Cell Phones Cause Cancer?

A report by the World Health Organization that cell phones may contribute to cancer has caused a frenzy on the Internet. Establishment scientists have dismissed the report. Otis Brawley, chief medical officer at the American Cancer Society, stated: "When we as consumers hear 'possibly carcinogenic,' we freak. But the data is not at all certain and needs further study." Great to hear the top doctor at the American Cancer Society thinks threats of cancer are overrated! Meanwhile, Donald Berry of the MD Anderson Cancer Center of Houston calls it "just an urban myth that keeps coming up. The panel somehow decided that there is maybe something here that's possibly carcinogenic, which ranks with everything else in the world."
Personally, I think they're right on this one, as the link between cell phones and brain cancer seems absurd. First of all, when I use my phone, it usually is on speaker so I don't have it next to my ear. Further, I rarely use my phone anyways, so instead of having it on my ear, I have it in my front pants pocket right next to my crotch. Who's the moron now, overconcerned scientists?

WHO: Cellphones possibly carcinogenic
Liz Szabo and Mary Brophy Marcus, USA TODAY
6-1-11
http://yourlife.usatoday.com/health/medical/cancer/story/2011/06/WHO-Cellphones-possibly-carcinogenic/47896306/1

The Rise and Fall of a Scientific Genius

The Forgotten Story of Royal Raymond Rife
a film by Shawn Montgomery

http://www.zerozerotwo.org/
ZERO ZERO TWO PRODUCTIONS
with new narration by Jeff Rense

See the staggering discoveries and work of Roy Rife which led him to a cure for cancer (among many other diseases) in 1934.

Hear Rife's own voice describe his breakthroughs and successes which shook the medical-pharmaceutical establishment to its core.

This all new, completely re-edited DVD version of the original two-part film by Shawn Montgomery, will leave you reeling with anger and shock at what has been withheld from all of us by men with an unbridled lust for profits and a complete disregard for the welfare of humanity.

"The Rise and Fall" shows how Rife's own brilliance led him to eventual ruin in the hands of the hopelessly corrupt American Medical Association, which did not and still does not want you to know his astonishing story. Countless millions of lives have been lost due to conflicting interests within the so-called Cancer Industry.

Oil of Oregano & Pomegranate Juice Kick Cancer's Ass

Courtesy of NaturalNews.com, oil of oregano and pomegranate juice are nutritious weapons in fighting cancer...

Oil of oregano fights harmful bacteria, cancer
Ethan A. Huff
Saturday, December 25, 2010
http://www.naturalnews.com/030833_oil_of_Oregano_cancer.html

Pomegranate juice components block cancer cell migration
S. L. Baker
Wednesday, December 29, 2010
http://www.naturalnews.com/030862_pomegranates_cancer_cells.html

97 percent of men survive prostate cancer even without treatment

http://www.naturalnews.com/030121_prostate_cancer_treatment.html

97 percent of men survive prostate cancer even without treatment
Thursday, October 21, 2010
David Gutierrez

(NaturalNews) If none of the men diagnosed with early-stage prostate cancer were ever treated, 97 percent of them would still survive the disease, according to a study conducted by Swedish researchers and published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

Most prostate cancers grow so slowly that researchers have increasingly questioned whether the significant risks of treatment with hormones, surgery or radiation -- all of which can cause side effects including incontinence and impotence -- are actually justified by a serious threat to patients' lives.

"What the data is showing is that for most patients with low-risk cancer, there is no need to panic," said cancer researcher Grace Lu-Yao of the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, who was not involved in the study. "Prostate cancer really is no longer a fatal disease."

Researchers used data from Sweden's national cancer registry to compare death rates among 6,800 men under the age of 70 who had been diagnosed with early-stage prostate cancer classified as low- or intermediate-risk. The risk factor of each cancer was calculated through a combination of tests, including the prostate specific antigen (PSA) and Gleason tests. Participants either underwent aggressive cancer treatment with hormones, surgery or radiation, or they took a "watchful waiting" approach in which their doctors monitored them for any progression in the cancer.

After eight years, 20 percent of the men in the watchful waiting group had died -- the same as the proportion for the general population. Fewer than 3 percent had died from prostate cancer. The researchers estimated that after 10 years, only 2.4 percent of participants in this group would have died from prostate caner.

Although the rate of death from both prostate cancer and from all causes was lower in the treatment group, the researchers noted that men in the "watchful waiting" group tended to be sicker going into the study than men who underwent treatment.

The Dentist Who Cured Cancer

http://www.naturalnews.com/030050_dentist_cancer.html

The Dentist Who Cured Cancer
Friday, October 15, 2010
Paul Fassa, citizen journalist

(NaturalNews) During the 1960s, a small town Texas dentist discovered a way to cure his terminal pancreatic cancer; he then proceeded to cure others of all kinds of cancers until the Medical Mafia struck him down. His name was William Donald Kelley, DDS, MS.

His procedure involved diet, heavy pancreatic enzyme dosing, and liver detoxing with coffee enemas. Dr. Kelley died in 2005 at the age of 79. His book, Curing the Incurable covers his therapy.

Kelley`s Cancer Victory

When the doctors told Kelley he was about to die from fast spreading and devastating pancreatic cancer, his wife left him with no money and four small children. Kelley`s mother came from Kansas to rescue him.

She threw out all the meats, junk food, cookies and candy that Kelley was addicted to. Then she fed him fresh grains, produce, and fruit, mostly raw. In three months, Kelley was up and about and working again.

That gave him a clue about diet and cancer. He read one of Max Gerson's books on diet and changed his diet forever.

Now he was healthier, but his cancer was still there. So he researched more on his own. Kelley found a book by John Beard, an early 20th Century Scottish embryologist who made the connection of pancreatic enzymes to cancer cells.

Beard noticed that when the fetus begins producing pancreatic enzymes, the placenta stops its cellular growth, and he wondered what that would do to cancer cells. He experimented by injecting cancerous animals and humans with pancreatic juices, and he cured them. Yet, nothing came of his successful experiments.

Kelley needed to try this for himself. He went to the local pharmacy and bought up as many pancreatic enzyme supplements as he could, and he proceeded to take heavy doses. He noticed progress on ridding cancer cells, but then he would get sick. When he stopped dosing, he would recover then proceed again. After dosing again with more cancer cells dying off, he would become ill again.

He realized that he was having Herxheimer or healing crisis reactions. Whenever dead cancer cells and their toxins were released after the enzymes tore up the cancer cell walls, the cancer cells were left vulnerable to the immune system.

So he incorporated daily liver cleanse coffee enemas to get off the Herxheimer roller coaster and became cancer free. Soon, the word spread about Kelley`s miraculous self cure. Cancer patients from all over began flocking to him. His cure rate with all types of cancer was over 50%.

But Kelley was not satisfied. He first realized that many were deficient in enzyme activators produced in the small intestine. So he incorporated activators in some of his enzyme formulas.

Then he discovered that one diet didn`t fit all with his methods. So he created metabolic typing to determine which diet best suits the individual for heavy metabolic proteolytic enzyme dosing. His cure rate went to 93%!

Medical Mafia Clamps Down

Kelley`s dental license was suspended for five years when the AMA found out that a dentist was curing cancer. He was even thrown in jail briefly in 1969, forcing Kelley to practice in nearby Mexico.

After his high profile patient actor Steve McQueen died, national media jumped all over Dr. Kelley. He claimed that Steve`s difficult mesothelioma lung cancer was cured, but the actor's insistence on a separate cosmetic surgery in the States led to his death.

Bitter and broken, Kelley called it quits after 20 years of curing thousands with cancer. Ironically, Dr. Nicholas Gonzalez, originally involved with Sloane-Kettering`s effort to debunk Kelley, is praising Kelley and practicing his version of Kelley`s protocol in NYC.

Dr. Kelley`s Pancreatic Enzymes Order Page
http://www.drkelleyenzymes.com/

About the author

Paul Fassa has managed to survive the Standard American Diet (SAD) and his youthful folly by deprogramming gradually from mainstream health ideology and studying holistic health matters informally with his wife while incorporating them into his lifestyle as a vegetarian.

He also practices Chi-Lel Chi Gong, and he is trained as a polarity therapy practitioner. He is dedicated to warning others about the current corruption of food and medicine and guiding others toward a better direction for health. You can visit his blog at http://healthmaven.blogspot.com/

Cancer 'is purely man-made' say scientists

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1320507/Cancer-purely-man-say-scientists-finding-trace-disease-Egyptian-mummies.html

Cancer 'is purely man-made' say scientists after finding almost no trace of disease in Egyptian mummies
Fiona Macrae
15th October 2010

Cancer is a man-made disease fuelled by the excesses of modern life, a study of ancient remains has found.

Tumours were rare until recent times when pollution and poor diet became issues, the review of mummies, fossils and classical literature found.

A greater understanding of its origins could lead to treatments for the disease, which claims more than 150,000 lives a year in the UK.

Michael Zimmerman, a visiting professor at Manchester University, said: 'In an ancient society lacking surgical intervention, evidence of cancer should remain in all cases.

'The virtual absence of malignancies in mummies must be interpreted as indicating their rarity in antiquity, indicating that cancer-causing factors are limited to societies affected by modern industrialisation.'

To trace cancer's roots, Professor Zimmerman and colleague Rosalie David analysed possible references to the disease in classical literature and scrutinised signs in the fossil record and in mummified bodies.

Despite slivers of tissue from hundreds of Egyptian mummies being rehydrated and placed under the microscope, only one case of cancer has been confirmed.

This is despite experiments showing that tumours should be even better preserved by mummification than healthy tissues.

Dismissing the argument that the ancient Egyptians didn't live long enough to develop cancer, the researchers pointed out that other age-related disease such as hardening of the arteries and brittle bones died occur.

Fossil evidence of cancer is also sparse, with scientific literature providing a few dozen, mostly disputed, examples in animal fossil, the journal Nature Reviews Cancer reports.

Even the study of thousands of Neanderthal bones has provided only one example of a possible cancer.

Evidence of cancer in ancient Egyptian texts is also 'tenuous' with cancer-like problems more likely to have been caused by leprosy or even varicose veins.

The ancient Greeks were probably the first to define cancer as a specific disease and to distinguish between benign and malignant tumours.

But Manchester professors said it was unclear if this signalled a real rise in the disease, or just a greater medical knowledge.

The 17th century provides the first descriptions of operations for breast and other cancers.

And the first reports in scientific literature of distinctive tumours only occurred in the past 200 years or so, including scrotal cancer in chimney sweeps in 1775 and nasal cancer in snuff users in 1761.

Professor David, who presented the findings to Professor Mike Richards, the UK's cancer tsar and other oncologists at a conference earlier this year, said: 'In industrialised societies, cancer is second only to cardiovascular disease as a cause of death. But in ancient times, it was extremely rare.

'There is nothing in the natural environment that can cause cancer. So it has to be a man-made disease, down to pollution and changes to our diet and lifestyle.

'The important thing about our study is that it gives a historical perspective to this disease. We can make very clear statements on the cancer rates in societies because we have a full overview. We have looked at millennia, not one hundred years, and have masses of data.

'Yet again extensive ancient Egyptian data, along with other data from across the millennia, has given modern society a clear message – cancer is man-made and something that we can and should address.

Dr Rachel Thompson, of World Cancer Research Fund, said: 'This research makes for very interesting reading.

'About one in three people in the UK will get cancer so it is fairly commonplace in the modern world.

Scientists now say a healthy diet, regular physical activity and maintaining a healthy weight can prevent about a third of the most common cancers so perhaps our ancestors’ lifestyle reduced their risk from cancer.'

Cancer Patients Relapsing Because They Can't Afford Deductibles

http://crooksandliars.com/susie-madrak/cancer-patients-relapsing-because-the

Cancer Patients Relapsing Because They Can't Afford Deductibles On Their Life-Saving Medication
Susie Madrak
Sunday Aug 08, 2010
Tags: cancer patients, finan, health care reform, healthcare coverage, Recession, USAToday

While politicians play games, people live with the economic fallout of their cowardice. Because this was a predictable problem, and the health care reform bill should have included free prescription coverage for people in situations like this:

In 2009 and 2010, as the economic collapse shuddered across the globe, oncologists in California noticed a troubling trend: Three patients who had had serious tumors under control for as long as eight years reappeared in the clinic with massive cancer regrowth which, in one case, required emergency surgery. In retrospect, this downturn in fortunes should have been predictable: The economic recession had forced the patients to discontinue a life-extending medication.

"In all three cases, the patients developed new symptoms and came in after having missed an appointment or two without us knowing that they had stopped the drug," said Dr. Katie Kelley, co-author of a letter-to-the-editor in the Aug. 5 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, which describes the cases. Kelley is also assistant clinical professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF).

And there have been other such cases, both at UCSF and around the nation, either of patients stopping medications altogether or rationing in the hopes of making precious supplies last longer.

"Certainly we've seen an increase in affordability concerns," said Stephen Finan, senior policy director of the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network in Washington, D.C. "Very definitely we've seen an upward trend in the last couple of years of people struggling with deductibles and cost sharing."

Got that? A lot of these people have insurance. They simply can't afford the deductibles. And that's what's going to happen when the new healthcare reform bill kicks in, too.

Medicare for all would have fixed this.

Future Poll: World War III, Cancer Cure Are on the Way

http://www.aolnews.com/nation/article/pew-future-poll-world-war-iii-cancer-cure-are-on-the-way/

Future Poll: World War III, Cancer Cure Are on the Way
Joseph Schuman

AOL News (June 22) -- On the plus side, by the year 2050 there will be a cure for cancer, bionic limbs will perform better than mere flesh-and-bone arms and legs and cloning will be used to bring back extinct animals. Oh, and computers will be able to converse among themselves like human beings.

On the downside, those same computers might be responsible for the expected third world war, won't be able to thwart a terrorist nuclear attack on the U.S. and will utterly fail to stop the major energy crisis that will play havoc with the world.

These are among the predictions made for the next 40 years by majorities of Americans, according to a poll released today by the Pew Research Center.

The survey of more than 1,500 adults taken in late April also suggests that Americans' world view has darkened a bit over a decade that opened with a recession and the worst terrorist attack in history, featured two wars that stymied U.S. military prowess and ended with a full-blown global financial crisis.

In April, 64 percent of respondents said they were optimistic for their lives and families over the next 40 years, and 61 percent were optimistic for the future of the U.S. But that's down from responses of 81 percent for respondents' lives and families and 70 percent for the country when the same survey was conducted in 1999. Pessimism for lives and families has climbed to 31 percent from 15 percent in that time, and for the U.S. future to 36 percent from 27 percent.

But the survey suggests Americans remain confident in a future filled with wonders that today are the stuff of fiction.

Eighty-one percent said computers will probably or definitely be able to converse like humans by 2050, 71 percent said there will be a cure for cancer, 66 percent expected artificial limbs that outperform natural ones, 63 percent predicted astronauts will land on Mars, 53 percent said ordinary people will travel in space and 50 percent said we will find evidence of life elsewhere in the universe.

While 51 percent said an extinct animal will probably or definitely be brought back by cloning, only 48 percent said humans will be cloned -- the same share that expected computer chips to be embedded in Americans for identification. And 42 percent said scientists will be able to tell thoughts from brain scans.

Among the threats to the country in the coming decades, another world war still seems probable to the most respondents (58 percent), followed closely by a major terrorist attack with a nuclear weapon (53 percent), while only 31 percent said an asteroid probably or definitely will hit the earth by 2050.

Among other menaces just over the horizon, 72 percent of Americans said there will be a major world energy crisis, and 66 percent expect the Earth to warm. Tellingly, younger people are more pessimistic about global warming (77 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds versus 61 percent of Americans 65 or older), and Republicans are much less worried about it than Democrats (48 percent versus 83 percent).

Americans are also divided on another subject that many associate with the end of the world, according to Pew: the return of Jesus Christ. Just over four in 10 respondents expect the Christian version of the messiah to show up by 2050, while 46 percent said this will probably or definitely not happen in that time.

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.

ATTEMPTED MURDER

http://thegoldspeculator.blogspot.com/2009/11/attempted-murder.html

Monday, November 16, 2009
ATTEMPTED MURDER
by Howard S. Katz

News item: Facts have recently been reported which have convinced me that certain members of the cancer establishment have tried to murder Suzanne Somers. Miss Somers was known to most Americans for her role as Chrissy Snow in “Three’s Company,” the popular TV situation comedy of the ‘70s and ‘80s, which starred John Ritter. More recently she has become known as a promoter of natural hormone replacement therapy.

In the current (Dec. 2009) issue of Life Extension Magazine, editor William Faloon writes:

“Earlier this year, actress Susanne Somers called me about a new book she felt compelled to write. She had been hospitalized with an infection [probably valley fever, a fungus in the soil of the American Southwest] but her doctors told her she suffered from metastatic breast cancer that required immediate chemotherapy.

“Had Suzanne believed her doctors, they would have dumped toxic chemo drugs into her body. She would then display classic signs/symptoms associated with cancer chemotherapy such as immune impairment, nausea, hair loss, emaciation, etc.

“If Suzanne died from chemotherapy-induced complications, which was possible since she suffered an infection that required her immune system to battle, her doctors would have proclaimed that she died of metastatic breast cancer. Suzanne wondered how many others perish this way at the hands of the cancer establishment.”

William Faloon, “As We See It,” Life Extension Magazine,
Dec. 2009, p. 8.

As background, cancer was one of the most feared diseases of the 20th century. Cancer deaths rose through the course of the century despite the fact that the Government singled it out for a special effort. In 1971, President Nixon declared war on cancer and announced the objective of curing the disease by 1980. (For younger readers, Americans used to think in terms of curing diseases in the sense of totally wiping them out. A large number of diseases were cured in this way in the early part of the 20th century, the last of which was polio.)

Cancer death rates now appear to have peaked in the early 1990s at just about the time that the Government (here meaning the Food and Drug Administration) suffered a major political defeat with the passage of the Health Freedom Act in 1994. This forced the FDA to legalize a number of beneficial natural products, some with anti-cancer effects. An example of this is melatonin, which is now available over-the-counter and has proven its ability to combat cancer..

The only exception to this peak has been in female lung cancer, which rose sharply from 1970 to 2005 as the feminist movement promoted smoking among women. (“You’ve come a long way baby.”
One of the incredible “blunders” of the war on cancer was the introduction of female hormone replacement therapy. It was discovered that certain female hormones had a positive effect in relieving many of the symptoms of menopause, drugs imitating these hormones were created and these drugs were given to millions of women over the past generation. More recently, scientific evidence proved that these drugs were more harmful than helpful, and female hormone therapy abruptly ceased.

However, at this time doctors who treat their patients by natural methods (as opposed to drugs) reported that in their treatment of women with actual human female hormones, instead of their drug or animal imitations, they observed only the beneficial effects with none of the harmful ones. This is not a surprising result because the exact same thing happened a generation back to men. In the 1930s, the male hormone, testosterone, was discovered. Several drug companies quickly manufactured drugs similar to testosterone. They would start with the testosterone molecule, which is quite complex, alter a single atom or chemical group and come up with a new substance, not found in nature, which had many of the effects of testosterone. These testosterone-like substances were then marketed to body-builder types. And then the body builders using them started to die. The very small difference between the drug and the natural product was enough to kill them. These drugs were then mislabeled anabolic steroids and are today regarded as highly dangerous.

The problem with this is that the category anabolic steroid is too broad. The drug anabolic steroids are fatal. The natural anabolic steroid, testosterone, is very healthy and invigorating. In one experiment, the testosterone levels of middle aged males were studied over a 10 year period. Those men who were lowest in testosterone suffered a much higher rate of heart attacks than the men highest in testosterone. Simply put, the drugs kill; the natural substance promotes life. After discovering this truth in regard to men, who are simpler in terms of hormones, the medical establishment made the same “error” in regard to women.

Enter Suzanne Somers. When drug hormone replacement therapy for women was ended because of its harmful effects, the medical establishment did not switch over to natural hormone replacement. With the exception of a small minority, the nation’s doctors declared hormone replacement (of all kinds) to be dangerous and ignored the proven benefits of natural hormones. (In the male area, testosterone, after being initially ignored, is now being positively slandered. For example, it is argued based on some very shoddy science that testosterone promotes the spread of prostate cancer. (For the scientific refutation of this point, see Life Extension Magazine, Dec. 2008.)

NOTE TO READERS. THIS IS A GOOD INDICATION OF THE STATE OF AMERICAN MEDICINE. YOUR LIFE MAY DEPEND ON EXACTLY WHOM YOU SELECT AS A DOCTOR, THE ESTABLISHMENT DOCTOR WHO TREATS WITH DRUGS OR THE NATUROPATHIC DOCTOR WHO TREATS WITH NATURAL SUBSTANCES.

Miss Somers played an airhead in “Three’s Company,” but she is a very intelligent woman. She educated herself as to the benefits of natural hormone replacement therapy, and over the past several years she has been making a noble effort to educate the public about this exciting news. Unfortunately, in doing this Miss Somers stepped on some very powerful toes.

In American medicine prior to the 20th century, almost all medicines were natural products. The same is true for all societies for all of human history. The great doctors of all time have highly praised natural medicine. Hippocrates, whose oath doctors still take today, once declared, “Let your food be your medicine and your medicine be your food.”

But as government began to worm its way into 20th century western medicine, events took a most evil turn. Basic American law (correctly) distinguishes between patentable and non-patentable products. If a product exists in nature, it cannot be patented, and anyone is free to use it. However, if a product was created by the mental labor of a human being, then that labor gives him the right to exclusive use of the product he has created. And this right is protected by a patent or a copyright. For example, if a poet writes a poem, he and he alone has the right to profit from it by printing up copies and selling them.

All this was established in American law long ago and is fundamentally in accord with justice. In 19th century America, patented products and unpatented products both sold in competition with each other. The unpatented were cheaper, and the patented claimed to be better. The consuming public made the final decision. This basically good system, however, was corrupted by the creation of the (modern) Food and Drug Administration in 1938.

The FDA quickly moved to violate the First Amendment rights of the manufacturers of natural (non-patentable) products. Scientific proof of the effectiveness of a medicine was redefined as that which is approved by the FDA, and FDA approval was granted by a system of big money. The FDA would require a complicated process of tests which were enormously expensive to perform. The proposition under question might have been proven by an academic researcher who demonstrated scientifically (and inexpensively) that the medicine in question worked. However, the FDA always pretends that this scientific proof does not exist and demands compliance with its expensive procedure. (The expensive procedure is worthless because, incredibly, the companies are allowed to perform the tests on their own product, and there is no effective way to stop them from cheating on their tests.)

A company with a patentable product can easily afford to pay the cost of the FDA tests. The patent gives it a monopoly, and this allows it to charge an absurdly high price. In effect, it pays nothing for the tests because the money is made up by the public. On the other hand, if a company makes a non-patentable product and can come up with the money for the FDA tests and if the tests prove effectiveness, then a competitor can come in and sell the same product for a much lower price (because it will not have the cost of the tests). Therefore, the original (non-patented) company would be undersold and driven out of business. It would be foolish to do this, and therefore this system makes it impossible to get FDA approval no matter how good the (non-patentable) product is and how many lives it saves.

The history of drugs invented under this system is a giant series of disasters. You have probably read a great deal of media hype about how wonderful drugs are. These are lies, pure and simple. The human being is a creature of evolution. Drugs are new substances on planet Earth, and humans have not had enough time to evolve natural protections from or biological harmonies with them. Thousands of chemical and electrical reactions are going on in the human body all the time, and the chances are very great that the new drug will interfere with one of these reactions and seriously injure or kill the patient. That is the story of new drugs. They are released without sufficient testing for side effects. Five, ten or even 30 years after release they turn out to have bizarre or fatal side effects (sometimes showing up in the next generation). (Remember Phen-fen?) Yet the vast majority of the sucker public takes these drugs because all of their authority figures tell them they are safe.

(One fact has always underlined in my mind the importance of evolutionary harmony. The original life form on earth was an anaerobic one celled animal. It did not breathe oxygen. Indeed, to it oxygen was a deadly poison, and it excreted oxygen in its normal metabolism. As this oxygen built up in the Earth’s atmosphere, this one-called animal was slowly poisoning itself. Life on Earth was about to destroy itself. Then, by an evolutionary accident, a creature evolved to which oxygen was not a poison. This creature breathed in oxygen and reduced the percentage of this gas in the atmosphere. Life on Earth was saved. Life had found a way.)

The whole point of paying for health care via insurance is to make this sucker public believe that these incredibly expensive drugs are free. (“It didn’t cost anything. The insurance paid for it.”) Thus most drugs do more harm with their dangerous side effects than good, but they bring in huge profits for the drug companies. For this reason, the drug companies pour out a constant stream of propaganda to the effect that natural products do not work. These lies are then backed up by the FDA because the drug companies have a sophisticated system of bribery (legalized) in place, and the FDA usually backs up everything they say. The bans on tryptophan (which is essential for life) and ephedra (used safely in China for 2000 years) are examples.

So when Suzanne Somers launched her campaign for natural hormone replacement therapy for women (and men also), she ran into the incredible power of these drug companies and those elements in the medical profession which have been corrupted by them. Go back and reread Mr. Faloon’s report on her recent incident. She was diagnosed as having a body full of highly advanced cancer (when in fact her only problem was a simple fungal infection, probably valley fever). After she refused chemotherapy, the cancer suddenly disappeared and was replaced by an (equally fictitious) contagious disease. (Again because of government invasion of our liberties, hospitals have been given the authority to hold a patient prisoner if they diagnose a contagious disease.)

Chemotherapy is a highly dangerous treatment. It is almost as dangerous to the patient as it is to the cancer (if one has cancer). Jacqueline Onassis Kennedy was killed by an overdose of chemotherapy. If I were on a jury, it would seem obvious to me that some of the doctors in that hospital were deliberately trying to murder Suzanne Somers. They would remove a dedicated enemy who was a substantial threat to their income (motive) and then cover it up by claiming that she had died of cancer. (One of Miss Somers’ early triumphs occurred when she did contract cancer and then cured herself by rejecting her doctors’ advice and treating herself with natural hormone replacement therapy. She was her own earliest success.) After leaving the hospital (in 2008) with a huge basket of drugs, Miss Somers was told by a doctor in whom she had confidence (Dr. Jonathan Wright):

“First of all, these drugs will kill you. Seriously, they are so toxic to the body that I don’t know what this doctor is thinking. Second, it is mandated by law that these drugs not be given unless there is an absolute diagnosis, which you do not have….these drugs have the potential to kill you or seriously injure and debilitate your liver.”

Dr. Jonathan Wright (speaking to Susanne Somers), asquoted in Knockout, by Suzanne Somers, (New York, Crown, 2009), p. 16.

If you are looking for heroes in this evil age, then Suzanne Somers is a true heroine. She is intelligent and courageous. She is fighting the battle for all of us. When they tried to kill her, they were trying to kill you and me and a great many of the American people.

Right now there is a movement trying to give more power to these evil people (President Obama and the Democratic Party). Miss Somers has given us a rallying point. Because of her celebrity status she can get the attention that you or I cannot. If we don’t fight now, then, when things get more desperate and we have to fight, we will fight from a weaker position. If the other fellow is trying to kill you, then you have no choice.

The nation owes this brave woman a giant thank you.

The Manufactured Doubt industry

http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/comment.html?entrynum=1389

Dr. Jeff Masters' WunderBlog
The Manufactured Doubt industry and the hacked email controversy
November 25, 2009

In 1954, the tobacco industry realized it had a serious problem. Thirteen scientific studies had been published over the preceding five years linking smoking to lung cancer. With the public growing increasingly alarmed about the health effects of smoking, the tobacco industry had to move quickly to protect profits and stem the tide of increasingly worrisome scientific news. Big Tobacco turned to one the world's five largest public relations firms, Hill and Knowlton, to help out. Hill and Knowlton designed a brilliant Public Relations (PR) campaign to convince the public that smoking is not dangerous. They encouraged the tobacco industry to set up their own research organization, the Council for Tobacco Research (CTR), which would produce science favorable to the industry, emphasize doubt in all the science linking smoking to lung cancer, and question all independent research unfavorable to the tobacco industry. The CTR did a masterful job at this for decades, significantly delaying and reducing regulation of tobacco products. George Washington University epidemiologist David Michaels, who is President Obama's nominee to head the Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA), wrote a meticulously researched 2008 book called, Doubt is Their Product: How Industry's Assault on Science Threatens Your Health. In the book, he wrote: "the industry understood that the public is in no position to distinguish good science from bad. Create doubt, uncertainty, and confusion. Throw mud at the anti-smoking research under the assumption that some of it is bound to stick. And buy time, lots of it, in the bargain". The title of Michaels' book comes from a 1969 memo from a tobacco company executive: "Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the 'body of fact' that exists in the minds of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy". Hill and Knowlton, on behalf of the tobacco industry, had founded the "Manufactured Doubt" industry.

The Manufactured Doubt industry grows up

As the success of Hill and Knowlton's brilliant Manufactured Doubt campaign became apparent, other industries manufacturing dangerous products hired the firm to design similar PR campaigns. In 1967, Hill and Knowlton helped asbestos industry giant Johns-Manville set up the Asbestos Information Association (AIA). The official-sounding AIA produced "sound science" that questioned the link between asbestos and lung diseases (asbestos currently kills 90,000 people per year, according to the World Health Organization). Manufacturers of lead, vinyl chloride, beryllium, and dioxin products also hired Hill and Knowlton to devise product defense strategies to combat the numerous scientific studies showing that their products were harmful to human health.

By the 1980s, the Manufactured Doubt industry gradually began to be dominated by more specialized "product defense" firms and free enterprise "think tanks". Michaels wrote in Doubt is Their Product about the specialized "product defense" firms: "Having cut their teeth manufacturing uncertainty for Big Tobacco, scientists at ChemRisk, the Weinberg Group, Exponent, Inc., and other consulting firms now battle the regulatory agencies on behalf of the manufacturers of benzene, beryllium, chromium, MTBE, perchlorates, phthalates, and virtually every other toxic chemical in the news today....Public health interests are beside the point. This is science for hire, period, and it is extremely lucrative".

Joining the specialized "product defense" firms were the so-called "think tanks". These front groups received funding from manufacturers of dangerous products and produced "sound science" in support of their funders' products, in the name of free enterprise and free markets. Think tanks such as the George C. Marshall Institute, Competitive Enterprise Institute, Heartland Institute, and Dr. Fred Singer's SEPP (Science and Environmental Policy Project) have all been active for decades in the Manufactured Doubt business, generating misleading science and false controversy to protect the profits of their clients who manufacture dangerous products.

The ozone hole battle

In 1975, the chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) industry realized it had a serious problem. The previous year, Sherry Rowland and Mario Molina, chemists at the University of California, Irvine, had published a scientific paper warning that human-generated CFCs could cause serious harm to Earth's protective ozone layer. They warned that the loss of ozone would significantly increase the amount of skin-damaging ultraviolet UV-B light reaching the surface, greatly increasing skin cancer and cataracts. The loss of stratospheric ozone could also significantly cool the stratosphere, potentially causing destructive climate change. Although no stratospheric ozone loss had been observed yet, CFCs should be banned, they said. The CFC industry hired Hill and Knowlton to fight back. As is essential in any Manufactured Doubt campaign, Hill and Knowlton found a respected scientist to lead the effort--noted British scientist Richard Scorer, a former editor of the International Journal of Air Pollution and author of several books on pollution. In 1975, Scorer went on a month-long PR tour, blasting Molina and Rowland, calling them "doomsayers", and remarking, "The only thing that has been accumulated so far is a number of theories." To complement Scorer's efforts, Hill and Knowlton unleashed their standard package of tricks learned from decades of serving the tobacco industry:

- Launch a public relations campaign disputing the evidence.

- Predict dire economic consequences, and ignore the cost benefits.

- Use non-peer reviewed scientific publications or industry-funded scientists who don't publish original peer-reviewed scientific work to support your point of view.

- Trumpet discredited scientific studies and myths supporting your point of view as scientific fact.

- Point to the substantial scientific uncertainty, and the certainty of economic loss if immediate action is taken.

- Use data from a local area to support your views, and ignore the global evidence.

- Disparage scientists, saying they are playing up uncertain predictions of doom in order to get research funding.

- Disparage environmentalists, claiming they are hyping environmental problems in order to further their ideological goals.

- Complain that it is unfair to require regulatory action in the U.S., as it would put the nation at an economic disadvantage compared to the rest of the world.

- Claim that more research is needed before action should be taken.

- Argue that it is less expensive to live with the effects.

The campaign worked, and CFC regulations were delayed many years, as Hill and Knowlton boasted in internal documents. The PR firm also took credit for keeping public opinion against buying CFC aerosols to a minimum, and helping change the editorial positions of many newspapers.

In the end, Hill and Knowlton's PR campaign casting doubt on the science of ozone depletion by CFCs turned out to have no merit. Molina and Rowland were awarded the Nobel Prize in 1995. The citation from the Nobel committee credited them with helping to deliver the Earth from a potential environmental disaster.

The battle over global warming

In 1988, the fossil fuel industry realized it had a serious problem. The summer of 1988 had shattered century-old records for heat and drought in the U.S., and NASA's Dr. James Hansen, one of the foremost climate scientists in the world, testified before Congress that human-caused global warming was partially to blame. A swelling number of scientific studies were warning of the threat posed by human-cause climate change, and that consumption of fossil fuels needed to slow down. Naturally, the fossil fuel industry fought back. They launched a massive PR campaign that continues to this day, led by the same think tanks that worked to discredit the ozone depletion theory. The George C. Marshall Institute, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, Heartland Institute, and Dr. Fred Singer's SEPP (Science and Environmental Policy Project) have all been key players in both fights, and there are numerous other think tanks involved. Many of the same experts who had worked hard to discredit the science of the well-established link between cigarette smoke and cancer, the danger the CFCs posed to the ozone layer, and the dangers to health posed by a whole host of toxic chemicals, were now hard at work to discredit the peer-reviewed science supporting human-caused climate change.

As is the case with any Manufactured Doubt campaign, a respected scientist was needed to lead the battle. One such scientist was Dr. Frederick Seitz, a physicist who in the 1960s chaired the organization many feel to be the most prestigious science organization in the world--the National Academy of Sciences. Seitz took a position as a paid consultant for R.J. Reynolds tobacco company beginning in 1978, so was well-versed in the art of Manufactured Doubt. According to the excellent new book, Climate Cover-up, written by desmogblog.com co-founder James Hoggan and Richard Littlemore, over a 10-year period Seitz was responsible for handing out $45 million in tobacco company money to researchers who overwhelmingly failed to link tobacco to anything the least bit negative. Seitz received over $900,000 in compensation for his efforts. He later became a founder of the George C. Marshall Institute, and used his old National Academy of Sciences affiliation to lend credibility to his attacks on global warming science until his death in 2008 at the age of ninety-six. It was Seitz who launched the "Oregon Petition", which contains the signatures of more than 34,000 scientists saying global warming is probably natural and not a crisis. The petition is a regular feature of the Manufactured Doubt campaign against human-caused global warming. The petition lists the "Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine" as its parent organization. According to Climate Cover-up, the Institute is a farm shed situated a couple of miles outside of Cave Junction, OR (population 17,000). The Institute lists seven faculty members, two of whom are dead, and has no ongoing research and no students. It publishes creationist-friendly homeschooler curriculums books on surviving nuclear war. The petition was sent to scientists and was accompanied by a 12-page review printed in exactly the same style used for the prestigious journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. A letter from Seitz, who is prominently identified as a former National Academy of Sciences president, accompanied the petition and review. Naturally, many recipients took this to be an official National Academy of Sciences communication, and signed the petition as a result. The National Academy issued a statement in April 2008, clarifying that it had not issued the petition, and that its position on global warming was the opposite. The petition contains no contact information for the signers, making it impossible to verify. In its August 2006 issue, Scientific American presented its attempt to verify the petition. They found that the scientists were almost all people with undergraduate degrees, with no record of research and no expertise in climatology. Scientific American contacted a random sample of 26 of the 1,400 signatories claiming to have a Ph.D. in a climate related science. Eleven said they agreed with the petition, six said they would not sign the petition today, three did not remember the petition, one had died, and five did not respond.

I could say much more about the Manufactured Doubt campaign being waged against the science of climate change and global warming, but it would fill an entire book. In fact, it has, and I recommend reading Climate Cover-up to learn more. The main author, James Hoggan, owns a Canadian public relations firm, and is intimately familiar with how public relations campaigns work. Suffice to say, the Manufactured Doubt campaign against global warming--funded by the richest corporations in world history--is probably the most extensive and expensive such effort ever. We don't really know how much money the fossil fuel industry has pumped into its Manufactured Doubt campaign, since they don't have to tell us. The website exxonsecrets.org estimates that ExxonMobil alone spent $20 million between 1998 - 2007 on the effort. An analysis done by Desmogblog's Kevin Grandia done in January 2009 found that skeptical global warming content on the web had doubled over the past year. Someone is paying for all that content.

Lobbyists, not skeptical scientists

The history of the Manufactured Doubt industry provides clear lessons in evaluating the validity of their attacks on the published peer-reviewed climate change science. One should trust that the think tanks and allied "skeptic" bloggers such as Steve McIntyre of Climate Audit and Anthony Watts of Watts Up With That will give information designed to protect the profits of the fossil fuel industry. Yes, there are respected scientists with impressive credentials that these think tanks use to voice their views, but these scientists have given up their objectivity and are now working as lobbyists. I don't like to call them skeptics, because all good scientists should be skeptics. Rather, the think tanks scientists are contrarians, bent on discrediting an accepted body of published scientific research for the benefit of the richest and most powerful corporations in history. Virtually none of the "sound science" they are pushing would ever get published in a serious peer-reviewed scientific journal, and indeed the contrarians are not scientific researchers. They are lobbyists. Many of them seem to believe their tactics are justified, since they are fighting a righteous war against eco-freaks determined to trash the economy.

I will give a small amount of credit to some of their work, however. I have at times picked up some useful information from the contrarians, and have used it to temper my blogs to make them more balanced. For example, I no longer rely just on the National Climatic Data Center for my monthly climate summaries, but instead look at data from NASA and the UK HADCRU source as well. When the Hurricane Season of 2005 brought unfounded claims that global warming was to blame for Hurricane Katrina, and a rather flawed paper by researchers at Georgia Tech showing a large increase in global Category 4 and 5 hurricanes, I found myself agreeing with the contrarians' analysis of the matter, and my blogs at the time reflected this.

The contrarians and the hacked CRU emails

A hacker broke into an email server at the Climate Research Unit of the UK's University of East Anglia last week and posted ten years worth of private email exchanges between leading scientists who've published research linking humans to climate change. Naturally, the contrarians have seized upon this golden opportunity, and are working hard to discredit several of these scientists. You'll hear claims by some contrarians that the emails discovered invalidate the whole theory of human-caused global warming. Well, all I can say is, consider the source. We can trust the contrarians to say whatever is in the best interests of the fossil fuel industry. What I see when I read the various stolen emails and explanations posted at Realclimate.org is scientists acting as scientists--pursuing the truth. I can see no clear evidence that calls into question the scientific validity of the research done by the scientists victimized by the stolen emails. There is no sign of a conspiracy to alter data to fit a pre-conceived ideological view. Rather, I see dedicated scientists attempting to make the truth known in face of what is probably the world's most pervasive and best-funded disinformation campaign against science in history. Even if every bit of mud slung at these scientists were true, the body of scientific work supporting the theory of human-caused climate change--which spans hundreds of thousands of scientific papers written by tens of thousands of scientists in dozens of different scientific disciplines--is too vast to be budged by the flaws in the works of the three or four scientists being subject to the fiercest attacks.

Exaggerated claims by environmentalists

Climate change contrarians regularly complain about false and misleading claims made by ideologically-driven environmental groups regarding climate change, and the heavy lobbying these groups do to influence public opinion. Such efforts confuse the real science and make climate change seem more dangerous than it really is, the contrarians argue. To some extent, these concerns are valid. In particular, environmentalists are too quick to blame any perceived increase in hurricane activity on climate change, when such a link has yet to be proven. While Al Gore's movie mostly had good science, I thought he botched the treatment of hurricanes as well, and the movie looked too much like a campaign ad. In general, environmental groups present better science than the think tanks do, but you're still better off getting your climate information directly from the scientists doing the research, via the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report. Another good source is Bob Henson's Rough Guide to Climate Change, aimed at people with high-school level science backgrounds.

Let's look at the amount of money being spent on lobbying efforts by the fossil fuel industry compared to environmental groups to see their relative influence. According to Center for Public Integrity, there are currently 2,663 climate change lobbyists working on Capitol Hill. That's five lobbyists for every member of Congress. Climate lobbyists working for major industries outnumber those working for environmental, health, and alternative energy groups by more than seven to one. For the second quarter of 2009, here is a list compiled by the Center for Public Integrity of all the oil, gas, and coal mining groups that spent more than $100,000 on lobbying (this includes all lobbying, not just climate change lobbying):

Chevron $6,485,000
Exxon Mobil $4,657,000
BP America $4,270,000
ConocoPhillips $3,300,000
American Petroleum Institute $2,120,000
Marathon Oil Corporation $2,110,000
Peabody Investments Corp $1,110,000
Bituminous Coal Operators Association $980,000
Shell Oil Company $950,000
Arch Coal, Inc $940,000
Williams Companies $920,000
Flint Hills Resources $820,000
Occidental Petroleum Corporation $794,000
National Mining Association $770,000
American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity $714,000
Devon Energy $695,000
Sunoco $585,000
Independent Petroleum Association of America $434,000
Murphy Oil USA, Inc $430,000
Peabody Energy $420,000
Rio Tinto Services, Inc $394,000
America's Natural Gas Alliance $300,000
Interstate Natural Gas Association of America $290,000
El Paso Corporation $261,000
Spectra Energy $279,000
National Propane Gas Association $242,000
National Petrochemical & Refiners Association $240,000
Nexen, Inc $230,000
Denbury Resources $200,000
Nisource, Inc $180,000
Petroleum Marketers Association of America $170,000
Valero Energy Corporation $160,000
Bituminous Coal Operators Association $131,000
Natural Gas Supply Association $114,000
Tesoro Companies $119,000

Here are the environmental groups that spent more than $100,000:

Environmental Defense Action Fund $937,500
Nature Conservancy $650,000
Natural Resources Defense Council $277,000
Earthjustice Legal Defense Fund $243,000
National Parks and Conservation Association $175,000
Sierra Club $120,000
Defenders of Wildlife $120,000
Environmental Defense Fund $100,000

If you add it all up, the fossil fuel industry outspent the environmental groups by $36.8 million to $2.6 million in the second quarter, a factor of 14 to 1. To be fair, not all of that lobbying is climate change lobbying, but that affects both sets of numbers. The numbers don't even include lobbying money from other industries lobbying against climate change, such as the auto industry, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, etc.

Corporate profits vs. corporate social responsibility

I'm sure I've left the impression that I disapprove of what the Manufactured Doubt industry is doing. On the contrary, I believe that for the most part, the corporations involved have little choice under the law but to protect their profits by pursuing Manufactured Doubt campaigns, as long as they are legal. The law in all 50 U.S. states has a provision similar to Maine's section 716, "The directors and officers of a corporation shall exercise their powers and discharge their duties with a view to the interest of the corporation and of the shareholders". There is no clause at the end that adds, "...but not at the expense of the environment, human rights, the public safety, the communities in which the corporation operates, or the dignity of employees". The law makes a company's board of directors legally liable for "breach of fiduciary responsibility" if they knowingly manage a company in a way that reduces profits. Shareholders can and have sued companies for being overly socially responsible, and not paying enough attention to the bottom line. We can reward corporations that are managed in a socially responsible way with our business and give them incentives to act thusly, but there are limits to how far Corporate Socially Responsibility (CSR) can go. For example, car manufacturer Henry Ford was successfully sued by stockholders in 1919 for raising the minimum wage of his workers to $5 per day. The courts declared that, while Ford's humanitarian sentiments about his employees were nice, his business existed to make profits for its stockholders.

So, what is needed is a fundamental change to the laws regarding the purpose of a corporation, or new regulations forcing corporations to limit Manufactured Doubt campaigns. Legislation has been introduced in Minnesota to create a new section of law for an alternative kind of corporation, the SR (Socially Responsible) corporation, but it would be a long uphill battle to get such legislation passed in all 50 states. Increased regulation limiting Manufactured Doubt campaigns is possible to do for drugs and hazardous chemicals--Doubt is Their Product has some excellent suggestions on that, with the first principle being, "use the best science available; do not demand certainty where it does not and cannot exist". However, I think such legislation would be difficult to implement for environmental crises such as global warming. In the end, we're stuck with the current system, forced to make critical decisions affecting all of humanity in the face of the Frankenstein monster our corporate system of law has created--the most vigorous and well-funded disinformation campaign against science ever conducted.

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.