anxiety, headache, premenstrual syndrome, and trouble sleeping. "You could get it for writer's block," comments Allen St. Pierre, the executive director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws.
Some California doctors voluntarily report the breakdown of patient medical conditions for which they have approved marijuana use in the Alameda, Calif., medical newsletter O'Shaughnessy's.
They commonly report that more than a quarter of their marijuana authorizations have been prompted by patients suffering from conditions like "anxiety" or "insomnia." (The most common complaint is "chronic pain.")
As a result, in most of California's coastal metropolitan areas, marijuana is effectively legal today. Any resident older than 18 who gets a note from a doctor can lawfully buy the stuff, and doctors seemingly eager to write such notes, typically in exchange for a $200 consultation fee, advertise in newspapers and on websites.
There are an estimated 300,000 to 400,000 medical marijuana patients in the state now, and the figure is rapidly growing.
More astonishingly, there are about 700 medical marijuana dispensaries now operating in California openly distributing the drug.
These dispensaries -- called "compassionate-care clinics" by the solemn and "pot shops" by the skeptical -- are decidedly outpatient facilities, with not a few patients arriving on bicycles, roller skates, or skateboards. (They often get discounts for doing so, because it's greener than using a fossil-fuel-powered car.)
The legitimization of selling pot
The dispensaries sell marijuana and its concentrated resin forms, hashish and kif, sometimes alongside a range of enticing, non-inhaled alternatives, including marijuana-imbued brownies, cookies, gelati, honeys, butters, cooking oils ("Not So Virgin" olive oil), bottled cold drinks ("enhanced" lemonade is the most popular), capsules, lozenges, spray-under-the-tongue tinctures, and even topically applied salves.
In Los Angeles a high-end three-store chain called the Farmacy employs a pastry chef to oversee production of all its baked goods. Most dispensaries also sell potted plants and seeds for patients who are either thrifty or entrepreneurial.
All these establishments are engaged in what federal penal statutes still humorlessly define as narcotics trafficking. The dispensaries' affiliated marijuana farms and plant nurseries are sometimes of sufficient size to subject operators to mandatory-minimum five-year federal prison terms.
And this, mind you, is a situation that evolved almost entirely during the Bush administration, when the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration was still routinely threatening dispensary landlords with forfeiture of their premises, periodically raiding clinics and seizing inventories, and criminally prosecuting the most brazenly abusive operators.
Luke Scarmazzo, who aired a rap video on YouTube two years ago boasting of all the money and great sex he was getting from running the California Healthcare Collective in Modesto, Calif. -- "Fuck the feds!" was one ill-advised lyric -- was sentenced in federal court this past December to almost 22 years of imprisonment on a continuing criminal enterprise conviction. (He has appealed.)
While the situation in California is unusual, it's becoming less so. There are now 15 dispensaries in Colorado, according to weedmaps.com, one of many online marijuana dispensary and physician ("pot-doc") locator services. In Oregon nearly one in four active physicians has authorized at least one of his patients to grow marijuana for medical use.
New Mexico hopes to have the nation's first state-licensed medical marijuana farm and distributorship up and running by the time this article is published. New Mexico's law was enacted two years ago, but state officials hadn't dared implement it until Attorney General Holder blew the all clear in February.
This is the sense in which President Obama's understated pledge not to interfere with state medical marijuana laws potentially achieves for that intoxicant what the Twenty-First Amendment accomplished for beer, wine, and booze during the Great Depression.
Repeal, remember, simply returned to the states the right to decide whether to permit alcoholic beverage sales, and, if so, when and how. If a state permitted sales, it could also enforce minimum- age requirements, limit store hours, set zoning restrictions, and levy taxes. If it prohibited sales, it could bask in righteousness but exercise no control over the traffic that would occur anyway.
Over time nearly every state fell in line behind the tax-and-regulate model. (During Prohibition, federal law did contain an exception allowing alcoholic beverage sales for medical purposes. Nevertheless the case for medical booze was never compelling, and after repeal no state chose to condition the legality of alcohol sales upon a showing of medical need.)
"I think we're going to have exactly that kind of local option with marijuana [that we now have with alcohol]," says Keith Stroup, 65, NORML's founder, two-time past executive director, and current legal counsel. "Once that happens it will be like gambling."
Initially only Nevada permitted gambling, and then it was just Nevada and New Jersey. "But over a period of time," Stroup says, "the morality part of the issue kind of dissipated, and there were more and more needs for new revenue, and today almost every state in the country allows legalized gambling."
Marijuana activists thought they were close to legalization once before. From 1973 to 1978 activists won decriminalization in 11 states. ("Decriminalization" is a grab-bag term but usually refers to schemes under which first-time possession of small quantities of marijuana becomes a noncriminal violation, akin to a parking ticket. Decriminalization falls short of legalization, in that sale and distribution remain serious felonies.)
In 1977, President Jimmy Carter endorsed a federal decriminalization bill. But the bill went nowhere, and soon the movement was all but obliterated by the return swing of the cultural pendulum, now known as the Reagan Revolution. There would be no new state or federal marijuana reforms for the next 16 years.
"Here's what's different now," asserts Ethan Nadelmann, the head of the Drug Policy Alliance, which favors marijuana legalization on a tax-and-regulate model. "First, in the late 1970s no more than 30% of the American public supported making marijuana legal. Now it's breaking 40%."
That jump reflects an important demographic change, Nadelmann notes. "Back then there was a whole older generation of Americans who didn't know the difference between marijuana and heroin," he says. "Now that generation is mostly gone. The people in power are baby boomers, a majority of whom actually smoked marijuana."
The past three Presidents have all more or less admitted trying the drug, Nadelmann continues, and the current one, when asked if he inhaled, famously retorted, "I thought that was the point."
Beyond the demographic change, there is a perception that after 40 years of blood, sweat, and tears, the war on drugs -- formally declared by President Richard Nixon in 1969, a month before the Woodstock festival -- has failed to reduce the availability of illegal drugs, has enriched and empowered organized-crime gangs, and has subjected millions of people to arrest who pose little threat to anyone but themselves.
On top of that, we're now mired in the worst economic environment since the Great Depression, which makes the prospect of collecting taxes on marijuana sales as alluring to contemporary politicians as beer, wine, and liquor taxes looked to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his party when they took office in 1933, the year Prohibition was repealed.
Assuming a national consumer market for marijuana of about $13 billion annually, Harvard economist Jeffrey Miron has estimated that legalization could be expected to bring state and federal governments about $7 billion annually in additional tax revenue, while saving them $13.5 billion in prohibition-related law enforcement costs.
In California, where the fiscal crisis is so grave that the state has had to issue vendors more than $1 billion in IOUs, a Field Poll published in April showed that 56% of the state's population favored legalizing marijuana, prompting Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to call for an "open debate" on the question. A legalization bill has been introduced in the state legislature, and the state board of equalization has estimated that if passed, it would bring in $1.4 billion in new revenue, a seemingly conservative estimate.
It's even possible that legalization would reduce national health-care costs, by easing demand for costly pharmaceuticals.
In the most recent issue of O'Shaughnessy's, one doctor reported that his cannabis patients had either stopped or cut back their use of "analgesics of all kinds [including] Tylenol, aspirin, and opioids; psychotherapeutic agents including anti-anxiety medications, anti-depressants, anti-panic, obsessive-compulsive, anti-psychotic, and bipolar agents; gastrointestiminal agents including anti-spasmodics and anti-inflammatory medications; migraine preparations; anticonvulsants; appetite stimulants; immuno-modulators and immunosuppressives; muscle relaxants; multiple sclerosis management medications; ophthalmic preparations; sedative and hypnotic agents; and Tourette's syndrome agents."
"Medical marijuana is God's little joke on the [marijuana] prohibitionists," says Richard Cowan, 69, a longtime legalization activist who claims he's smoked almost every day since 1967. "There is clearly a medical need, and it ranges from minor to life-saving.... From my perspective, the dividing line between medical and nonmedical should not be decided by the police."
Medical marijuana is clearly the crowning factor making things different this time. Not only is it changing perceptions of the drug, but it has also given legalization advocates in California a first-ever opportunity to devise and showcase a business prototype.
They've been afforded the chance to show a skeptical public that a safe, seemly, and responsible system for distributing marijuana is possible. If they succeed, they'll convince the fence sitters and lead the way to a nationwide metamorphosis.
If they fail, the backlash will be savage. If communities cannot adequately regulate the dispensaries, they'll descend into unsightly, youth-seducing, crime-ridden playgrounds for gang-bangers, and this flirtation with legalization will conclude the way the last one did: with a swift and merciless swing of the pendulum.
Pot's medical history
Marijuana, whose botanical name is cannabis, has been used medicinally -- and as an intoxicant, of course -- for thousands of years in Eastern cultures. It is believed to have been introduced to Western medicine in the early 19th century by a British doctor, W.B. O'Shaughnessy, who learned about it while stationed in India (and for whom the medical cannabis newsletter is named).
Several well-known pharmaceutical companies, including Eli Lilly (LLY, Fortune 500), sold cannabis in powdered or tincture forms in the early 20th century as a painkiller, antispasmodic, sedative, and "exhilarant." (For this article Fortune asked Eli Lilly for historical details on its cannabis sales, but a spokeswoman responded, "Due to competing priorities, we ... are unable to facilitate your query.")
Though cannabis remained listed in the U.S. Pharmacopeia -- a standard desk reference for drugs -- until 1942, its use in Western medicine began declining in the late 1800s, according to a history of cannabis written by Harvard psychiatrist Lester Grinspoon titled "Marijuana: The Forbidden Medicine."
The decline, Grinspoon writes, was due in part to the rise of more stable and effective pharmaceuticals -- though many of them later proved to have grave potential side effects -- and because modern hypodermic syringes could deliver faster pain relief using opiates. (Opiates were soluble; cannabis wasn't.)
Then, in the early 1900s, states began outlawing cannabis, which had become associated in legislators' minds with violent crime and psychosis. The drug was then being used in the U.S. mainly by Mexican migrant workers in the West and African Americans in the South, so apprehensions about it may have been intertwined with racial and ethnic fears. In 1937 the federal government, over the objections of the American Medical Association, effectively outlawed cannabis.
Modern-day medical assessments of marijuana's properties have not corroborated the outsize dangers that lawmakers had attributed to the plant. While it is a "powerful drug," concluded an Institute of Medicine report conducted in 1997 at the behest of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, its "adverse effects ... are within the range of effects tolerated for other medications."
Yes, someone who is high on marijuana shouldn't drive -- his motor skills and mental powers are impaired -- but that's true of alcohol and many prescription drugs too.
The long-term risks to chronic users appear to center mainly on the generic dangers of smoking (respiratory disease and possibly lung cancer) and upon the "mild and short-lived" withdrawal symptoms that a minority of marijuana users experience, according to the IOM experts. They considered marijuana less addictive than tobacco, codeine, or Valium.
Still, many doctors are squeamish about recommending marijuana to patients -- putting aside issues of legal liability. To begin with, most pharmaceuticals consist of a single, purified chemical compound. Such drugs are susceptible to double-blind, placebo-controlled testing, and once they are approved, doctors can prescribe known dosages.
Marijuana, in contrast, consists of the dried, ground-up flowers of a highly variable plant. It is made up of at least 400 compounds, including more than 60 that are unique to cannabis, known as cannabinoids, several of which are believed to have therapeutic effects. The proportions of these compounds vary greatly from plant to plant. A plant may attract harmful molds.
Lighting a match to the mix then introduces a whole new set of variables. Finally, smoking -- even putting aside its health risks -- is an idiosyncratic delivery system. Everyone smokes differently, so one never knows how much of which compounds the patient is receiving. These factors all make marijuana hard for researchers to test meaningfully and hard for doctors to prescribe confidently.
Accordingly, even those doctors who recognize the therapeutic powers of marijuana often prefer the notion of looking for one or two key active ingredients in it, isolating them, and then devising a delivery system that would not involve smoking.
And that's been done. In 1986 the FDA approved a synthetic version of what has long been recognized to be the main psychoactive ingredient of marijuana -- delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC. After rigorous testing, the FDA found THC to be safe and effective for the treatment of nausea, vomiting, and wasting diseases. This lawful, Schedule II drug, trade-named Marinol, is taken orally, by capsule.
The trouble is, for many patients Marinol turns out to be inferior to good old-fashioned pot. Smoked marijuana is much faster acting and, as a consequence, easier for patients to control in terms of dosage. The patient inhales as much as he needs and then stops. In contrast, with a THC pill the patient can easily ingest more than he can handle.
"Oral THC is slow in onset of action but produces more pronounced, and often unfavorable, psychoactive effects that last much longer than those experienced with smoking," according to a 2008 report published by the American College of Physicians. (Incidentally, the FDA-approved warnings for Marinol -- pure THC -- do not flatly forbid patients from driving under its influence. Rather, they simply caution patients not to do so "until it is established that they are able to tolerate the drug and to perform such tasks safely.")
Still, despite the disappointing performance of oral THC, many doctors want to continue exploring faster-acting THC delivery systems, including a skin patch or a suppository.
Meanwhile we're still awaiting hard proof that smoking marijuana can actually cause lung cancer. That evidence has proved surprisingly elusive, maybe in part because typical marijuana users smoke so much less than typical tobacco smokers.
In any case, marijuana users are increasingly turning to a means of inhalation that does not involve smoking known as vaporization. With a vaporizer -- the Volcano brand is the best known -- users heat marijuana to a temperature sufficient to vaporize the cannabinoids but insufficient to spark combustion and most of its associated noxious gases. The vapors are captured in a balloon and then inhaled.
The government's compassionate-use program
As a teenager Irv Rosenfeld was a strong opponent of marijuana use. He would sometimes give talks against marijuana at local schools. "I'd hold up bags of my prescription drugs and say, 'Be thankful you're healthy,'" he recounts. He was then taking prescription muscle relaxants, sleeping pills, anti-inflammatories, and a range of addictive, debilitating, opioid painkillers, including codeine, Demerol, and Darvon.
Shortly after Rosenfeld started college at the University of Miami, he caved in to peer pressure and tried pot. "Nothing happened," he says. (To this day Rosenfeld maintains that he never has been able to get high from marijuana. In my six or so hours with him, during which he drove me from Fort Lauderdale to Miami and back, all the while chain-smoking joints, I never noticed any apparent impact on him, other than an occasional cough.)
Rosenfeld continued smoking socially when others did. "About the 10th time," he continues, "I was playing chess when I realized that I'd been sitting still for 30 minutes." Normally he couldn't do that because his muscles would begin to ache and he'd have to change position. "I hadn't taken a pill in six hours. Just then someone handed me the joint, and it hit me. The only thing I'd done different was smoke pot."
Rosenfeld ran repeated experiments, and both he and his surgeon became convinced that marijuana helped him more than his prescription drugs, with fewer side effects. In 1971, with the blessing of his doctors and the indulgence of sympathetic police officials, he began smoking marijuana to treat his pain.
Then, in 1976, Rosenfeld learned of the extraordinary case of Bob Randall (now deceased). Randall, who had severe glaucoma, had been prosecuted that year for marijuana possession in the District of Columbia but won acquittal after advancing a "medical necessity" defense. Randall's doctors had testified that he risked going blind without marijuana to relieve the pressure within his eyeballs.
Randall then brought a civil suit against the government. In 1978 a mind-boggling settlement was reached: The government agreed to supply Randall with marijuana for the rest of his life.
The government had the capacity to strike such a deal because since 1968, NIDA had been growing a small quantity of marijuana for research purposes under contract with the University of Mississippi's pharmacy school. FDA and NIDA officials theorized that the U.S. government could lawfully become Randall's supplier if they observed the pretense that he was part of a clinical study to investigate a potential new drug. A research "protocol" was drawn up, though the study design called for just one patient: Randall.
Rosenfeld drew up a similar protocol for a clinical study of himself. With the help of supportive doctors and threatening lawyers, Rosenfeld became the second patient to pry his way into what became known as the compassionate-use investigative new drug program.
By 1991 the compassionate-use program had grown to include 13 patients. That year, after Randall counseled AIDS advocacy groups on how to seek admission to the program, it suddenly found itself deluged with 40 new applications. In early 1992, seeing the unworkable direction in which matters were headed, the government shut the program down, though the 13 existing patients were grandfathered in. Today just four are left, including Rosenfeld.
For them, federal marijuana grown at the University of Mississippi is sent to a contractor in Research Triangle Park, N.C., where it is rolled into cigarettes on an old machine obtained from the local tobacco industry. About every five months the contractor sends six tins of the cigarettes to the pharmacy where Rosenfeld picks them up.
Rosenfeld's weed is hardly connoisseur quality by contemporary California dispensary standards. The government grows its crops only sporadically, so it dries the harvested flowers and places them in cold storage. When I visited him in June, Rosenfeld was smoking marijuana harvested nine years earlier. Because Rosenfeld finds the government's cigarettes too dry, he unwraps them, rehydrates the marijuana by placing it in a container with lettuce, and then re-rolls his own joints, he says.
Rosenfeld's cigarettes are also not very potent by contemporary standards. They contain around 3.5% THC, which was about the average strength of dope seized in domestic street busts in 1996, according to NIDA data.
By contrast, marijuana seized from such busts in 2007 had an average potency of about 4.8%, while the fresh "manicured bud" available at today's best California dispensaries boast THC content ranging from about 6% to 22%.
It's as if Rosenfeld were receiving vanilla ice cream joylessly made in the Soviet Union and stored for decades, when there's fresh Ben & Jerry's Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough for sale just around the corner.
Still, Rosenfeld's not complaining. The government charges him nothing, so his only costs are medical consultations and pharmacists' fees -- about $50 a month. Subpar or not, the 8.3 ounces he receives every 25 days would cost him more than $2,000 on the street.
The battle to legalize marijuana
After the compassionate-use program was shut down, medical marijuana activists had one last hope for changing federal policies. Back in 1972, NORML and other groups had sued the predecessor of the DEA to force the rescheduling of marijuana as a prescribable drug, and incredibly, two decades later, the litigation was still raging.
During 14 days of hearings in 1986 the plaintiffs had presented many anecdotal accounts of nearly miraculous experiences patients had had with marijuana. Rosenfeld testified, as did the psychiatrist and medical historian Grinspoon, who related not only the evidence his research had unearthed but also a personal anecdote.
In 1972, Grinspoon's own teenage son, who had leukemia, began undergoing chemotherapy. "He would start to vomit shortly after treatment and continue retching for up to eight hours," as Grinspoon later described the ordeal in his book. "He vomited in the car as we drove home, and on arriving he would lie in bed with his head over a bucket on the floor."
Having heard that marijuana could help, Grinspoon's wife proposed that the couple let their son try it, but Grinspoon refused because it was illegal. His wife then defied him, secretly smoking marijuana with the teenager before one of his treatments. This time there was no vomiting, and in fact, on the way home the child asked to stop for a submarine sandwich. "From then on he used marijuana before every treatment, and we were all much more comfortable during the remaining year of his life," according to Grinspoon's account.
In 1988 the administrative law judge hearing the case ruled in NORML's favor. "Marijuana, in its natural form, is one of the safest therapeutically active substances known to man," Judge Francis Young concluded. Young was referring to the fact that it is almost impossible to overdose fatally on marijuana, a circumstance that distinguishes it from virtually any other drug. "By any measure of rational analysis," Young concluded, "marijuana can be safely used within a supervised routine of medical care."
In one of those maddening circularities of federal administrative law, however, the DEA's appeal from Judge Young's ruling was heard by John C. Lawn, then administrator of the DEA itself. Not surprisingly, in 1989, Lawn overturned all of Young's findings.
Lawn gave short shrift to anecdotes like Grinspoon's and Rosenfeld's. "These stories of individuals who treat themselves with a mind-altering drug ... must be viewed with great skepticism," he wrote. "Many of these individuals had been recreational users of marijuana prior to becoming ill. These individuals' desire for the drug to relieve their symptoms, as well as a desire to rationalize their marijuana use, removes any scientific value from their accounts."
Lawn also stressed the absence of any controlled clinical studies proving marijuana's safety or efficacy. He was right; such studies didn't exist (at that time), both because of the inherent difficulties of performing them on a whole plant and the unique difficulties of performing them on an illegal plant. To even obtain marijuana for such tests, researchers would have had to first win approval from three federal bureaucracies - the DEA, the FDA, and NIDA -- a daunting task even assuming the best of good will on everyone's part.
As for the controlled studies showing that marijuana's chief psychoactive ingredient -- THC, in the form of Marinol -- was safe and effective for treating certain medical conditions, Lawn saw them as simply proving conclusively that there could be no conceivable excuse for smoking marijuana. To whatever extent THC might be helpful, patients could use Marinol.
In 1994 the federal court of appeals for the District of Columbia upheld Lawn's decision, and the activists' last hope for achieving reform at the federal level died.
So they turned to state government. In 1996 a group of marijuana activists in California got enough signatures to put a legislative initiative on the ballot known as Proposition 215. It called for permitting medical marijuana patients or their "primary caregivers" to possess marijuana on the "recommendation or approval" of a physician.
The measure passed with a 56% majority, and California became the first medical marijuana state. Precisely what that meant, though, remained totally unclear. Prop. 215 did not specify how much pot patients could possess, and it said nothing about the way patients would obtain it. Nothing in the initiative explicitly legalized sales or distribution of any kind.
Nevertheless, a few intrepid souls opened dispensaries.
Dispensaries - A legal gray area
"In the immediate wake of passage of Prop. 215 in 1996," recalls Stephen DeAngelo, who would later open what is now Oakland's largest dispensary, "local governments tended to take a hands-off attitude toward medical cannabis." They wouldn't explicitly license dispensaries to open, he says, but they also didn't instruct the police to go shut them down. "Dispensaries were tolerated but not sanctioned."
Even those local politicians who supported the goals of Prop. 215 were reluctant to regulate in the area, because any such effort would have had to begin with dispensary operators filling out forms providing incriminating information about themselves. Any such documents could then have been subpoenaed by federal prosecutors and used to shut the operators down or put them in prison.
DeAngelo, now 51, was then a longtime marijuana activist but also a businessman. From 1990 to 2000 he founded and headed the industrial hemp company known as Ecolution. (Hemp, from which rope and other products are made, is a non-psychoactive strain of cannabis. Hemp products are legal in this country, but growing hemp is not.) Excited by the medical cannabis phenomenon in California, DeAngelo moved there in 2001, when the legal environment was still extremely gray.
He found two main types of dispensary managers operating at that time, he recalls. "The best of them were the well-motivated activists who brought really good intentions ... but had, for the most part, no business experience whatsoever and no capital to invest. Despite that, they managed to thrive, simply because they were the only game in town.
"This engendered a second wave of operators, who were attracted by the money, as opposed to the cause," DeAngelo continues. "A whole new wave of dispensaries got thrown up, which I refer to as 'thug dispensaries.' These were operations run by people who had a background in illicit activities, whether it was selling cannabis or other drugs on the street, or trading in illegal firearms, or in the porn industry or gambling industry -- people comfortable operating in the gray zone. Very rapidly you began to see some big problems. Several armed robberies. You had a spate of stories about operators being arrested.
"As a patient," says DeAngelo -- he uses marijuana to relieve pain from a degenerative disk disease -- "I was profoundly unhappy about it. As an activist I became concerned because these types were really hurting the public image of medical cannabis."
In an effort to improve the Wild West atmosphere, the California legislature then passed Senate Bill 420 ("420" is a slang term for pot), which took effect in 2004. This law fleshed out a bit more about the way Prop. 215 would work, requiring counties to issue identification cards to patients who sought them (to help them in their interactions with the police) and setting up minimum guidelines for how much marijuana patients could possess: eight ounces of dried marijuana plus either six mature plants or 12 immature plants. (Counties could allow higher amounts.)
Though SB 420 was still silent on the issue of dispensaries, it did contain a provision that protected patients or caregivers who "associate ... in order collectively or cooperatively to cultivate marijuana for medical purposes." Accordingly, nearly all the dispensaries in California now claim to be patient "collectives" or "cooperatives," protected under this provision.
At the same time another provision of SB 420 seemed to cut against the idea that dispensaries were legal -- at least as many of them were (and still are) being run. It said that nothing in the law should be construed to "authorize any individual or group to cultivate or distribute marijuana for profit."
"In my opinion," says Bill Panzer, a criminal-defense lawyer and marijuana legalization advocate who helped draft Prop. 215, "the vast, overwhelming majority [of dispensaries] are not legal, because they're not collectives or cooperatives. If somebody owns the store, sells marijuana, and at end of day takes the extra money and puts it in his pocket and goes home, that's not a collective."
The proof-of-concept challenge
DeAngelo opened the Harborside Health Center dispensary in Oakland in October 2006 as a proof-of-concept that might show the rest of the nation how such an establishment could provide top-flight patient services, adhere to the letter of the law, and interact with the surrounding community beneficially.
His clinic, across from a scenic stretch of Oakland harbor, is identified only by its address -- a large, block-letter "1840" painted on the façade of an inconspicuous, gray-blue one-story building on Embarcadero Drive.
On the inside it's a spacious, wood-trimmed, tastefully appointed room that blends clean, contemporary lines with sparingly employed Eastern medicinal themes: a laughing Buddha here, a dancing goddess statuette there.
The mood is broken only by the metal detector at the door and the multiple casino-style cameras embedded in the ceiling. Oakland has a high crime rate, and precautions must be taken. There are at least three security guards inside the facility at all times, as well as two more outside, patrolling Harborside's 100-car parking lot.
"Whenever a patient comes into the clinic for the first time," explains DeAngelo, "they sign a collective cultivation agreement. They authorize all the other patients in the collective to grow medical cannabis on their behalf. That sets up a 100% closed-loop distribution system that isolates my patients from any contact with the illicit market."
But that doesn't mean that every member of the collective actually knows what a hoe looks like. "For a variety of very valid reasons," DeAngelo continues, "most patients are unable to grow their own medicine. We act as a clearinghouse between patients who are able to grow and patients who aren't able to grow."
Harborside now has 30,000 patients registered in its database, and their purchases of medicine bring in about $20 million annually in revenue, according to DeAngelo. "I'd rather not discuss my specific salary," he says. "I can tell you if I was working in any other industry and showed the kind of financial returns that this business has shown, I'd be paid three or four times as much as I'm making at Harborside."
First-time patients, upon stepping through the metal detector at Harborside, immediately undergo a thorough paperwork check. The patient produces his doctor recommendation, the clinic verifies its authenticity with the doctor, and then the clinic also verifies the doctor's credentials with the state medical board.
About 600 patients come to Harborside each day, according to DeAngelo, most to buy marijuana, a few to supply it. Suppliers can bring in as much as three pounds at a time. (Bay Area police generally allow patients to transport this much, DeAngelo says.) The patient-grown marijuana is inspected for quality, examined for molds and fungi, and tested with a gas chromatograph mass spectrometer to determine its THC content.
At Harborside, there are eight selling stations along a long counter, each near a glass case displaying the wide array of medicines available, labeled as to strain and THC content. "Our most popular strains are our purple strains," says DeAngelo, "like Purple Urkle or Granddaddy Purple. The purples tend to be heavy indicas" -- one of the two main varieties of psychoactive cannabis -- "with a very strong, relaxing effect. They have a characteristically sweet, almost candy-like flavor.
"Another popular family of strains is the Kush family," he continues. "That would include OG Kush, Baba Kush, and Pure Kush. The Kushes tend to be more sativa-dominant," referring to the other main variety of cannabis, which is said to produce a more cerebral, "daytime appropriate" high, with less body impact. "They have a pungent flavor as opposed to a sweet flavor."
At Harborside, I experienced a mild personal epiphany: I realized that I never really knew before what fresh marijuana smelled like. Though I had easily recognized, from East Coast college days 30 years back, the smell of smoked marijuana inside Rosenfeld's SUV, I had never before smelled the sweet, herbal fragrance suffusing Harborside. At first I incorrectly assumed it was some sort of incense being artificially introduced to mask the odor I was familiar with.
As I further inspected Harborside's medicines, I also realized that I had never really known before what fresh, high-quality marijuana looked like. I remembered baggies half-filled with crushed brown twigs, leaves, stems, and even seeds. But the dispensaries sell only fresh "bud," which looks like cute, plump, fuzzy caterpillars curled in a ball.
After my education at Harborside I went on to explore some of the other approaches that marijuana entrepreneurs and activists are experimenting with as they try to rise to the proof-of-concept challenge.
Pioneering canna-businessman Richard Lee, also in Oakland, has opened his Blue Sky Café dispensary as a coffee shop, taking his cue from Amsterdam. Lee acknowledges that he runs the Blue Sky as a for-profit business, a situation that the City of Oakland authorities have at least tacitly endorsed, notwithstanding SB 420's apparent prohibition of "for profit" distribution.
In 2004 the city, seeking to avoid being overrun by dispensaries, passed municipal regulations limiting the permissible number to four. Those regs required that dispensary operators not earn "excessive" profits, which has been understood to imply that some profit must be permissible. Lee was granted one of the city's four permits.
Lee has also opened an array of affiliated businesses in the immediate neighborhood of the Blue Sky, several of the few bustling businesses in Oakland's otherwise depressed downtown. The best-known is Oaksterdam University, which trains medical cannabis entrepreneurs to navigate the business and legal challenges.
It also teaches trades to those who seek jobs as, say, a medical cannabis cultivator or "bud-tender," i.e., the quasi-pharmacist sales clerk who helps customers choose their medicine. Oaksterdam has now opened branches in Los Angeles and Sebastopol, Calif., about an hour north of Oakland, and stages conferences in Ann Arbor.
The most open dispensaries I saw were two branches of the Farmacy chain in Los Angeles. They are full-service herbal medicine stores under the management of registered pharmacist JoAnna LaForce, with marijuana being sold inconspicuously alongside scores of uncontroversial, legal plant products with putative healing powers. At these stores all members of the public, of any age, are welcome to enter, and only those who ask about marijuana are required to produce paperwork. "That way, a young mother with children can come into a store and not feel like a criminal," LaForce explains.
For my aesthetic taste, the most inviting dispensary I toured was the immaculate Peace in Medicine facility in Sebastopol. Here, patients enter a handsome, freshly painted house -- the former sales office for a Ford dealership -- and come to what looks like a cheery doctor's waiting room.
After taking care of the paperwork, patients are summoned into the dispensary. There, I mention to Robert Jacobs, 32, Peace in Medicine's idealistic young executive director, how enticing the fresh medicine smells. "If it smells good, the body probably wants it," he responds, smiling a bit and sounding like Eve in the Garden of Eden.
I then notice a journalistic hole opening up in my reporting. Until now I had assumed that my haphazard, stale, youthful experiences with marijuana would need no refreshing in order for me to write a thorough article about medical cannabis. Now I'm not so sure.
Unfortunately, most dispensaries are intransigent about serving only California residents, and I am not one. I explain my quandary to Jacobs. Listening back upon my words as they hang in the air, I realize that it sounds as if I've just asked him to break the law. He very politely declines.
Taxing and regulating dispensaries
In the early days of dispensaries the California Board of Equalization, which collects state and local sales tax, refused to issue seller's permits to dispensaries that sought them -- the necessary prelude to paying sales tax in the state. The board viewed such establishments as certainly illegal under federal law, and possibly illegal under state law.
In October 2005 the board changed tack and began allowing dispensaries to pay sales taxes if they wanted, and in 2007 it completed the reversal by requiring them to pay sales taxes and demanding that they do so retroactively to October 2005.
The board assured the dispensaries in a February 2007 letter that it would now issue seller's permits even if the dispensary refused to answer portions of the standard application -- identifying the product sold, for instance, or listing suppliers -- due to "concerns about confidentiality or self-incrimination."
Since sellers' permits do not require establishments to identify themselves as medical marijuana dispensaries, the board has no hard records on sales taxes collected from them. Unless there is extremely poor compliance by dispensaries, however, the numbers should be robust.
Harborside alone reported about $15 million in sales in 2008, for instance, and DeAngelo estimates that the average revenue for each of California's 700 dispensaries probably ranges from $3 million to $4 million annually. If so, gross statewide medical cannabis sales are approaching $2.5 billion, generating taxes of around $220 million. That does not include the state and federal income taxes that dispensaries and their employees also pay, and employee payroll taxes.
In addition some localities, like Oakland, have begun imposing their own taxes. Each of Oakland's four dispensaries pays the city $30,000 annually for its license, plus a business tax on gross sales (over and above state or local sales tax).
This past July, Oakland increased that business tax 15 times over, from $1.20 to $18 for every $1,000 in sales. Tellingly, the increase had been sought by the dispensary owners themselves, who well understand the importance of being seen as good citizens and becoming indispensable to the city's revenue supply.
Has medical cannabis been a good thing for Oakland? "I think so," says Ignacio De La Fuente, Oakland's current deputy mayor and, from 1998 to 2008, president of its city council. "I was not one of the initial supporters," he concedes, and he still doesn't favor legalizing marijuana for recreational purposes. "But I became educated about the medicinal value of cannabis" over the years of debate, De La Fuente explains. "You kind of make a decision of, Is this measure worth the risk to help the people that really need it?"
On balance he believes it was, though he urges other localities considering legalizing medical marijuana to "do their homework about how they want to regulate establishments, so they don't become a problem or a nuisance."
"It's not working," says Councilman Dennis Zine of Los Angeles, a city that began regulating its dispensaries late, and is now overrun. "Too many of these places have become distribution places for recreational purposes under the guise of medical," he says.
In 2007 the city set a deadline after which no new dispensaries would be permitted. A staggering 186 establishments met the cutoff, yet another 736 filed late applications, citing a "hardship" exception, and many of those opened too. Zine estimates that there are about 600 dispensaries in his city. He seeks tougher regulations, plus assistance from city, state, and federal authorities to help shut down any operator whose intent is "profit-making" as opposed to "compassionate" distribution for "medical purposes."
"I think the next five or six years are going to be incredibly exciting for this issue," says Stroup, who founded the National Organization to Reform Marijuana Laws 39 years ago. "I honestly believe we'll stop arresting individual smokers in almost all states and start to see the first one or two states experiment with a legalization bill."
Although Stroup originally wanted the "R" in NORML to stand for "Repeal," he was later talked into softening it to "Reform" by cooler, more politically savvy advisers. Now he thinks society might finally be closing in on his original goal.
Could be. Just watch out for those swinging pendulums.
How marijuana became legal
Medical marijuana is giving activists a chance to show how a legitimized pot business can work. Is the end of prohibition upon us?
By Roger Parloff, senior editor
September 18, 2009
(Fortune Magazine) -- When Irvin Rosenfeld, 56, picks me up at the Fort Lauderdale airport, his SUV reeks of marijuana. The vice president for sales at a local brokerage firm, Rosenfeld has been smoking 10 to 12 marijuana cigarettes a day for 38 years, he says.
That's probably unusual in itself, but what makes Rosenfeld exceptional is that for the past 27 years, he has been copping his weed directly from the United States government.
Every 25 days Rosenfeld goes to a pharmacy and picks up a tin of 300 federally grown and rolled cigarettes that have been sent there for him by the National Institute of Drug Abuse (NIDA), acting with approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
Rosenfeld smokes the marijuana to relieve chronic pain and muscle spasms caused by a rare bone disease. When he was 10, doctors discovered that his skeleton was riddled with more than 200 tumors, due to a condition known as multiple congenital cartilaginous exostosis. Despite seven operations, he still lives with scores of tumors in his bones.
Rosenfeld is one of four people in the United States whom the federal government supplies with medical marijuana. Each is a living anomaly because, officially, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, NIDA, and the FDA all take the position that marijuana has "no currently accepted medical use."
That's the only way federal law can continue to classify marijuana, like heroin, as a "Schedule I controlled substance," forbidden from being prescribed by doctors. (Numerous dangerous, psychoactive, and addictive opium derivatives, by contrast, are more leniently classified as Schedule II drugs, allowing prescription use.)
Over the years the government's position has become progressively more embattled, if not untenable.
Thirteen states now have laws that let residents use marijuana medicinally, typically to alleviate chronic pain (particularly nerve pain caused by diabetes, AIDS, and hepatitis); manage movement disorders and muscle spasticity (especially for multiple sclerosis patients); as an anti-nausea and anti-vomiting agent (for those, say, undergoing chemotherapy); and as an appetite stimulant (yes, as in "the munchies") for those with wasting diseases like AIDS and cancer.
Another 15 states are weighing legislation or ballot initiatives that could turn them into medical marijuana states by next year.
The acceptance of medical marijuana has implications that extend far beyond helping those suffering from life-threatening diseases. It is one of several factors -- including demographic changes, the financial crisis, and the widely perceived failure of the war on drugs -- reopening the country's 40-year-old on-again, off-again shouting match over whether marijuana should be legalized.
This article is not another polemic about why it should or shouldn't be. Today, in any case, the pertinent question is whether it already has been -- at least on a local-option basis. We're referring to a cultural phenomenon that has been evolving for the past 15 years, topped off by a crucial policy reversal that was quietly instituted by President Barack Obama in February.
First, some necessary background. Under President George W. Bush (and under President Bill Clinton before him, for that matter), the U.S. Justice Department treated state medical marijuana laws as nullities. Such laws were contradicted and therefore preempted by federal drug laws, the Justice Department reasoned, and the U.S. Supreme Court upheld that position in 2005.
Accordingly, the federal government has periodically raided and prosecuted defendants who at least claimed to be complying with state medical marijuana laws, and when it did, defendants were forbidden from telling juries about the existence of those laws.
In late February, President Obama signaled a new approach. His attorney general, Eric Holder, confirmed at a press conference that he would no longer subject individuals who were complying with state medical marijuana laws to federal drug raids and prosecutions.
Pot from Uncle Sam
This understated act -- a simple pledge not to act, really -- could have enormous consequences. It potentially leads to exactly the same endpoint as the Twenty-First Amendment, which repealed the federal prohibition on alcoholic beverage sales.
Here's how. When states make a legal loophole allowing medical use of marijuana, they must grapple with the messy question of what precisely constitutes medical use. After all, doctors regularly prescribe powerful drugs like Valium, Viagra, Prozac, and -- give us a break -- Botox to patients who are hardly at death's door.
If a state doesn't tightly limit what "medical use" means, the camel can get its nose under the tent.
That's what happened in California. Like most medical marijuana states, California permits doctors to "recommend" marijuana use for patients who suffer from specific serious diseases. (Drafters of the law avoided the word "prescribe" in an attempt to sidestep conflict with federal law.)
California's law then adds a catchall provision that lets doctors also approve marijuana use for "any other illness for which marijuana provides relief." In practice, doctors -- largely protected from second-guessing by confidentiality privileges -- have been free to make the final call as to which conditions those might be.
This is, after all, the norm vis-à-vis medicines. Once a pharmaceutical has been FDA-approved for one use, doctors can lawfully prescribe it for other, so-called off-label purposes, even though the drug has not yet been certified as safe or effective for them.
Accordingly, California doctors are authorizing patients to take marijuana to relieve such ailments as anxiety, headache, premenstrual syndrome, and trouble sleeping. "You could get it for writer's block," comments Allen St. Pierre, the executive director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws.
Some California doctors voluntarily report the breakdown of patient medical conditions for which they have approved marijuana use in the Alameda, Calif., medical newsletter O'Shaughnessy's.
They commonly report that more than a quarter of their marijuana authorizations have been prompted by patients suffering from conditions like "anxiety" or "insomnia." (The most common complaint is "chronic pain.")
As a result, in most of California's coastal metropolitan areas, marijuana is effectively legal today. Any resident older than 18 who gets a note from a doctor can lawfully buy the stuff, and doctors seemingly eager to write such notes, typically in exchange for a $200 consultation fee, advertise in newspapers and on websites.
There are an estimated 300,000 to 400,000 medical marijuana patients in the state now, and the figure is rapidly growing.
More astonishingly, there are about 700 medical marijuana dispensaries now operating in California openly distributing the drug.
These dispensaries -- called "compassionate-care clinics" by the solemn and "pot shops" by the skeptical -- are decidedly outpatient facilities, with not a few patients arriving on bicycles, roller skates, or skateboards. (They often get discounts for doing so, because it's greener than using a fossil-fuel-powered car.)
The legitimization of selling pot
The dispensaries sell marijuana and its concentrated resin forms, hashish and kif, sometimes alongside a range of enticing, non-inhaled alternatives, including marijuana-imbued brownies, cookies, gelati, honeys, butters, cooking oils ("Not So Virgin" olive oil), bottled cold drinks ("enhanced" lemonade is the most popular), capsules, lozenges, spray-under-the-tongue tinctures, and even topically applied salves.
In Los Angeles a high-end three-store chain called the Farmacy employs a pastry chef to oversee production of all its baked goods. Most dispensaries also sell potted plants and seeds for patients who are either thrifty or entrepreneurial.
All these establishments are engaged in what federal penal statutes still humorlessly define as narcotics trafficking. The dispensaries' affiliated marijuana farms and plant nurseries are sometimes of sufficient size to subject operators to mandatory-minimum five-year federal prison terms.
And this, mind you, is a situation that evolved almost entirely during the Bush administration, when the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration was still routinely threatening dispensary landlords with forfeiture of their premises, periodically raiding clinics and seizing inventories, and criminally prosecuting the most brazenly abusive operators.
Luke Scarmazzo, who aired a rap video on YouTube two years ago boasting of all the money and great sex he was getting from running the California Healthcare Collective in Modesto, Calif. -- "Fuck the feds!" was one ill-advised lyric -- was sentenced in federal court this past December to almost 22 years of imprisonment on a continuing criminal enterprise conviction. (He has appealed.)
While the situation in California is unusual, it's becoming less so. There are now 15 dispensaries in Colorado, according to weedmaps.com, one of many online marijuana dispensary and physician ("pot-doc") locator services. In Oregon nearly one in four active physicians has authorized at least one of his patients to grow marijuana for medical use.
New Mexico hopes to have the nation's first state-licensed medical marijuana farm and distributorship up and running by the time this article is published. New Mexico's law was enacted two years ago, but state officials hadn't dared implement it until Attorney General Holder blew the all clear in February.
This is the sense in which President Obama's understated pledge not to interfere with state medical marijuana laws potentially achieves for that intoxicant what the Twenty-First Amendment accomplished for beer, wine, and booze during the Great Depression.
Repeal, remember, simply returned to the states the right to decide whether to permit alcoholic beverage sales, and, if so, when and how. If a state permitted sales, it could also enforce minimum- age requirements, limit store hours, set zoning restrictions, and levy taxes. If it prohibited sales, it could bask in righteousness but exercise no control over the traffic that would occur anyway.
Over time nearly every state fell in line behind the tax-and-regulate model. (During Prohibition, federal law did contain an exception allowing alcoholic beverage sales for medical purposes. Nevertheless the case for medical booze was never compelling, and after repeal no state chose to condition the legality of alcohol sales upon a showing of medical need.)
"I think we're going to have exactly that kind of local option with marijuana [that we now have with alcohol]," says Keith Stroup, 65, NORML's founder, two-time past executive director, and current legal counsel. "Once that happens it will be like gambling."
Initially only Nevada permitted gambling, and then it was just Nevada and New Jersey. "But over a period of time," Stroup says, "the morality part of the issue kind of dissipated, and there were more and more needs for new revenue, and today almost every state in the country allows legalized gambling."
Marijuana activists thought they were close to legalization once before. From 1973 to 1978 activists won decriminalization in 11 states. ("Decriminalization" is a grab-bag term but usually refers to schemes under which first-time possession of small quantities of marijuana becomes a noncriminal violation, akin to a parking ticket. Decriminalization falls short of legalization, in that sale and distribution remain serious felonies.)
In 1977, President Jimmy Carter endorsed a federal decriminalization bill. But the bill went nowhere, and soon the movement was all but obliterated by the return swing of the cultural pendulum, now known as the Reagan Revolution. There would be no new state or federal marijuana reforms for the next 16 years.
"Here's what's different now," asserts Ethan Nadelmann, the head of the Drug Policy Alliance, which favors marijuana legalization on a tax-and-regulate model. "First, in the late 1970s no more than 30% of the American public supported making marijuana legal. Now it's breaking 40%."
That jump reflects an important demographic change, Nadelmann notes. "Back then there was a whole older generation of Americans who didn't know the difference between marijuana and heroin," he says. "Now that generation is mostly gone. The people in power are baby boomers, a majority of whom actually smoked marijuana."
The past three Presidents have all more or less admitted trying the drug, Nadelmann continues, and the current one, when asked if he inhaled, famously retorted, "I thought that was the point."
Beyond the demographic change, there is a perception that after 40 years of blood, sweat, and tears, the war on drugs -- formally declared by President Richard Nixon in 1969, a month before the Woodstock festival -- has failed to reduce the availability of illegal drugs, has enriched and empowered organized-crime gangs, and has subjected millions of people to arrest who pose little threat to anyone but themselves.
On top of that, we're now mired in the worst economic environment since the Great Depression, which makes the prospect of collecting taxes on marijuana sales as alluring to contemporary politicians as beer, wine, and liquor taxes looked to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his party when they took office in 1933, the year Prohibition was repealed.
Assuming a national consumer market for marijuana of about $13 billion annually, Harvard economist Jeffrey Miron has estimated that legalization could be expected to bring state and federal governments about $7 billion annually in additional tax revenue, while saving them $13.5 billion in prohibition-related law enforcement costs.
In California, where the fiscal crisis is so grave that the state has had to issue vendors more than $1 billion in IOUs, a Field Poll published in April showed that 56% of the state's population favored legalizing marijuana, prompting Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to call for an "open debate" on the question. A legalization bill has been introduced in the state legislature, and the state board of equalization has estimated that if passed, it would bring in $1.4 billion in new revenue, a seemingly conservative estimate.
It's even possible that legalization would reduce national health-care costs, by easing demand for costly pharmaceuticals.
In the most recent issue of O'Shaughnessy's, one doctor reported that his cannabis patients had either stopped or cut back their use of "analgesics of all kinds [including] Tylenol, aspirin, and opioids; psychotherapeutic agents including anti-anxiety medications, anti-depressants, anti-panic, obsessive-compulsive, anti-psychotic, and bipolar agents; gastrointestiminal agents including anti-spasmodics and anti-inflammatory medications; migraine preparations; anticonvulsants; appetite stimulants; immuno-modulators and immunosuppressives; muscle relaxants; multiple sclerosis management medications; ophthalmic preparations; sedative and hypnotic agents; and Tourette's syndrome agents."
"Medical marijuana is God's little joke on the [marijuana] prohibitionists," says Richard Cowan, 69, a longtime legalization activist who claims he's smoked almost every day since 1967. "There is clearly a medical need, and it ranges from minor to life-saving.... From my perspective, the dividing line between medical and nonmedical should not be decided by the police."
Medical marijuana is clearly the crowning factor making things different this time. Not only is it changing perceptions of the drug, but it has also given legalization advocates in California a first-ever opportunity to devise and showcase a business prototype.
They've been afforded the chance to show a skeptical public that a safe, seemly, and responsible system for distributing marijuana is possible. If they succeed, they'll convince the fence sitters and lead the way to a nationwide metamorphosis.
If they fail, the backlash will be savage. If communities cannot adequately regulate the dispensaries, they'll descend into unsightly, youth-seducing, crime-ridden playgrounds for gang-bangers, and this flirtation with legalization will conclude the way the last one did: with a swift and merciless swing of the pendulum.
Pot's medical history
Marijuana, whose botanical name is cannabis, has been used medicinally -- and as an intoxicant, of course -- for thousands of years in Eastern cultures. It is believed to have been introduced to Western medicine in the early 19th century by a British doctor, W.B. O'Shaughnessy, who learned about it while stationed in India (and for whom the medical cannabis newsletter is named).
Several well-known pharmaceutical companies, including Eli Lilly (LLY, Fortune 500), sold cannabis in powdered or tincture forms in the early 20th century as a painkiller, antispasmodic, sedative, and "exhilarant." (For this article Fortune asked Eli Lilly for historical details on its cannabis sales, but a spokeswoman responded, "Due to competing priorities, we ... are unable to facilitate your query.")
Though cannabis remained listed in the U.S. Pharmacopeia -- a standard desk reference for drugs -- until 1942, its use in Western medicine began declining in the late 1800s, according to a history of cannabis written by Harvard psychiatrist Lester Grinspoon titled "Marijuana: The Forbidden Medicine."
The decline, Grinspoon writes, was due in part to the rise of more stable and effective pharmaceuticals -- though many of them later proved to have grave potential side effects -- and because modern hypodermic syringes could deliver faster pain relief using opiates. (Opiates were soluble; cannabis wasn't.)
Then, in the early 1900s, states began outlawing cannabis, which had become associated in legislators' minds with violent crime and psychosis. The drug was then being used in the U.S. mainly by Mexican migrant workers in the West and African Americans in the South, so apprehensions about it may have been intertwined with racial and ethnic fears. In 1937 the federal government, over the objections of the American Medical Association, effectively outlawed cannabis.
Modern-day medical assessments of marijuana's properties have not corroborated the outsize dangers that lawmakers had attributed to the plant. While it is a "powerful drug," concluded an Institute of Medicine report conducted in 1997 at the behest of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, its "adverse effects ... are within the range of effects tolerated for other medications."
Yes, someone who is high on marijuana shouldn't drive -- his motor skills and mental powers are impaired -- but that's true of alcohol and many prescription drugs too.
The long-term risks to chronic users appear to center mainly on the generic dangers of smoking (respiratory disease and possibly lung cancer) and upon the "mild and short-lived" withdrawal symptoms that a minority of marijuana users experience, according to the IOM experts. They considered marijuana less addictive than tobacco, codeine, or Valium.
Still, many doctors are squeamish about recommending marijuana to patients -- putting aside issues of legal liability. To begin with, most pharmaceuticals consist of a single, purified chemical compound. Such drugs are susceptible to double-blind, placebo-controlled testing, and once they are approved, doctors can prescribe known dosages.
Marijuana, in contrast, consists of the dried, ground-up flowers of a highly variable plant. It is made up of at least 400 compounds, including more than 60 that are unique to cannabis, known as cannabinoids, several of which are believed to have therapeutic effects. The proportions of these compounds vary greatly from plant to plant. A plant may attract harmful molds.
Lighting a match to the mix then introduces a whole new set of variables. Finally, smoking -- even putting aside its health risks -- is an idiosyncratic delivery system. Everyone smokes differently, so one never knows how much of which compounds the patient is receiving. These factors all make marijuana hard for researchers to test meaningfully and hard for doctors to prescribe confidently.
Accordingly, even those doctors who recognize the therapeutic powers of marijuana often prefer the notion of looking for one or two key active ingredients in it, isolating them, and then devising a delivery system that would not involve smoking.
And that's been done. In 1986 the FDA approved a synthetic version of what has long been recognized to be the main psychoactive ingredient of marijuana -- delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC. After rigorous testing, the FDA found THC to be safe and effective for the treatment of nausea, vomiting, and wasting diseases. This lawful, Schedule II drug, trade-named Marinol, is taken orally, by capsule.
The trouble is, for many patients Marinol turns out to be inferior to good old-fashioned pot. Smoked marijuana is much faster acting and, as a consequence, easier for patients to control in terms of dosage. The patient inhales as much as he needs and then stops. In contrast, with a THC pill the patient can easily ingest more than he can handle.
"Oral THC is slow in onset of action but produces more pronounced, and often unfavorable, psychoactive effects that last much longer than those experienced with smoking," according to a 2008 report published by the American College of Physicians. (Incidentally, the FDA-approved warnings for Marinol -- pure THC -- do not flatly forbid patients from driving under its influence. Rather, they simply caution patients not to do so "until it is established that they are able to tolerate the drug and to perform such tasks safely.")
Still, despite the disappointing performance of oral THC, many doctors want to continue exploring faster-acting THC delivery systems, including a skin patch or a suppository.
Meanwhile we're still awaiting hard proof that smoking marijuana can actually cause lung cancer. That evidence has proved surprisingly elusive, maybe in part because typical marijuana users smoke so much less than typical tobacco smokers.
In any case, marijuana users are increasingly turning to a means of inhalation that does not involve smoking known as vaporization. With a vaporizer -- the Volcano brand is the best known -- users heat marijuana to a temperature sufficient to vaporize the cannabinoids but insufficient to spark combustion and most of its associated noxious gases. The vapors are captured in a balloon and then inhaled.
The government's compassionate-use program
As a teenager Irv Rosenfeld was a strong opponent of marijuana use. He would sometimes give talks against marijuana at local schools. "I'd hold up bags of my prescription drugs and say, 'Be thankful you're healthy,'" he recounts. He was then taking prescription muscle relaxants, sleeping pills, anti-inflammatories, and a range of addictive, debilitating, opioid painkillers, including codeine, Demerol, and Darvon.
Shortly after Rosenfeld started college at the University of Miami, he caved in to peer pressure and tried pot. "Nothing happened," he says. (To this day Rosenfeld maintains that he never has been able to get high from marijuana. In my six or so hours with him, during which he drove me from Fort Lauderdale to Miami and back, all the while chain-smoking joints, I never noticed any apparent impact on him, other than an occasional cough.)
Rosenfeld continued smoking socially when others did. "About the 10th time," he continues, "I was playing chess when I realized that I'd been sitting still for 30 minutes." Normally he couldn't do that because his muscles would begin to ache and he'd have to change position. "I hadn't taken a pill in six hours. Just then someone handed me the joint, and it hit me. The only thing I'd done different was smoke pot."
Rosenfeld ran repeated experiments, and both he and his surgeon became convinced that marijuana helped him more than his prescription drugs, with fewer side effects. In 1971, with the blessing of his doctors and the indulgence of sympathetic police officials, he began smoking marijuana to treat his pain.
Then, in 1976, Rosenfeld learned of the extraordinary case of Bob Randall (now deceased). Randall, who had severe glaucoma, had been prosecuted that year for marijuana possession in the District of Columbia but won acquittal after advancing a "medical necessity" defense. Randall's doctors had testified that he risked going blind without marijuana to relieve the pressure within his eyeballs.
Randall then brought a civil suit against the government. In 1978 a mind-boggling settlement was reached: The government agreed to supply Randall with marijuana for the rest of his life.
The government had the capacity to strike such a deal because since 1968, NIDA had been growing a small quantity of marijuana for research purposes under contract with the University of Mississippi's pharmacy school. FDA and NIDA officials theorized that the U.S. government could lawfully become Randall's supplier if they observed the pretense that he was part of a clinical study to investigate a potential new drug. A research "protocol" was drawn up, though the study design called for just one patient: Randall.
Rosenfeld drew up a similar protocol for a clinical study of himself. With the help of supportive doctors and threatening lawyers, Rosenfeld became the second patient to pry his way into what became known as the compassionate-use investigative new drug program.
By 1991 the compassionate-use program had grown to include 13 patients. That year, after Randall counseled AIDS advocacy groups on how to seek admission to the program, it suddenly found itself deluged with 40 new applications. In early 1992, seeing the unworkable direction in which matters were headed, the government shut the program down, though the 13 existing patients were grandfathered in. Today just four are left, including Rosenfeld.
For them, federal marijuana grown at the University of Mississippi is sent to a contractor in Research Triangle Park, N.C., where it is rolled into cigarettes on an old machine obtained from the local tobacco industry. About every five months the contractor sends six tins of the cigarettes to the pharmacy where Rosenfeld picks them up.
Rosenfeld's weed is hardly connoisseur quality by contemporary California dispensary standards. The government grows its crops only sporadically, so it dries the harvested flowers and places them in cold storage. When I visited him in June, Rosenfeld was smoking marijuana harvested nine years earlier. Because Rosenfeld finds the government's cigarettes too dry, he unwraps them, rehydrates the marijuana by placing it in a container with lettuce, and then re-rolls his own joints, he says.
Rosenfeld's cigarettes are also not very potent by contemporary standards. They contain around 3.5% THC, which was about the average strength of dope seized in domestic street busts in 1996, according to NIDA data.
By contrast, marijuana seized from such busts in 2007 had an average potency of about 4.8%, while the fresh "manicured bud" available at today's best California dispensaries boast THC content ranging from about 6% to 22%.
It's as if Rosenfeld were receiving vanilla ice cream joylessly made in the Soviet Union and stored for decades, when there's fresh Ben & Jerry's Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough for sale just around the corner.
Still, Rosenfeld's not complaining. The government charges him nothing, so his only costs are medical consultations and pharmacists' fees -- about $50 a month. Subpar or not, the 8.3 ounces he receives every 25 days would cost him more than $2,000 on the street.
The battle to legalize marijuana
After the compassionate-use program was shut down, medical marijuana activists had one last hope for changing federal policies. Back in 1972, NORML and other groups had sued the predecessor of the DEA to force the rescheduling of marijuana as a prescribable drug, and incredibly, two decades later, the litigation was still raging.
During 14 days of hearings in 1986 the plaintiffs had presented many anecdotal accounts of nearly miraculous experiences patients had had with marijuana. Rosenfeld testified, as did the psychiatrist and medical historian Grinspoon, who related not only the evidence his research had unearthed but also a personal anecdote.
In 1972, Grinspoon's own teenage son, who had leukemia, began undergoing chemotherapy. "He would start to vomit shortly after treatment and continue retching for up to eight hours," as Grinspoon later described the ordeal in his book. "He vomited in the car as we drove home, and on arriving he would lie in bed with his head over a bucket on the floor."
Having heard that marijuana could help, Grinspoon's wife proposed that the couple let their son try it, but Grinspoon refused because it was illegal. His wife then defied him, secretly smoking marijuana with the teenager before one of his treatments. This time there was no vomiting, and in fact, on the way home the child asked to stop for a submarine sandwich. "From then on he used marijuana before every treatment, and we were all much more comfortable during the remaining year of his life," according to Grinspoon's account.
In 1988 the administrative law judge hearing the case ruled in NORML's favor. "Marijuana, in its natural form, is one of the safest therapeutically active substances known to man," Judge Francis Young concluded. Young was referring to the fact that it is almost impossible to overdose fatally on marijuana, a circumstance that distinguishes it from virtually any other drug. "By any measure of rational analysis," Young concluded, "marijuana can be safely used within a supervised routine of medical care."
In one of those maddening circularities of federal administrative law, however, the DEA's appeal from Judge Young's ruling was heard by John C. Lawn, then administrator of the DEA itself. Not surprisingly, in 1989, Lawn overturned all of Young's findings.
Lawn gave short shrift to anecdotes like Grinspoon's and Rosenfeld's. "These stories of individuals who treat themselves with a mind-altering drug ... must be viewed with great skepticism," he wrote. "Many of these individuals had been recreational users of marijuana prior to becoming ill. These individuals' desire for the drug to relieve their symptoms, as well as a desire to rationalize their marijuana use, removes any scientific value from their accounts."
Lawn also stressed the absence of any controlled clinical studies proving marijuana's safety or efficacy. He was right; such studies didn't exist (at that time), both because of the inherent difficulties of performing them on a whole plant and the unique difficulties of performing them on an illegal plant. To even obtain marijuana for such tests, researchers would have had to first win approval from three federal bureaucracies - the DEA, the FDA, and NIDA -- a daunting task even assuming the best of good will on everyone's part.
As for the controlled studies showing that marijuana's chief psychoactive ingredient -- THC, in the form of Marinol -- was safe and effective for treating certain medical conditions, Lawn saw them as simply proving conclusively that there could be no conceivable excuse for smoking marijuana. To whatever extent THC might be helpful, patients could use Marinol.
In 1994 the federal court of appeals for the District of Columbia upheld Lawn's decision, and the activists' last hope for achieving reform at the federal level died.
So they turned to state government. In 1996 a group of marijuana activists in California got enough signatures to put a legislative initiative on the ballot known as Proposition 215. It called for permitting medical marijuana patients or their "primary caregivers" to possess marijuana on the "recommendation or approval" of a physician.
The measure passed with a 56% majority, and California became the first medical marijuana state. Precisely what that meant, though, remained totally unclear. Prop. 215 did not specify how much pot patients could possess, and it said nothing about the way patients would obtain it. Nothing in the initiative explicitly legalized sales or distribution of any kind.
Nevertheless, a few intrepid souls opened dispensaries.
Dispensaries - A legal gray area
"In the immediate wake of passage of Prop. 215 in 1996," recalls Stephen DeAngelo, who would later open what is now Oakland's largest dispensary, "local governments tended to take a hands-off attitude toward medical cannabis." They wouldn't explicitly license dispensaries to open, he says, but they also didn't instruct the police to go shut them down. "Dispensaries were tolerated but not sanctioned."
Even those local politicians who supported the goals of Prop. 215 were reluctant to regulate in the area, because any such effort would have had to begin with dispensary operators filling out forms providing incriminating information about themselves. Any such documents could then have been subpoenaed by federal prosecutors and used to shut the operators down or put them in prison.
DeAngelo, now 51, was then a longtime marijuana activist but also a businessman. From 1990 to 2000 he founded and headed the industrial hemp company known as Ecolution. (Hemp, from which rope and other products are made, is a non-psychoactive strain of cannabis. Hemp products are legal in this country, but growing hemp is not.) Excited by the medical cannabis phenomenon in California, DeAngelo moved there in 2001, when the legal environment was still extremely gray.
He found two main types of dispensary managers operating at that time, he recalls. "The best of them were the well-motivated activists who brought really good intentions ... but had, for the most part, no business experience whatsoever and no capital to invest. Despite that, they managed to thrive, simply because they were the only game in town.
"This engendered a second wave of operators, who were attracted by the money, as opposed to the cause," DeAngelo continues. "A whole new wave of dispensaries got thrown up, which I refer to as 'thug dispensaries.' These were operations run by people who had a background in illicit activities, whether it was selling cannabis or other drugs on the street, or trading in illegal firearms, or in the porn industry or gambling industry -- people comfortable operating in the gray zone. Very rapidly you began to see some big problems. Several armed robberies. You had a spate of stories about operators being arrested.
"As a patient," says DeAngelo -- he uses marijuana to relieve pain from a degenerative disk disease -- "I was profoundly unhappy about it. As an activist I became concerned because these types were really hurting the public image of medical cannabis."
In an effort to improve the Wild West atmosphere, the California legislature then passed Senate Bill 420 ("420" is a slang term for pot), which took effect in 2004. This law fleshed out a bit more about the way Prop. 215 would work, requiring counties to issue identification cards to patients who sought them (to help them in their interactions with the police) and setting up minimum guidelines for how much marijuana patients could possess: eight ounces of dried marijuana plus either six mature plants or 12 immature plants. (Counties could allow higher amounts.)
Though SB 420 was still silent on the issue of dispensaries, it did contain a provision that protected patients or caregivers who "associate ... in order collectively or cooperatively to cultivate marijuana for medical purposes." Accordingly, nearly all the dispensaries in California now claim to be patient "collectives" or "cooperatives," protected under this provision.
At the same time another provision of SB 420 seemed to cut against the idea that dispensaries were legal -- at least as many of them were (and still are) being run. It said that nothing in the law should be construed to "authorize any individual or group to cultivate or distribute marijuana for profit."
"In my opinion," says Bill Panzer, a criminal-defense lawyer and marijuana legalization advocate who helped draft Prop. 215, "the vast, overwhelming majority [of dispensaries] are not legal, because they're not collectives or cooperatives. If somebody owns the store, sells marijuana, and at end of day takes the extra money and puts it in his pocket and goes home, that's not a collective."
The proof-of-concept challenge
DeAngelo opened the Harborside Health Center dispensary in Oakland in October 2006 as a proof-of-concept that might show the rest of the nation how such an establishment could provide top-flight patient services, adhere to the letter of the law, and interact with the surrounding community beneficially.
His clinic, across from a scenic stretch of Oakland harbor, is identified only by its address -- a large, block-letter "1840" painted on the façade of an inconspicuous, gray-blue one-story building on Embarcadero Drive.
On the inside it's a spacious, wood-trimmed, tastefully appointed room that blends clean, contemporary lines with sparingly employed Eastern medicinal themes: a laughing Buddha here, a dancing goddess statuette there.
The mood is broken only by the metal detector at the door and the multiple casino-style cameras embedded in the ceiling. Oakland has a high crime rate, and precautions must be taken. There are at least three security guards inside the facility at all times, as well as two more outside, patrolling Harborside's 100-car parking lot.
"Whenever a patient comes into the clinic for the first time," explains DeAngelo, "they sign a collective cultivation agreement. They authorize all the other patients in the collective to grow medical cannabis on their behalf. That sets up a 100% closed-loop distribution system that isolates my patients from any contact with the illicit market."
But that doesn't mean that every member of the collective actually knows what a hoe looks like. "For a variety of very valid reasons," DeAngelo continues, "most patients are unable to grow their own medicine. We act as a clearinghouse between patients who are able to grow and patients who aren't able to grow."
Harborside now has 30,000 patients registered in its database, and their purchases of medicine bring in about $20 million annually in revenue, according to DeAngelo. "I'd rather not discuss my specific salary," he says. "I can tell you if I was working in any other industry and showed the kind of financial returns that this business has shown, I'd be paid three or four times as much as I'm making at Harborside."
First-time patients, upon stepping through the metal detector at Harborside, immediately undergo a thorough paperwork check. The patient produces his doctor recommendation, the clinic verifies its authenticity with the doctor, and then the clinic also verifies the doctor's credentials with the state medical board.
About 600 patients come to Harborside each day, according to DeAngelo, most to buy marijuana, a few to supply it. Suppliers can bring in as much as three pounds at a time. (Bay Area police generally allow patients to transport this much, DeAngelo says.) The patient-grown marijuana is inspected for quality, examined for molds and fungi, and tested with a gas chromatograph mass spectrometer to determine its THC content.
At Harborside, there are eight selling stations along a long counter, each near a glass case displaying the wide array of medicines available, labeled as to strain and THC content. "Our most popular strains are our purple strains," says DeAngelo, "like Purple Urkle or Granddaddy Purple. The purples tend to be heavy indicas" -- one of the two main varieties of psychoactive cannabis -- "with a very strong, relaxing effect. They have a characteristically sweet, almost candy-like flavor.
"Another popular family of strains is the Kush family," he continues. "That would include OG Kush, Baba Kush, and Pure Kush. The Kushes tend to be more sativa-dominant," referring to the other main variety of cannabis, which is said to produce a more cerebral, "daytime appropriate" high, with less body impact. "They have a pungent flavor as opposed to a sweet flavor."
At Harborside, I experienced a mild personal epiphany: I realized that I never really knew before what fresh marijuana smelled like. Though I had easily recognized, from East Coast college days 30 years back, the smell of smoked marijuana inside Rosenfeld's SUV, I had never before smelled the sweet, herbal fragrance suffusing Harborside. At first I incorrectly assumed it was some sort of incense being artificially introduced to mask the odor I was familiar with.
As I further inspected Harborside's medicines, I also realized that I had never really known before what fresh, high-quality marijuana looked like. I remembered baggies half-filled with crushed brown twigs, leaves, stems, and even seeds. But the dispensaries sell only fresh "bud," which looks like cute, plump, fuzzy caterpillars curled in a ball.
After my education at Harborside I went on to explore some of the other approaches that marijuana entrepreneurs and activists are experimenting with as they try to rise to the proof-of-concept challenge.
Pioneering canna-businessman Richard Lee, also in Oakland, has opened his Blue Sky Café dispensary as a coffee shop, taking his cue from Amsterdam. Lee acknowledges that he runs the Blue Sky as a for-profit business, a situation that the City of Oakland authorities have at least tacitly endorsed, notwithstanding SB 420's apparent prohibition of "for profit" distribution.
In 2004 the city, seeking to avoid being overrun by dispensaries, passed municipal regulations limiting the permissible number to four. Those regs required that dispensary operators not earn "excessive" profits, which has been understood to imply that some profit must be permissible. Lee was granted one of the city's four permits.
Lee has also opened an array of affiliated businesses in the immediate neighborhood of the Blue Sky, several of the few bustling businesses in Oakland's otherwise depressed downtown. The best-known is Oaksterdam University, which trains medical cannabis entrepreneurs to navigate the business and legal challenges.
It also teaches trades to those who seek jobs as, say, a medical cannabis cultivator or "bud-tender," i.e., the quasi-pharmacist sales clerk who helps customers choose their medicine. Oaksterdam has now opened branches in Los Angeles and Sebastopol, Calif., about an hour north of Oakland, and stages conferences in Ann Arbor.
The most open dispensaries I saw were two branches of the Farmacy chain in Los Angeles. They are full-service herbal medicine stores under the management of registered pharmacist JoAnna LaForce, with marijuana being sold inconspicuously alongside scores of uncontroversial, legal plant products with putative healing powers. At these stores all members of the public, of any age, are welcome to enter, and only those who ask about marijuana are required to produce paperwork. "That way, a young mother with children can come into a store and not feel like a criminal," LaForce explains.
For my aesthetic taste, the most inviting dispensary I toured was the immaculate Peace in Medicine facility in Sebastopol. Here, patients enter a handsome, freshly painted house -- the former sales office for a Ford dealership -- and come to what looks like a cheery doctor's waiting room.
After taking care of the paperwork, patients are summoned into the dispensary. There, I mention to Robert Jacobs, 32, Peace in Medicine's idealistic young executive director, how enticing the fresh medicine smells. "If it smells good, the body probably wants it," he responds, smiling a bit and sounding like Eve in the Garden of Eden.
I then notice a journalistic hole opening up in my reporting. Until now I had assumed that my haphazard, stale, youthful experiences with marijuana would need no refreshing in order for me to write a thorough article about medical cannabis. Now I'm not so sure.
Unfortunately, most dispensaries are intransigent about serving only California residents, and I am not one. I explain my quandary to Jacobs. Listening back upon my words as they hang in the air, I realize that it sounds as if I've just asked him to break the law. He very politely declines.
Taxing and regulating dispensaries
In the early days of dispensaries the California Board of Equalization, which collects state and local sales tax, refused to issue seller's permits to dispensaries that sought them -- the necessary prelude to paying sales tax in the state. The board viewed such establishments as certainly illegal under federal law, and possibly illegal under state law.
In October 2005 the board changed tack and began allowing dispensaries to pay sales taxes if they wanted, and in 2007 it completed the reversal by requiring them to pay sales taxes and demanding that they do so retroactively to October 2005.
The board assured the dispensaries in a February 2007 letter that it would now issue seller's permits even if the dispensary refused to answer portions of the standard application -- identifying the product sold, for instance, or listing suppliers -- due to "concerns about confidentiality or self-incrimination."
Since sellers' permits do not require establishments to identify themselves as medical marijuana dispensaries, the board has no hard records on sales taxes collected from them. Unless there is extremely poor compliance by dispensaries, however, the numbers should be robust.
Harborside alone reported about $15 million in sales in 2008, for instance, and DeAngelo estimates that the average revenue for each of California's 700 dispensaries probably ranges from $3 million to $4 million annually. If so, gross statewide medical cannabis sales are approaching $2.5 billion, generating taxes of around $220 million. That does not include the state and federal income taxes that dispensaries and their employees also pay, and employee payroll taxes.
In addition some localities, like Oakland, have begun imposing their own taxes. Each of Oakland's four dispensaries pays the city $30,000 annually for its license, plus a business tax on gross sales (over and above state or local sales tax).
This past July, Oakland increased that business tax 15 times over, from $1.20 to $18 for every $1,000 in sales. Tellingly, the increase had been sought by the dispensary owners themselves, who well understand the importance of being seen as good citizens and becoming indispensable to the city's revenue supply.
Has medical cannabis been a good thing for Oakland? "I think so," says Ignacio De La Fuente, Oakland's current deputy mayor and, from 1998 to 2008, president of its city council. "I was not one of the initial supporters," he concedes, and he still doesn't favor legalizing marijuana for recreational purposes. "But I became educated about the medicinal value of cannabis" over the years of debate, De La Fuente explains. "You kind of make a decision of, Is this measure worth the risk to help the people that really need it?"
On balance he believes it was, though he urges other localities considering legalizing medical marijuana to "do their homework about how they want to regulate establishments, so they don't become a problem or a nuisance."
"It's not working," says Councilman Dennis Zine of Los Angeles, a city that began regulating its dispensaries late, and is now overrun. "Too many of these places have become distribution places for recreational purposes under the guise of medical," he says.
In 2007 the city set a deadline after which no new dispensaries would be permitted. A staggering 186 establishments met the cutoff, yet another 736 filed late applications, citing a "hardship" exception, and many of those opened too. Zine estimates that there are about 600 dispensaries in his city. He seeks tougher regulations, plus assistance from city, state, and federal authorities to help shut down any operator whose intent is "profit-making" as opposed to "compassionate" distribution for "medical purposes."
"I think the next five or six years are going to be incredibly exciting for this issue," says Stroup, who founded the National Organization to Reform Marijuana Laws 39 years ago. "I honestly believe we'll stop arresting individual smokers in almost all states and start to see the first one or two states experiment with a legalization bill."
Although Stroup originally wanted the "R" in NORML to stand for "Repeal," he was later talked into softening it to "Reform" by cooler, more politically savvy advisers. Now he thinks society might finally be closing in on his original goal.
Could be. Just watch out for those swinging pendulums.
Wednesday, March 11, 2009
Scientists Allege Fraud in 1984 HIV/AIDS Papers
http://www.naturalnews.com/025787.html
Scientists Allege Fraud in 1984 HIV/AIDS Papers
Friday, March 06, 2009
David Gutierrez, staff writer
(NaturalNews) Thirty-seven legal, medical and research professionals have sent a letter to the journal Science, asking it to officially retract the original four papers making the case for HIV as the cause of AIDS. According to the letter's authors, widespread evidence has now emerged that the studies were not only poorly carried out, but that their results were falsified.
In 1984, Robert Gallo published four articles in Science, claiming that he had isolated the HIV virus and concluding that it was the "probable cause of AIDS." Investigative journalist Janine Roberts has discovered, however, that Gallo made last-minute alterations to the paper and its results.
"I was shocked when I read the original draft of the key scientific paper now widely cited as proving HIV causes AIDS," said Roberts, author of Fear of the Invisible.
"Gallo's handwritten last-minute changes had reversed what the scientists in his lab had originally concluded. This demonstrates a stunning disregard for the scientific process and a very disturbing breach of public trust."
Along with a copy of the handwritten changes, the letter from the 37 experts includes a letter from Gallo himself, admitting to another researcher that HIV could not be isolated from human samples alone; and a letter from an electron microscopy expert saying that there was no HIV virus contained in Gallo's 1984 samples.
Gallo's research has come under fire before, with U.S. government investigations in the 1990s concluding that the lead paper was "fraught with false and erroneous statements" and that "the careless and unacceptable keeping of research records ... reflects irresponsible laboratory management that has permanently impaired the ability to retrace the important steps taken."
"With new findings that undermine the scientific integrity and veracity of Gallo's four papers, the entire basis of the theory that HIV causes AIDS may now be questioned," said David Crowe, president of the international organization Rethinking AIDS.
Sources for this story include: www.rethinkingaids.com.
Scientists Allege Fraud in 1984 HIV/AIDS Papers
Friday, March 06, 2009
David Gutierrez, staff writer
(NaturalNews) Thirty-seven legal, medical and research professionals have sent a letter to the journal Science, asking it to officially retract the original four papers making the case for HIV as the cause of AIDS. According to the letter's authors, widespread evidence has now emerged that the studies were not only poorly carried out, but that their results were falsified.
In 1984, Robert Gallo published four articles in Science, claiming that he had isolated the HIV virus and concluding that it was the "probable cause of AIDS." Investigative journalist Janine Roberts has discovered, however, that Gallo made last-minute alterations to the paper and its results.
"I was shocked when I read the original draft of the key scientific paper now widely cited as proving HIV causes AIDS," said Roberts, author of Fear of the Invisible.
"Gallo's handwritten last-minute changes had reversed what the scientists in his lab had originally concluded. This demonstrates a stunning disregard for the scientific process and a very disturbing breach of public trust."
Along with a copy of the handwritten changes, the letter from the 37 experts includes a letter from Gallo himself, admitting to another researcher that HIV could not be isolated from human samples alone; and a letter from an electron microscopy expert saying that there was no HIV virus contained in Gallo's 1984 samples.
Gallo's research has come under fire before, with U.S. government investigations in the 1990s concluding that the lead paper was "fraught with false and erroneous statements" and that "the careless and unacceptable keeping of research records ... reflects irresponsible laboratory management that has permanently impaired the ability to retrace the important steps taken."
"With new findings that undermine the scientific integrity and veracity of Gallo's four papers, the entire basis of the theory that HIV causes AIDS may now be questioned," said David Crowe, president of the international organization Rethinking AIDS.
Sources for this story include: www.rethinkingaids.com.
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
Aids bottom-feeders line up for a feast on the dead
http://letterstotheempire.com/2009/01/04/aids-bottom-feeders-line-up-for-a-feast-on-the-dead/
Aids bottom-feeders line up for a feast on the dead
January 4, 2009
Photonaut
The LA Times article announcing HIV activist Christine Maggiore’s death said “According to officials at the Los Angeles County coroner’s office, she had been treated for pneumonia in the last six months.” This does not mean she had been suffering from chronic PCP pneumonia for six months; but it was enough for Aids proponents.
Aids drug front-man Seth Kalichman, eager to promote his new book on Aids “denialism” has been quick to capitalize on Christine’s passing. “For my own part, I have stated that when a person who tested HIV positive dies of pneumonia they have, by medical definition, died from complications of AIDS” he trumpets triumphantly on his blog. But is that what she died of? At the end of my previous post is an article by Celia Farber, titled “In Her Own Words, a Dec 19 Email From Christine Maggiore” – in which it is clear that Christine suffered an acute, short-lived episode, a sudden breakdown in health.
“So what?” sneers Seth, repeating the dogma. “When a person who tested HIV positive dies of pneumonia they have, by medical definition, died from complications of AIDS.”
But in the actual medical canon, we read, “If the pneumonia is recurrent and/or of the genus Pneumocystis (carinii) jiroveci (also known as PCP), it is considered an AIDS-defining condition in HIV-infected persons.” See Stringer JR, Beard CB, Miller RF, Wakefield AE. A new name (Pneumocystis jiroveci) for pneumocystis from humans. Emerg Infect Dis [serial online] 2002 Sep;8. Available from:
http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/EID/vol8no9/02-0096.htm
Yes, just the same as if they died of 30-odd other diseases, almost all of which have been known to man since the dawn of time. “HIV” is a wonderful catch-all, an umbrella term for linking all sorts of conditions together which otherwise would not be linked together. Pneumona is just pneumonia; but pneumonia + “HIV” = Aids. TB is just TB; but TB + “HIV” = Aids. It’s wonderfully circular, but there you go. So arguing here that Christine Maggiore died of pneumonia, but not an “Aids defining” pneumonia is basically arguing along fictitious lines, as if we all agreed to describe a mathematics with the starting-point, “2 + 2 = 5”.
I would like, again, to bring my reader’s attention to the same passage that I included in my past post, from Matt Irwin’s “Aids & Voodoo Hexing”. Celia Farber wrote, “She always tried to be stronger than any human being could ever be asked to be. I feared for her life, always. I feared the battle would kill her, as I have felt it could kill me, if I couldn’t find enough beauty to offset the malevolence. This is a deeply occult battle, and Christine got caught in its darkest shadows.” Dr Irwin’s essay puts these words in context, and give real pause to thought; while the Aids bandwaggon rolls on, adding this event as one more item to the “mountain of proof” that “HIV = Aids = death”.
“[...] A more recent article by Meador appeared in the Southern Medical Journal in 1992. Dr. Meador gave case histories of two people who received death-hexes from medicine men. The two men had very different outcomes, apparently due to the ability of one of their physicians to alter the belief structure of the patient. One of the most astounding elements of his case histories is that one of the men was a Haitian given a death hex by a medicine man, while the other was an American given a death hex unintentionally because of a false positive liver scan which appeared to indicate widespread metastatic cancer, when in actuality there was none. The “medicine man” who placed this second hex was Dr. Meador, himself, the author of the article.The first patient, a poorly educated man near death after a hex pronounced by a local voodoo priest, rapidly recovered after ingenious words and actions by his family physician. The second, who had a diagnosis of metastatic carcinoma of the esophagus, died believing he was dying of widespread cancer, as did his family and his physicians. At autopsy, only a 2 cm nodule of cancer in his liver was found. (page 244)The actions of the physician whose patient made a dramatic recovery were truly remarkable, and involved something more akin to theatre, rather than medical treatment:The patient had been ill for many weeks and had lost a large amount of weight. He looked wasted and near death. Tuberculosis or widespread cancer was considered the likely diagnosis. The patient refused to eat and continued a downward course depsite a feeding tube.
He soon reached a stage of near stupor, coming in and out of consciosness, and was barely able to talk. Only then did his wife ask to speak with Dr. Daugherty privately… The wife told him that about 4 months before hospitalization, the patient had an argument with a local voodoo priest. The priest summoned him to a local cemetery late one night, and… annonced that he had “voodooed” him, that he would die in the very near future.
Dr. Daugherty spent many hours that evening pondering… what he could do to save this moribund man. The next morning he gathered 10 or more of the patient’s kin at the bedside; they were trembling and frightened to even be associated with this doomed man. Dr. Daugherty announced in his most authoritative voice that he now knew exactly what was wrong. He told them of a harrowing encounter at midnight the night before in the local cemetery where he had lured the voodoo priest. Dr. Daugherty reported that he had… choked the priest against a tree nearly to death until the priest described exactly what he had done. Dr. Daugherty announced to the astonished patient and family “That voodoo priest made some lizard eggs climb down into your stomach and they hatched out some small lizards. All but one of them died leaving a large one which is eating up all of your food and the lining of your body. I will now get that lizard out of your sustem and cure you of this horrible curse.” With that he summoned the nurse, who had, on prearrangement, filled a large syringe with apomorphine (a powerful emetic for inducing vomiting). With great ceremony, Dr. Daugherty squirted the smallest amount of clear liquid into the air and lunged towards the patient, who by now had gathered enough strength to be sitting up wide-eyed in the bed. Although he pressed himself against the headboard trying to withdraw from the injection, Dr. Daugherty delivered the entire dose of apomorphine. With that he wheeled about, said nothing, and dramatically left the ward. Within a few moments the patient began to vomit. When Dr. Daugherty arrived at the bedside the patient was retching, one wave of spasms after another. His head was buried in a metal basin. After several minutes of continued vomiting and at a point judged to be near its end, Dr. Daugherty pulled from his black bag, carefully and secretively, a live green lizard. At the height of the next wave of retching, he slid the lizard into the basin. He called out in a loud voice, “Look what has come out of you. You are now cured. the voodoo curse is lifted.”…
The patient’s eyes widened and his mouth fell open. He looked dazed. he then drifted into a deep sleep within a minute or two, saying nothing. The sleep lasted until the next morning. When he awoke, he was ravenous for food. Within a week the patient was discharged home, and soon regained his weight and strength. he lived another 10, or more, years, and died of an apparent heart attack. No one else in the family was affected…
I reflected on this case for many years. I could make no sense of it until I read Walter Cannon’s classic paper, “Voodoo Death”. (pages 244-245)Dr. Meador goes on to describe Cannon’s paper, and summarizes the aspects necessary to cause a voodoo hex to succeed, including deep belief in the hex by the victim, the family, and the community, as well as initial social isolation followed by expectant preparations for death. Before describing the American man who died after a false liver scan, he asks the following question: Even if such a strongly held belief could cause death, most Westerners think of hexing as a bizarre superstitious practice limited to ignorant people. It has no pertinence to modern Western society… does it? (page 245).This patient died with only a small patch of pneumonia and a small nodule of cancer in his liver. His wasting syndrome was unresponsive to antibiotics, and he died “thinking that he was dying of cancer, a belief shared by his wife, her family, his surgeons, and me, his internist” (page 246). Meador asks yet another question of the reader: “If the first patient was cured of a hex, did the second die of a hex?”.
Some of the descriptions of the first patient’s illness bear remarkable resemblance to AIDS. The patient “had lost a large amount of weight”. He looked “wasted and near death”. Tuberculosis or widespread cancer was considered the likely diagnosis, and tuberculosis is one of the most common “AIDS-defining illnesses”. Several types of cancer are also considered AIDS-defining. The patient “continued a downward course despite a feeding tube”, showing that malnutrition alone did not explain his demise. He also suffered from severe dementia.
Kaada (1989) presents a review of research into the opposite of the placebo effect, dubbed the “nocebo” effect. This is the negative effect on health associated with harmful beliefs and psychological stressors. He comments on voodoo hexing and the ability to resist its power as follows:“In its most extreme, nocebo-stimuli may cause death, as in voodoo-death in primitive societies, an example of the fear-paralysis reflex. Whether the outcome is positive or negative is determined, inter alia, by the subject’s possibility of coping with the situation.”This could explain why some people live for years after an HIV diagnosis with no ill health, while others succumb in much shorter time.”
As Christine lived far longer than expected according to the “HIV” dogma, one wonders if she might not have been dead years ago, had she subscribed dutifully & credulously to a regimen of ”life-saving” ARV’s (”LSARV’s). In any event, I am convinced that self-proclaimed “crusaders” like Kalichman, Wainberg, Moore & the like are only doing the Aids Dissident movement service, by driving into public awareness the knowledge that there is a debate on “HIV” to begin with. This actually represents a failure of nerve on the part of the Aids Establishment as a whole, because for nigh on two decades, the policy of flat-out ignoring dissenting voices worked very well. Now, the establishment of sites dedicated to “negating denialist lies”, like aidstruth & Seth’s own blog, while providing fodder for some, are sowing seeds of doubt elsewhere, where none existed before.
The battle-lines have changed forever; & I am confident that Christine Maggiore’s life & death have, & will further serve the Dissident Cause, & add to the slowly-tipping balances towards Truth.
Aids bottom-feeders line up for a feast on the dead
January 4, 2009
Photonaut
The LA Times article announcing HIV activist Christine Maggiore’s death said “According to officials at the Los Angeles County coroner’s office, she had been treated for pneumonia in the last six months.” This does not mean she had been suffering from chronic PCP pneumonia for six months; but it was enough for Aids proponents.
Aids drug front-man Seth Kalichman, eager to promote his new book on Aids “denialism” has been quick to capitalize on Christine’s passing. “For my own part, I have stated that when a person who tested HIV positive dies of pneumonia they have, by medical definition, died from complications of AIDS” he trumpets triumphantly on his blog. But is that what she died of? At the end of my previous post is an article by Celia Farber, titled “In Her Own Words, a Dec 19 Email From Christine Maggiore” – in which it is clear that Christine suffered an acute, short-lived episode, a sudden breakdown in health.
“So what?” sneers Seth, repeating the dogma. “When a person who tested HIV positive dies of pneumonia they have, by medical definition, died from complications of AIDS.”
But in the actual medical canon, we read, “If the pneumonia is recurrent and/or of the genus Pneumocystis (carinii) jiroveci (also known as PCP), it is considered an AIDS-defining condition in HIV-infected persons.” See Stringer JR, Beard CB, Miller RF, Wakefield AE. A new name (Pneumocystis jiroveci) for pneumocystis from humans. Emerg Infect Dis [serial online] 2002 Sep;8. Available from:
http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/EID/vol8no9/02-0096.htm
Yes, just the same as if they died of 30-odd other diseases, almost all of which have been known to man since the dawn of time. “HIV” is a wonderful catch-all, an umbrella term for linking all sorts of conditions together which otherwise would not be linked together. Pneumona is just pneumonia; but pneumonia + “HIV” = Aids. TB is just TB; but TB + “HIV” = Aids. It’s wonderfully circular, but there you go. So arguing here that Christine Maggiore died of pneumonia, but not an “Aids defining” pneumonia is basically arguing along fictitious lines, as if we all agreed to describe a mathematics with the starting-point, “2 + 2 = 5”.
I would like, again, to bring my reader’s attention to the same passage that I included in my past post, from Matt Irwin’s “Aids & Voodoo Hexing”. Celia Farber wrote, “She always tried to be stronger than any human being could ever be asked to be. I feared for her life, always. I feared the battle would kill her, as I have felt it could kill me, if I couldn’t find enough beauty to offset the malevolence. This is a deeply occult battle, and Christine got caught in its darkest shadows.” Dr Irwin’s essay puts these words in context, and give real pause to thought; while the Aids bandwaggon rolls on, adding this event as one more item to the “mountain of proof” that “HIV = Aids = death”.
“[...] A more recent article by Meador appeared in the Southern Medical Journal in 1992. Dr. Meador gave case histories of two people who received death-hexes from medicine men. The two men had very different outcomes, apparently due to the ability of one of their physicians to alter the belief structure of the patient. One of the most astounding elements of his case histories is that one of the men was a Haitian given a death hex by a medicine man, while the other was an American given a death hex unintentionally because of a false positive liver scan which appeared to indicate widespread metastatic cancer, when in actuality there was none. The “medicine man” who placed this second hex was Dr. Meador, himself, the author of the article.The first patient, a poorly educated man near death after a hex pronounced by a local voodoo priest, rapidly recovered after ingenious words and actions by his family physician. The second, who had a diagnosis of metastatic carcinoma of the esophagus, died believing he was dying of widespread cancer, as did his family and his physicians. At autopsy, only a 2 cm nodule of cancer in his liver was found. (page 244)The actions of the physician whose patient made a dramatic recovery were truly remarkable, and involved something more akin to theatre, rather than medical treatment:The patient had been ill for many weeks and had lost a large amount of weight. He looked wasted and near death. Tuberculosis or widespread cancer was considered the likely diagnosis. The patient refused to eat and continued a downward course depsite a feeding tube.
He soon reached a stage of near stupor, coming in and out of consciosness, and was barely able to talk. Only then did his wife ask to speak with Dr. Daugherty privately… The wife told him that about 4 months before hospitalization, the patient had an argument with a local voodoo priest. The priest summoned him to a local cemetery late one night, and… annonced that he had “voodooed” him, that he would die in the very near future.
Dr. Daugherty spent many hours that evening pondering… what he could do to save this moribund man. The next morning he gathered 10 or more of the patient’s kin at the bedside; they were trembling and frightened to even be associated with this doomed man. Dr. Daugherty announced in his most authoritative voice that he now knew exactly what was wrong. He told them of a harrowing encounter at midnight the night before in the local cemetery where he had lured the voodoo priest. Dr. Daugherty reported that he had… choked the priest against a tree nearly to death until the priest described exactly what he had done. Dr. Daugherty announced to the astonished patient and family “That voodoo priest made some lizard eggs climb down into your stomach and they hatched out some small lizards. All but one of them died leaving a large one which is eating up all of your food and the lining of your body. I will now get that lizard out of your sustem and cure you of this horrible curse.” With that he summoned the nurse, who had, on prearrangement, filled a large syringe with apomorphine (a powerful emetic for inducing vomiting). With great ceremony, Dr. Daugherty squirted the smallest amount of clear liquid into the air and lunged towards the patient, who by now had gathered enough strength to be sitting up wide-eyed in the bed. Although he pressed himself against the headboard trying to withdraw from the injection, Dr. Daugherty delivered the entire dose of apomorphine. With that he wheeled about, said nothing, and dramatically left the ward. Within a few moments the patient began to vomit. When Dr. Daugherty arrived at the bedside the patient was retching, one wave of spasms after another. His head was buried in a metal basin. After several minutes of continued vomiting and at a point judged to be near its end, Dr. Daugherty pulled from his black bag, carefully and secretively, a live green lizard. At the height of the next wave of retching, he slid the lizard into the basin. He called out in a loud voice, “Look what has come out of you. You are now cured. the voodoo curse is lifted.”…
The patient’s eyes widened and his mouth fell open. He looked dazed. he then drifted into a deep sleep within a minute or two, saying nothing. The sleep lasted until the next morning. When he awoke, he was ravenous for food. Within a week the patient was discharged home, and soon regained his weight and strength. he lived another 10, or more, years, and died of an apparent heart attack. No one else in the family was affected…
I reflected on this case for many years. I could make no sense of it until I read Walter Cannon’s classic paper, “Voodoo Death”. (pages 244-245)Dr. Meador goes on to describe Cannon’s paper, and summarizes the aspects necessary to cause a voodoo hex to succeed, including deep belief in the hex by the victim, the family, and the community, as well as initial social isolation followed by expectant preparations for death. Before describing the American man who died after a false liver scan, he asks the following question: Even if such a strongly held belief could cause death, most Westerners think of hexing as a bizarre superstitious practice limited to ignorant people. It has no pertinence to modern Western society… does it? (page 245).This patient died with only a small patch of pneumonia and a small nodule of cancer in his liver. His wasting syndrome was unresponsive to antibiotics, and he died “thinking that he was dying of cancer, a belief shared by his wife, her family, his surgeons, and me, his internist” (page 246). Meador asks yet another question of the reader: “If the first patient was cured of a hex, did the second die of a hex?”.
Some of the descriptions of the first patient’s illness bear remarkable resemblance to AIDS. The patient “had lost a large amount of weight”. He looked “wasted and near death”. Tuberculosis or widespread cancer was considered the likely diagnosis, and tuberculosis is one of the most common “AIDS-defining illnesses”. Several types of cancer are also considered AIDS-defining. The patient “continued a downward course despite a feeding tube”, showing that malnutrition alone did not explain his demise. He also suffered from severe dementia.
Kaada (1989) presents a review of research into the opposite of the placebo effect, dubbed the “nocebo” effect. This is the negative effect on health associated with harmful beliefs and psychological stressors. He comments on voodoo hexing and the ability to resist its power as follows:“In its most extreme, nocebo-stimuli may cause death, as in voodoo-death in primitive societies, an example of the fear-paralysis reflex. Whether the outcome is positive or negative is determined, inter alia, by the subject’s possibility of coping with the situation.”This could explain why some people live for years after an HIV diagnosis with no ill health, while others succumb in much shorter time.”
As Christine lived far longer than expected according to the “HIV” dogma, one wonders if she might not have been dead years ago, had she subscribed dutifully & credulously to a regimen of ”life-saving” ARV’s (”LSARV’s). In any event, I am convinced that self-proclaimed “crusaders” like Kalichman, Wainberg, Moore & the like are only doing the Aids Dissident movement service, by driving into public awareness the knowledge that there is a debate on “HIV” to begin with. This actually represents a failure of nerve on the part of the Aids Establishment as a whole, because for nigh on two decades, the policy of flat-out ignoring dissenting voices worked very well. Now, the establishment of sites dedicated to “negating denialist lies”, like aidstruth & Seth’s own blog, while providing fodder for some, are sowing seeds of doubt elsewhere, where none existed before.
The battle-lines have changed forever; & I am confident that Christine Maggiore’s life & death have, & will further serve the Dissident Cause, & add to the slowly-tipping balances towards Truth.
Wednesday, January 7, 2009
Christine Maggiore, vocal skeptic of AIDS research
http://www.latimes.com/features/health/medicine/la-me-christine-maggiore30-2008dec30,0,7436635.story
Christine Maggiore, vocal skeptic of AIDS research, dies at 52
Woman and her husband sued Los Angeles County for finding that daughter died of AIDS-related pneumonia.
By Anna Gorman and Alexandra Zavis
December 30, 2008
Until the end, Christine Maggiore remained defiant.
On national television and in a blistering book, she denounced research showing that HIV causes AIDS. She refused to take medications to treat her own virus. She gave birth to two children and breast-fed them, denying any risk to their health. And when her 3-year-old child, Eliza Jane, died of what the coroner determined to be AIDS-related pneumonia, she protested the findings and sued the county.
On Saturday, Maggiore died at her Van Nuys home, leaving a husband, a son and many unanswered questions. She was 52.
According to officials at the Los Angeles County coroner's office, she had been treated for pneumonia in the last six months. Because she had recently been under a doctor's care, no autopsy will be performed unless requested by the family, they said. Her husband, Robin Scovill, could not be reached for comment.
Jay Gordon, a pediatrician whom the family consulted when Eliza Jane was sick, said Monday that Maggiore's death was an "unmitigated tragedy."
"In the event that she died of AIDS-related complications, there are medications to prevent this," said Gordon, who disagrees with Maggiore's views and believes HIV causes AIDS. "There are medications that enable people who are HIV-positive to lead healthy, normal, long lives."
Diagnosed with HIV in 1992, Maggiore plunged into AIDS volunteer work -- at AIDS Project Los Angeles, L.A. Shanti and Women at Risk. Her background commanded attention. A well-spoken, middle-class woman, she was soon being asked to speak about the risks of HIV at local schools and health fairs. "At the time," Maggiore told The Times in 2005, "I felt like I was doing a good thing."
All that changed in 1994, she said, when she spoke to UC Berkeley biology professor Peter Duesberg, whose well-publicized views on AIDS -- including assertions that its symptoms can be caused by recreational drug use and malnutrition -- place him well outside the scientific mainstream.
Intrigued, Maggiore began scouring the literature about the underlying science of HIV. She came to believe that flu shots, pregnancy and common viral infections could lead to a positive test result. She later detailed those claims in her book, "What if Everything You Thought You Knew About AIDS Was Wrong?"
Maggiore started Alive & Well AIDS Alternatives, a nonprofit that challenges "common assumptions" about AIDS. She also had a regular podcast about the topic.
Her supporters expressed shock Monday over her death but were highly skeptical that it was caused by AIDS. And they said it would not stop them from questioning mainstream thinking.
"Why did she remain basically healthy from 1992 until just before her death?" asked David Crowe, who served with Maggiore for a number of years on the board of the nonprofit Rethinking AIDS. "I think it's certain that people who promote the establishment view of AIDS will declare that she died of AIDS and will attempt to use this to bring people back in line. But you can only learn so much from an unfortunate death."
Brian Carter, who facilitated local peer groups with Maggiore, said the movement would remain strong.
"Christine was only part of this. There is an outstanding number of prominent rethinkers, independent thinkers, doctors, scientists, lawyers who question AIDS causation."
Though they run counter to the scientific consensus about AIDS, such beliefs can have a major effect. In South Africa, where about 5.7 million people live with HIV, the government refused until 2005 to fund antiretroviral treatment, citing questions about the effectiveness of the drugs that inhibit the replication of HIV.
Federal health officials and other experts say the link between HIV and AIDS has been shown in hundreds of studies and the prescription of antiretroviral drugs has helped reduce the pandemic to a chronic but manageable disease in the United States. Researchers from the Harvard School of Public Health calculated earlier this year that the South African government's delay in introducing treatment between 2000 and 2005 cost more than 330,000 lives in that country.
Craig Thompson, executive director of AIDS Project Los Angeles, said Maggiore was an effective and powerful advocate, in part because she was a woman living with HIV. But he said her message discouraging testing and treatment was dangerous.
"It's just really sad that she never could understand and never could trust the medical community, unlike the rest of the world," Thompson said.
Maggiore's friends said she underwent a holistic "cleanse" last month that left her feeling ill.
"She was telling me that she wasn't feeling great," Carter said, adding that he questioned whether the pneumonia was related to AIDS.
As an advocate, Maggiore counseled HIV-positive pregnant women on how to avoid pressure to use the drug AZT as a method to reduce the chances of transmission to their babies. She considered the drug toxic.
Maggoire gave birth to her son, Charlie, and his younger sister, Eliza Jane, at home and breast-fed both, although research indicates that it increases the risk of transmission. Eliza Jane Scovill died in 2005 from what the coroner ruled was AIDS-related pneumonia. Maggiore and Scovill, however, hired a pathologist who concluded that the girl died of an allergic reaction to the antibiotic amoxicillin.
After Eliza Jane's death, Los Angeles police investigated whether Maggiore and Scovill were negligent in not testing the girl for HIV. In 2006, the Los Angeles County district attorney's office decided not to file criminal charges against Maggiore, saying that it would have been difficult to prove criminal negligence because Maggiore had sought medical advice. Friends said that Maggiore never fully recovered after the death of her daughter and that she had trouble even sleeping and eating. Her preteen son, Charlie, has tested HIV negative.
Last year, Maggiore and Scovill sued Los Angeles County and others on behalf of their daughter's estate, charging that the autopsy report lacked proper medical and scientific evidence for the declared cause of death. The case is pending.
anna.gorman@latimes.com
alexandra.zavis@latimes.com
Christine Maggiore, vocal skeptic of AIDS research, dies at 52
Woman and her husband sued Los Angeles County for finding that daughter died of AIDS-related pneumonia.
By Anna Gorman and Alexandra Zavis
December 30, 2008
Until the end, Christine Maggiore remained defiant.
On national television and in a blistering book, she denounced research showing that HIV causes AIDS. She refused to take medications to treat her own virus. She gave birth to two children and breast-fed them, denying any risk to their health. And when her 3-year-old child, Eliza Jane, died of what the coroner determined to be AIDS-related pneumonia, she protested the findings and sued the county.
On Saturday, Maggiore died at her Van Nuys home, leaving a husband, a son and many unanswered questions. She was 52.
According to officials at the Los Angeles County coroner's office, she had been treated for pneumonia in the last six months. Because she had recently been under a doctor's care, no autopsy will be performed unless requested by the family, they said. Her husband, Robin Scovill, could not be reached for comment.
Jay Gordon, a pediatrician whom the family consulted when Eliza Jane was sick, said Monday that Maggiore's death was an "unmitigated tragedy."
"In the event that she died of AIDS-related complications, there are medications to prevent this," said Gordon, who disagrees with Maggiore's views and believes HIV causes AIDS. "There are medications that enable people who are HIV-positive to lead healthy, normal, long lives."
Diagnosed with HIV in 1992, Maggiore plunged into AIDS volunteer work -- at AIDS Project Los Angeles, L.A. Shanti and Women at Risk. Her background commanded attention. A well-spoken, middle-class woman, she was soon being asked to speak about the risks of HIV at local schools and health fairs. "At the time," Maggiore told The Times in 2005, "I felt like I was doing a good thing."
All that changed in 1994, she said, when she spoke to UC Berkeley biology professor Peter Duesberg, whose well-publicized views on AIDS -- including assertions that its symptoms can be caused by recreational drug use and malnutrition -- place him well outside the scientific mainstream.
Intrigued, Maggiore began scouring the literature about the underlying science of HIV. She came to believe that flu shots, pregnancy and common viral infections could lead to a positive test result. She later detailed those claims in her book, "What if Everything You Thought You Knew About AIDS Was Wrong?"
Maggiore started Alive & Well AIDS Alternatives, a nonprofit that challenges "common assumptions" about AIDS. She also had a regular podcast about the topic.
Her supporters expressed shock Monday over her death but were highly skeptical that it was caused by AIDS. And they said it would not stop them from questioning mainstream thinking.
"Why did she remain basically healthy from 1992 until just before her death?" asked David Crowe, who served with Maggiore for a number of years on the board of the nonprofit Rethinking AIDS. "I think it's certain that people who promote the establishment view of AIDS will declare that she died of AIDS and will attempt to use this to bring people back in line. But you can only learn so much from an unfortunate death."
Brian Carter, who facilitated local peer groups with Maggiore, said the movement would remain strong.
"Christine was only part of this. There is an outstanding number of prominent rethinkers, independent thinkers, doctors, scientists, lawyers who question AIDS causation."
Though they run counter to the scientific consensus about AIDS, such beliefs can have a major effect. In South Africa, where about 5.7 million people live with HIV, the government refused until 2005 to fund antiretroviral treatment, citing questions about the effectiveness of the drugs that inhibit the replication of HIV.
Federal health officials and other experts say the link between HIV and AIDS has been shown in hundreds of studies and the prescription of antiretroviral drugs has helped reduce the pandemic to a chronic but manageable disease in the United States. Researchers from the Harvard School of Public Health calculated earlier this year that the South African government's delay in introducing treatment between 2000 and 2005 cost more than 330,000 lives in that country.
Craig Thompson, executive director of AIDS Project Los Angeles, said Maggiore was an effective and powerful advocate, in part because she was a woman living with HIV. But he said her message discouraging testing and treatment was dangerous.
"It's just really sad that she never could understand and never could trust the medical community, unlike the rest of the world," Thompson said.
Maggiore's friends said she underwent a holistic "cleanse" last month that left her feeling ill.
"She was telling me that she wasn't feeling great," Carter said, adding that he questioned whether the pneumonia was related to AIDS.
As an advocate, Maggiore counseled HIV-positive pregnant women on how to avoid pressure to use the drug AZT as a method to reduce the chances of transmission to their babies. She considered the drug toxic.
Maggoire gave birth to her son, Charlie, and his younger sister, Eliza Jane, at home and breast-fed both, although research indicates that it increases the risk of transmission. Eliza Jane Scovill died in 2005 from what the coroner ruled was AIDS-related pneumonia. Maggiore and Scovill, however, hired a pathologist who concluded that the girl died of an allergic reaction to the antibiotic amoxicillin.
After Eliza Jane's death, Los Angeles police investigated whether Maggiore and Scovill were negligent in not testing the girl for HIV. In 2006, the Los Angeles County district attorney's office decided not to file criminal charges against Maggiore, saying that it would have been difficult to prove criminal negligence because Maggiore had sought medical advice. Friends said that Maggiore never fully recovered after the death of her daughter and that she had trouble even sleeping and eating. Her preteen son, Charlie, has tested HIV negative.
Last year, Maggiore and Scovill sued Los Angeles County and others on behalf of their daughter's estate, charging that the autopsy report lacked proper medical and scientific evidence for the declared cause of death. The case is pending.
anna.gorman@latimes.com
alexandra.zavis@latimes.com
Sunday, December 21, 2008
Gay leaders furious with Obama
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1208/16693.html
Gay leaders furious with Obama
By BEN SMITH & NIA-MALIKA HENDERSON
12/17/08
Rick Warren, Obama’s pick to give the inaugural invocation, backed the California ban on same-sex marriage.
Barack Obama’s choice of a prominent evangelical minister to perform the invocation at his inauguration is a conciliatory gesture toward social conservatives who opposed him in November, but it is drawing fierce challenges from a gay rights movement that – in the wake of a gay marriage ban in California – is looking for a fight.
Rick Warren, the senior pastor of Saddleback Church in southern California, opposes abortion rights but has taken more liberal stances on the government role in fighting poverty, and backed away from other evangelicals’ staunch support for economic conservatism. But it’s his support for the California constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage that drew the most heated criticism from Democrats Wednesday.
“Your invitation to Reverend Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at your inauguration is a genuine blow to LGBT Americans,” the president of Human Rights Campaign, Joe Solomonese, wrote Obama Wednesday. “[W]e feel a deep level of disrespect when one of architects and promoters of an anti-gay agenda is given the prominence and the pulpit of your historic nomination.”
The rapid, angry reaction from a range of gay activists comes as the gay rights movement looks for an opportunity to flex its political muscle. Last summer gay groups complained, but were rebuffed by Obama, when an “ex-gay” singer led Obama’s rallies in South Carolina. And many were shocked last month when voters approved the California ban.
“There is a lot of energy and there’s a lot of anger and I think people are wanting to direct it somewhere,” Solomonese told Politico.
The selection of Warren to preside at the inauguration is not a surprise move, but it is a mirror image of President Bill Clinton’s early struggles with issues of gay rights. Obama has worked, and at times succeeded, to bridge the gap between Democrats and evangelical Christians, who form a solid section of the Republican base.
Obama opposes same-sex marriage, but also opposed the California constitutional amendment Warren backed. In selecting Warren, he is choosing to reach out to conservatives on a hot-button social issue, at the cost of antagonizing gay voters who overwhelmingly supported him.
Clinton, by contrast, drew early praise from gay rights activists by pressing to allow openly gay soldiers to serve, only to retreat into the “don’t ask, don’t tell” compromise that pleased few.
The reaction Wednesday in gay rights circles was universally negative.
“It’s a huge mistake,” said California gay rights activist Rick Jacobs, who chairs the state’s Courage Campaign. “He’s really the wrong person to lead the president into office.
“Can you imagine if he had a man of God doing the invocation who had deliberately said that Jews are not going to be saved and therefore should be excluded from what’s going on in America? People would be up in arms,” he said.
The editor of the Washington Blade, Kevin Naff, called the choice “Obama’s first big mistake.”
“His presence on the inauguration stand is a slap in the faces of the millions of GLBT voters who so enthusiastically supported him,” Naff wrote, referring to gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered people. “This tone-deafness to our concerns must not be tolerated. We have just endured eight years of endless assaults on our dignity and equality from a president beholden to bigoted conservative Christians. The election was supposed to have ended that era. It appears otherwise.”
Other liberal groups chimed in.
“Rick Warren gets plenty of attention through his books and media appearances. He doesn’t need or deserve this position of honor,” said the president of People for the American Way, Kathryn Kolbert, who described Warren as “someone who has in recent weeks actively promoted legalized discrimination and denigrated the lives and relationships of millions of Americans.”
Warren’s spokeswoman did not respond to a message seeking comment, but he has tried to blend personal tolerance with doctrinal disapproval of homosexuality.
“I have many gay friends, I’ve eaten dinner in gay homes. No church has probably done more for people with AIDS than Saddleback Church,” he said in a recent interview with BeliefNet.
In the same interview, he compared the “redefiniton of a marrige” to include gay marriage to legitimizing incest, child abuse, and polygamy.
Obama’s move may deepen some apparent distance between him among gays and lesbians, one of the very few core Democratic groups among whom his performance was worse than John Kerry’s in 2004. Exit polls suggested that John McCain won 27% of the gay vote in November, up four points from Bush’s 2004 tally – even as almost all other voters slid toward Obama.
But despite the symbolism of picking Warren, Obama is likely to shift several substantive policy areas in directions that will please gay voters and their political leaders, including a pledge to end “don’t ask, don’t tell” in military service.
And some gay activists were holding out hope that they would either persuade Obama to dump Warren or Warren to change his mind.
“Rick Warren did a real disservice to gay families in California and across the country by casually supporting our continued exclusion from marriage,” said the founder of the pro-same sex marriage Freedom to Marry, Evan Wolfson. “I hope in the spirit of the new era that’s dawning, he will open his heart and speak to all Americans about inclusion and our country’s commitment to equality.”
Gay leaders furious with Obama
By BEN SMITH & NIA-MALIKA HENDERSON
12/17/08
Rick Warren, Obama’s pick to give the inaugural invocation, backed the California ban on same-sex marriage.
Barack Obama’s choice of a prominent evangelical minister to perform the invocation at his inauguration is a conciliatory gesture toward social conservatives who opposed him in November, but it is drawing fierce challenges from a gay rights movement that – in the wake of a gay marriage ban in California – is looking for a fight.
Rick Warren, the senior pastor of Saddleback Church in southern California, opposes abortion rights but has taken more liberal stances on the government role in fighting poverty, and backed away from other evangelicals’ staunch support for economic conservatism. But it’s his support for the California constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage that drew the most heated criticism from Democrats Wednesday.
“Your invitation to Reverend Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at your inauguration is a genuine blow to LGBT Americans,” the president of Human Rights Campaign, Joe Solomonese, wrote Obama Wednesday. “[W]e feel a deep level of disrespect when one of architects and promoters of an anti-gay agenda is given the prominence and the pulpit of your historic nomination.”
The rapid, angry reaction from a range of gay activists comes as the gay rights movement looks for an opportunity to flex its political muscle. Last summer gay groups complained, but were rebuffed by Obama, when an “ex-gay” singer led Obama’s rallies in South Carolina. And many were shocked last month when voters approved the California ban.
“There is a lot of energy and there’s a lot of anger and I think people are wanting to direct it somewhere,” Solomonese told Politico.
The selection of Warren to preside at the inauguration is not a surprise move, but it is a mirror image of President Bill Clinton’s early struggles with issues of gay rights. Obama has worked, and at times succeeded, to bridge the gap between Democrats and evangelical Christians, who form a solid section of the Republican base.
Obama opposes same-sex marriage, but also opposed the California constitutional amendment Warren backed. In selecting Warren, he is choosing to reach out to conservatives on a hot-button social issue, at the cost of antagonizing gay voters who overwhelmingly supported him.
Clinton, by contrast, drew early praise from gay rights activists by pressing to allow openly gay soldiers to serve, only to retreat into the “don’t ask, don’t tell” compromise that pleased few.
The reaction Wednesday in gay rights circles was universally negative.
“It’s a huge mistake,” said California gay rights activist Rick Jacobs, who chairs the state’s Courage Campaign. “He’s really the wrong person to lead the president into office.
“Can you imagine if he had a man of God doing the invocation who had deliberately said that Jews are not going to be saved and therefore should be excluded from what’s going on in America? People would be up in arms,” he said.
The editor of the Washington Blade, Kevin Naff, called the choice “Obama’s first big mistake.”
“His presence on the inauguration stand is a slap in the faces of the millions of GLBT voters who so enthusiastically supported him,” Naff wrote, referring to gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered people. “This tone-deafness to our concerns must not be tolerated. We have just endured eight years of endless assaults on our dignity and equality from a president beholden to bigoted conservative Christians. The election was supposed to have ended that era. It appears otherwise.”
Other liberal groups chimed in.
“Rick Warren gets plenty of attention through his books and media appearances. He doesn’t need or deserve this position of honor,” said the president of People for the American Way, Kathryn Kolbert, who described Warren as “someone who has in recent weeks actively promoted legalized discrimination and denigrated the lives and relationships of millions of Americans.”
Warren’s spokeswoman did not respond to a message seeking comment, but he has tried to blend personal tolerance with doctrinal disapproval of homosexuality.
“I have many gay friends, I’ve eaten dinner in gay homes. No church has probably done more for people with AIDS than Saddleback Church,” he said in a recent interview with BeliefNet.
In the same interview, he compared the “redefiniton of a marrige” to include gay marriage to legitimizing incest, child abuse, and polygamy.
Obama’s move may deepen some apparent distance between him among gays and lesbians, one of the very few core Democratic groups among whom his performance was worse than John Kerry’s in 2004. Exit polls suggested that John McCain won 27% of the gay vote in November, up four points from Bush’s 2004 tally – even as almost all other voters slid toward Obama.
But despite the symbolism of picking Warren, Obama is likely to shift several substantive policy areas in directions that will please gay voters and their political leaders, including a pledge to end “don’t ask, don’t tell” in military service.
And some gay activists were holding out hope that they would either persuade Obama to dump Warren or Warren to change his mind.
“Rick Warren did a real disservice to gay families in California and across the country by casually supporting our continued exclusion from marriage,” said the founder of the pro-same sex marriage Freedom to Marry, Evan Wolfson. “I hope in the spirit of the new era that’s dawning, he will open his heart and speak to all Americans about inclusion and our country’s commitment to equality.”
Monday, November 17, 2008
A Cure for AIDS
http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2008-11/cure-aids
A Cure for AIDS
While treating a patient for leukemia, doctors inadvertently cured his case of AIDS
By Julia Wallace
11.14.2008
Holy crap. These guys in Germany just cured AIDS!
Of course, the procedure is so expensive, complicated, and risky that it's not replicable as a large-scale public health strategy, but we'll ignore that for a minute. Here's how they did it. Drs. Gero Hutter and Eckhard Thiel are blood cancer experts at the Charite Medical University in Berlin. Their patient, an American ex-pat, was suffering from leukemia as well as a full-blown case of AIDS. His case was so desperate that his doctors decided to get craaazy and give him a bone-marrow transplant--(this isn't the crazy part)--using blood stem cells from a donor who was immune to HIV (this is). About 10 years ago, doctors discovered that a few of their gay male patients never developed AIDS, despite engaging in risky sex with hundreds of partners. It turned out that they had a rare mutation called Delta 32 that blocks a molecule in HIV from adhering to the cell surface. Delta 32 must be inherited from both parents; it occurs at a rate of roughly 1 percent in European populations (it's more common in Northern Europe and much much, rarer--basically unheard of--in Africa and Asia), so it was difficult but not impossible for the doctors to find a donor in Germany who fit the bill. The patient was asked to stop taking his antiretroviral AIDS medication for the duration of the procedure with the understanding that he'd have to restart the meds fairly soon after the transplant was complete and the level of the virus in his bloodstream started to rise. But to everyone's surprise, it never rose, not at all. It has now been close to two years since the transplant, and there are still no traces of HIV in the patient's blood or brain tissues. So: success! A cure! For this guy, at least.
Now back to the caveats. A bone marrow transplant is dangerous and painful--it involves wiping out the patient's entire immune system with chemotherapy and radiation and carries a 30 percent mortality rate. The prospect is so daunting that one doctor joked to the New York Times that he'd rather just take antiretrovirals for the rest of his life. It's also not always possible to find a donor who is a good match for the recipient (if the donated cells are not taken from someone with similar human leukocyte antigens, a crucial part of the immune system, they are likely to be rejected or cause severe graft-versus-host disease) and is also happens to be resistant to HIV. This would be particularly tricky in Africa, where the mutation doesn't occur naturally. And carriers of Delta 32 might actually be more susceptible to certain other diseases, like the West Nile virus.
But even though this particular procedure doesn't offer a new standard of care for AIDS patients worldwide, it offers a lot more than just hope (although hope is nice). For one thing, researchers now have a clear path to a cure. If the steps taken by Hutter and Thiel can be refined, simplified, and made less risky, they could become a viable protocol for thousands of other people with AIDS. Eventually, this might entail bone-marrow transplants in which not all of the body's immune cells are killed, or "snipping" the segment of DNA that codes for HIV receptors out out of blood cells and transplanting them into AIDS patients. Eventually, patients' own cells could actually be engineered to resist HIV. These advances are probably decades away, but this breakthrough is confirmation that, once they're made, they could amount to something big.
A Cure for AIDS
While treating a patient for leukemia, doctors inadvertently cured his case of AIDS
By Julia Wallace
11.14.2008
Holy crap. These guys in Germany just cured AIDS!
Of course, the procedure is so expensive, complicated, and risky that it's not replicable as a large-scale public health strategy, but we'll ignore that for a minute. Here's how they did it. Drs. Gero Hutter and Eckhard Thiel are blood cancer experts at the Charite Medical University in Berlin. Their patient, an American ex-pat, was suffering from leukemia as well as a full-blown case of AIDS. His case was so desperate that his doctors decided to get craaazy and give him a bone-marrow transplant--(this isn't the crazy part)--using blood stem cells from a donor who was immune to HIV (this is). About 10 years ago, doctors discovered that a few of their gay male patients never developed AIDS, despite engaging in risky sex with hundreds of partners. It turned out that they had a rare mutation called Delta 32 that blocks a molecule in HIV from adhering to the cell surface. Delta 32 must be inherited from both parents; it occurs at a rate of roughly 1 percent in European populations (it's more common in Northern Europe and much much, rarer--basically unheard of--in Africa and Asia), so it was difficult but not impossible for the doctors to find a donor in Germany who fit the bill. The patient was asked to stop taking his antiretroviral AIDS medication for the duration of the procedure with the understanding that he'd have to restart the meds fairly soon after the transplant was complete and the level of the virus in his bloodstream started to rise. But to everyone's surprise, it never rose, not at all. It has now been close to two years since the transplant, and there are still no traces of HIV in the patient's blood or brain tissues. So: success! A cure! For this guy, at least.
Now back to the caveats. A bone marrow transplant is dangerous and painful--it involves wiping out the patient's entire immune system with chemotherapy and radiation and carries a 30 percent mortality rate. The prospect is so daunting that one doctor joked to the New York Times that he'd rather just take antiretrovirals for the rest of his life. It's also not always possible to find a donor who is a good match for the recipient (if the donated cells are not taken from someone with similar human leukocyte antigens, a crucial part of the immune system, they are likely to be rejected or cause severe graft-versus-host disease) and is also happens to be resistant to HIV. This would be particularly tricky in Africa, where the mutation doesn't occur naturally. And carriers of Delta 32 might actually be more susceptible to certain other diseases, like the West Nile virus.
But even though this particular procedure doesn't offer a new standard of care for AIDS patients worldwide, it offers a lot more than just hope (although hope is nice). For one thing, researchers now have a clear path to a cure. If the steps taken by Hutter and Thiel can be refined, simplified, and made less risky, they could become a viable protocol for thousands of other people with AIDS. Eventually, this might entail bone-marrow transplants in which not all of the body's immune cells are killed, or "snipping" the segment of DNA that codes for HIV receptors out out of blood cells and transplanting them into AIDS patients. Eventually, patients' own cells could actually be engineered to resist HIV. These advances are probably decades away, but this breakthrough is confirmation that, once they're made, they could amount to something big.
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